This was pretty much my objection to stuff like Gears of War. It wasn't ugliness designed to deliver a game, which is often awesome in a cartoonish sort of way, such as the classic GTA games, or Resident Evil 4. Instead, it was a game designed to deliver ugliness, a pleasant little third-person-shooter which was created expressly for the purpose of showing you an incredibly horrible, ruined world, populated by testosterone-poisoned manly men who seemed to be composed entirely of scar tissue.
This isn't to say ugliness and squalor can't be artistic. Indeed, game developers seem to be very good at making it... too good, to the point that it's becoming the ONLY kind of art you can get in playable format. It's not as though it's IMPOSSIBLE to create a deep, inviting experience in a gameworld that's less utterly crapsack, it's just that nobody seems to want to do so. For some reason(probably because the predominant market for gamers is teenage to young adult males =P), "dark and gritty" keeps getting auto-translated into "deep and interesting" in the minds of game developers.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-19 05:06 am (UTC)This isn't to say ugliness and squalor can't be artistic. Indeed, game developers seem to be very good at making it... too good, to the point that it's becoming the ONLY kind of art you can get in playable format. It's not as though it's IMPOSSIBLE to create a deep, inviting experience in a gameworld that's less utterly crapsack, it's just that nobody seems to want to do so. For some reason(probably because the predominant market for gamers is teenage to young adult males =P), "dark and gritty" keeps getting auto-translated into "deep and interesting" in the minds of game developers.
I miss seeing primary colors in video games.