The Distinction between Cool & Fun
by N-Revolution on Comments
It seems to be a growing trend that game developers focus more on pop culture and creating a hip image around their games. Now this may or may not result in less emphasis on quality gameplay, but in my experience with such games, it always seems to result in less enjoyment. I'm not entirely sure why that is. Maybe it's just me rejecting what I percieve to be cheap tactics at gaining my desire (and money), but sometimes it really does seem like just a generic, bland game underneath all that "cool" extrerior. People see neat images for games and automatically assume a great play experience without caring what the game is actually like. And to some extent, the image is important because it has to do with how we fantasize through the game to feel good, but I'm just afraid that it's beginning to go too far. I guess my problem isn't our reliance on cool images, but is instead about how our perceptions of those images narrows our imagination for gaming. Cool these days seems to be compacted into prepackaged containers marked "Blood & Gore", "Ninjas", "Gangsta's", "Hot Chicks", and "Big Guns". Most games out there (and even Nintendo does it to a lesser extent) seem to fixate on those obvious categories of cool, even though it's in different settings. I'd like to see some more complex themes surface in games' characters and stories for a change.