Melan on 17/10/2011 at 20:26
This is a good article.
Quote:
As I attended boring lectures and stone-cold seminars, the reality settled onto the gathered bright-eyed, idea-filled game developers like an ashen snow-blanket: these Zynga guys were making literally a quadrillion dollars a month off trite, shallow, ugly, awful, stupid half-formed pseudo-games. I found myself drawn to sessions in which tasteful, boring people talked about the implications of social games. I wound up with the fanciful idea in my brain that I’d write a New-Yorker-worthy thing about social games and the global financial crisis. It’d be simultaneously clever, stupid, and sad.
:cool:
Koki on 18/10/2011 at 12:13
It's not an article. It's five pages worth of a guy who thinks is being clever when in fact his entire point could be summed up in a single paragraph.
Probably - not going to read all that imaginary bullshit.
Matthew on 18/10/2011 at 13:26
Hmmm
gunsmoke on 18/10/2011 at 19:56
Wow. That was terrible. I could have told you who the author was without even reading the header.
This is entirely subjective, though. I am sure as heck not getting on you for liking it, but it just got under my skin for some reason.
Aerothorn on 24/10/2011 at 00:49
Quote Posted by Sulphur
And what's the second?
To Be Honest, I don't think MGS2 deserves all the deconstructionary breakdowns it's inspired over the years, partly because it couldn't escape its own hamminess (watch for a dealbreaker levelled against this argument involving someone arguing that the hamminess was an inherent part of the game's own self-awareness and its meta-goals), but to each his own.
The second is (
http://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/) Driving Off the Map by James Howell, which is much more of an academic piece, but manages to be very thorough in not that many pages.
I absolutely think the game's hamminess WASN'T part of its postmodern goals (Kojima et al. may well have been aware of it, but if so they did it because they thought it was fun or they just didn't give a damn, not because it furthered any sort of self-reflectivity). Though I don't think it significantly detracts from what MGS2 accomplished. I can certainly understand how it makes it less enjoyable, or makes it harder to take seriously. If there was a lot of other games that did what it did, and didn't have the hamminess, then those games would overshadow it; as it is, MGS2 remains the only (mass-market, AAA game) to get so aggressively postmodernist, and absolutely not care that it would piss off a good portion of the fans (particularly the American ones, who are probably the bulk of the fans anyway).
For what it's worth, I actually don't think it has gotten that much post-release analysis; I've only seen a few academic articles and some scattered forum posts. There's hardly an industry-wide recognition of what it did, or agreement as to what that was, let alone whether or not it was valuable. And if it's received more than it deserves, it's only because there are so few other bestsellers that these sorts of theorists can really dig their teeth into.
