Games are looking more realistic and developers keep trying harder to excite their audiences but I'm finding that instead of them getting better, many are crossing a line of good taste and demonstrating just how shallow our talent pool of writers and directors is.
The march of technology should automatically improve games, shouldn't it? But instead of games rivalling film and literature in their ability to express ideas and emotions, the demands of the technology are instead exposing the juvenile, shallow and overall inarticulate nature of a lot of developers. Today, story and visual impact is valued as much as gameplay, but it doesn't feel to me like most developers are able to deliver.
For me, Resident Evil 5 was spoilt by the ignorant portrayal of Africa. Whether you could say it was unintentionally racist, blissfully unaware of the socio-politcal context of its imagery, or just laughably spun from crude Japanese stereotypes of black people and the continent, it was a disaster because it felt so dimwitted. Expensive, flashy and shocking, yes, but devoid of any creative integrity. Capcom had the budget and the tools to make something incredible, but either their ambitions or their skill as content makers failed them.
Bad content displayed in high defintion at 60 fps with blood physics and surround sound voice acting seems so much worse than bad content displayed in 8-bit pixels.
We all knew that as the generations went by, the violence that most games are based on would start to get more realistic and perhaps more uncomfortable to experience. As the graphics improve we expect deeper and more nuanced stories to go with them, to live up to what we see on the screen and to justify the violence, or better yet, flesh it out with other experiences. Unfortunately great ideas and great writing seem to be in short supply. Do developers have the right kind of directors and writers to achieve it? Is the talent there? Where it's lacking we'll see more and more games that rely on shock value to stand out, and that's unfortunately what I think we're seeing.
Take Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game has a level in which you play a terrorist (or undercover agent with terrorists) shooting civilians inside an airport. The civilians in the crowded terminal are your only targets during this mission, and with state of the art graphics the crowds howl and scream as they try to run and are cut down by your hail of bullets or are picked off through the scope of your rifle. It's pretty shocking. If you haven't already seen the movies, you're bound to hear about it when the mainstream media picks up on it.
Maybe I'm just turning into Danny Glover and getting too old for this shit, but from what I've seen it's genuinely repulsive and it doesn't exist for any other reason than to cause controversy and to appeal to the anarchistic nature of teenagers. Let's be honest, Infinity Ward doesn't have the literary skills for this to be described as a commentary on world events, or a thought provoking interactive sequence - or any of the other things they will defend themselves with.
This seems to be the worrying formula:
Inherently violent game genres
+
increasing realistic graphics
+
densensitized gamers
+
crowded marketplace
+
mediocre developers desperate to stimulate them
=
Depressingly unsophisticated games clamoring for your attention with thoughtless graphic violence
I'm not bothered by the fact that artistically bankrupt games exist. It's that the gaming media seems to embrace them as being the core of gaming. Journalists write off the old guard, imaginative games like Mario platformers as being casual, kiddy, family, not for the core, meanwhile these clumsy, grisly epics are held up as the biggest releases of the year. They are the poster children of modern gaming, they're what people inevitably judge gaming by and so long as they do that, the medium won't progress.
Those games wouldn't stand a chance in hell of garnering respect in other mediums. MW2 wouldn't stand up against a double episode of 24, let alone a novel or film with actual depth. It's sad to me that we have so far to go.
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