Neal here for my first editorial, ready to start flame wars of all kinds I’d imagine. In this contrived rant I’ll talk about the process of trying to take games seriously, which is ironic because I won’t be taking this seriously.

The process of trying to take any form of media seriously requires a diverse quantity of content that can appeal to a broad range of persons, such as a person with an eye for the artistic touch… or that guy that just wants to see some stuff explode. Now the problem in debating art versus entertainment is that art can be boring. It’s far more entertaining to just blow something up, because fire is pretty. Also games that try to be artistic tend to think of themselves far to highly. For instance, games with nine hour long cutscenes tend to be a bit light on gameplay, and the cutscenes are often nine hours long because the plot is so contrived that the more it tries to explain itself the more it ends up looking completely silly and pointless. However I’m not going to name names on that issue… yet. I’m sure there can be good examples of games as art. Like… um. Does Katamari Damacy qualify as an artistic game or training for a bad drug induced haze? I’ll just go with the ladder so I don’t have to go further into that. Some times a game will strike a good balance, but most often the push to get the stuff out as soon as possible means you’ll end up with a few levels and some stuff trying to explain why the levels are so… level-y? For instance, writers for games must not get paid much I imagine, and my example is this: play any average action like game and during the tutorial level you’ll often notice how they try to explain away why making sure you can walk is part of your basic daily activity as a warrior. "Now, you DO know that moving backwards means you’ll go backwards right?" I find it far better to just read the thrilling story that each game comes with about the exploits of a person named "manual." Or better yet just flashing a screen that tells me how to do stuff or just let me skip it. I’d imagine the creative think tanks for games don’t get paid much by the thousands of "thug’d out" games I see flooding the market since Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas became popular. Most of the time I picture a few programmers having to pull double duty and thinking of a plot as quickly as possible. Then you have those big name developers that like to be creative, this can also be a very bad thing as that dreaded plot gets in your way of shooting faceless foes, because that plot is boring anyways and you just want to blow things up right? Forget trying to add context and meaning, you have a gun and that’s all that matters, and thus the world still spins around. Now there could be a perfect world where all ppsspp games integrate a meaningful story within gameplay without sacrificing action or thrills and being over all entertaining, but that’s thinking WAY to much. I’m sure there are some like "artistic" games out there, but those aren’t based on skill levels or dedication most of the time, and that’s lame, gaming should mostly be all about the stuff that made the older things popular, like spending an unhealthy amount of time with fictional material so you can brag about stuff. That whole "walking away with a thoughtful experience" thing is overrated anyways. Not to mention games will never be taken seriously anyways, not as long as Team Ninja is allowed to make DOA Volleyball games. For every Metal Gear Solid, you’ll have 3 GTA clones. For every Halo, you’ll have a bunch of poorly thought out WWII shooters. For every good game that seems like it should be embraced you’ll get bombarded with stuff that sounds like it took maybe about a month total to make. For instance, 25 To Life selling well while most people don’t even know what Phantom Dust is… I mean come on you want to talk about a surreal game! I digress though, no wait did I? I suppose games will be just like any other form of media after all, for all the good there’s a bunch of poorly thought out trash being pushed as quickly as possible to make a quick buck off of people that don’t know any better. You’ll get tons of game sequels just like any remotely successful movie will spawn another evil brood. So I guess me saying games can’t be taken seriously has nothing to do with the games themselves… Crap why is it so hard to take games seriously these days? Is it because of the little kids swearing a bunch on Xbox Live? Hum, yeah I could put my money on that. I guess the end result is because of negative attention from major media outlets portraying GTA as evil and thus spawning a legion of uninformed people that have no idea how to handle or educate themselves about said subject matter… but that’s like WAY to much thinking and stuff. Till the next bout of randomly splayed thought spilled fourth from my hollowed mind this is Neal signing off. If you want to add any feedback on the subject remember to check out the forums.