Friday, March 30, 2012

GARME JERNALISM!

There's an expression called 'missing the forest for the trees'. Almost every gaming website out there, from 1up, to GiantBomb, to Joystiq, and more are guilty of this.

The common theme among all of them in regards to the generally loathed Mass Effect 3 ending is that those that are complaining about it have a sense of 'entitlement'. Entitlement for the ending that they did not get because, apparently, the gaming fanbase at large is simply too stupid to understand the 'artistic vision' of Bioware. And some are claiming that they shouldn't change the ending to maintain the 'artistic integrity' of the ending.

Just a note; 'artistic integrity' is a misnomer. Especially when you're part of a giant corporation with millions upon millions of dollars at your disposal, in order to make even more money.

The writers at Bioware are not 'areeests' or 'auteurs'. They're writers for a product meant for public consumption. If they wanted to make an art game, they should have made a damn art game. ME is NOT an art game. It's supposed to be a fun and satisfying game. After 3 whole games, to be told that everything you've done was for nothing is not only insulting, it goes against what a video game's supposed to, entertain you.

It's because of this circle jerking that it's becoming more difficult to even call it 'gaming journalism' in the first place.

1 comment:

  1. Just because a game sold 4.7 million copies doesn't mean that Bioware has to make the game so that all 4.7 million people can understand what's going on.

    In other words, dumbing the thing down for the spoon-fed masses of people or so that even a brain dead monkey can understand it.

    In reality though, Bioware spent the last year basically force feeding people the explanation to the ending via DLC, and the sad part? People STILL DON'T GET IT.

    They are far too stupid to understand it. I'd be able to look the other way and sympathize if this was pre-Extended Cut, but after having a year to basically repeat the same stuff to you that was already in the game or couldn't be solved by using simple logic so that you'd understand it, and have the audience still not understand it.

    Do you think that Christopher Nolan is going to dumb down Inception (which some may consider a product) to make sure that every single person can understand the story he's trying to tell? Nope.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoKCdpksYYM&t=22m15s

    ReplyDelete