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Last week, we mentioned Keith Stuart's meditation on whether or not reviewers really get innovation; since then, several people have picked up the discourse, with N'Gai Croal weighing in on the debate.
Ian Bogost and his students have a new project underway looking at the intersection of journalism and games; their new blog is full of interesting stuff.
Gamasutra has a fabulous postmortem up — easily one of the best I've read — on Tale of Tales' The Graveyard.
Yet another nice piece from the Guardian; Keith Stuart takes up the issue of innovation and whether or not reviewers really get it. Using Mirror's Edge as a launching point, he notes that there seems to be too much focus on some of the little details and not enough emphasis on deconstructing the experience:
Game journalism is a pretty maligned corner of the journalism world as a whole — sometimes for good reason, but as Gus Mastrapa argues, we're not really deserving of the broad brush we get painted with. Why, he even points to Kotaku as a 'sure sign that we've arrived'! Games journalism doesn't lag behind many other enthusiast presses, he says, despite their advantage of age:
There's a really fun interview up at Gamasutra with Keiichi Yano, chief creative officer of iNiS (the Ouendan series and Elite Beat Agents). The subject is ostensibly Lips, the recently released 360 karaoke title, but a lot of ground is covered in terms of game design and future potential. My favourite part of the discussion is when Yano gets into the decision not to include a fail condition, and instead allow (possibly drunk) warblers to mangle music to their hearts' content:
GameSetWatch and Gamasutra have reprinted a really interesting article from Game Developer, where Soren Johnson of EA Maxis takes up the issue of 2D versus 3D in game design. Johnson maintains that while 2D is frequently seen as a relic of antiquated technology, there are plenty of places where it can make sense to utilise 2D over 3D. And, as Johnson points out, 3D graphics don't necessarily equal 3D gameplay, and 3D gameplay comes with its own challenges. 2D graphics also have their less obvious advantages:
David Nieborg has a thoughtful essay up over at Valuable Games on the subject of Fable 2 and its moral system — and the relative success (or not) of that system. As Nieborg points out, it would be entirely possible to play through the game and ignore the moral aspects, and in his view, the morality system is implemented more like a 'feature' or 'upgrade' — a nice add-on. While he finds a lot to like about the attempt to insert a morality system into the game, Nieborg does have some quibbles, especially when it comes to feedback:
Tom Endo has a nice essay up over the Escapist on the issue of finishing games (or not finishing games, as the case may be). "What other medium," he queries, "allows us to be so blithely indifferent to its consumption?". I certainly have a somewhat appalling stack of partially finished games, some of which have been languishing for years. Do games in their current format simply not fit comfortably into the flow of many people's lives?:
The Montreal International Game Summit recently wrapped up, and keynote speaker David Braben of Frontier Development really took the industry to task on everything from the business model (broken!) to retailers (killing longevity of games!) to the 'online myth' of the next gen consoles. He makes some interesting points, though I'm not at all convinced of the veracity of some of them. Here's his take on the retail model:
