maybe it's just the title, but it is reminiscent, thematically at least, of some of Duncan Fyfe's Life Starts Here stuff: http://www.lifestartshere.net/

♥

2 things about that video clip: 1) the game (I'm pretty sure although I didn't actually try it out) offers no consequences if the player carries through with the shooting. Either Tiffany is somehow considered "essential" (for a later story scene or whatever) and is therefore invulnerable or no one reacts to her death (other than maybe a nearby cop but the reaction would be no different than if you gunned down any faceless pedestrian). Sleeping Dogs (which, just for the record, I really enjoyed), flirts with this kind of thing, but the game hasn't directed enough resources towards following through on it. 2) despite (1), the "I'll see what I can do" is kind of weirdly poignant, because it is what Wei Shen says to anybody who asks him to do something (i.e. pretty much all sidequests).

"the analysis itself can be long, but it can't really be that deep unless one is grasping at straws or making things up." I don't really think that's true at all. There's lots of interesting writing about situating a work as the expression of a particular aesthetic (or other: moral, for instance) sensibility due to its historical context: as a reaction against prior convention or as a precursor to things to come, for instance. The work itself could be Transformers 2, it doesn't really matter all that much if the director or cinematographer didn't explicitly, consciously think in those terms because they're inevitably the product of what they've watched growing up etc.

Not that I think this is necessarily the case here, but it's important not to conflate smart analysis with smart games. There's plenty of lofty analysis of low brow, common-denominator films.

"At what point will a major developer chuck the whole photorealism schtick and build a big-budget ambitious narrative video game based on a completely different visual aesthetic? Not because it's cheaper; not so it will run on older systems; but purely because the designers believe they can do better than realism. This day is coming. History suggests it's inevitable. I say it can't come soon enough." I think the mainstream thrust of game development will always struggle to diverge strongly from photorealism. Art is controversial in a way that visual fidelity to the real world isn't. If I can pump out more polys than my competition then I can market my game as looking more real than theirs. As much as some of us might imagine that 100% fidelity in "realistic" rendering is an inevitable eventuality, it's not here yet, so any game that can claim to do it better than the competition can claim an edge. If instead of making something "more real looking," my game goes with a stylized look, I invite aesthetic criticism, which by its nature is subjective. Does it look better than reality or not? The audience, the reviewers, et al. get to decide. When realism is the goal, the measuring stick is a known quantity: as a developer you can know before the game is sold how well you've done (visually) versus your competition, but when you've decided on an aesthetic approach other than realism, the only thing that's going to validate that is sales and good reviews. It's a gamble, and, as such, it's probably a difficult choice for the business people to make with any consistency. It's going to take a string of hugely successful Okamis (or what have you) for that kind of approach to become commonplace. And I don't have to remind you that while critically lauded, Okami didn't do well enough to stop the closer of Clover...

The problem of the return is that the challenges it poses aren't typically ones resolved by physical conflict (if resolved at all), so if (as is frequently the case) fighting is the only (or primary mode) of interacting with the world/playing the game, the return doesn't work as anything other than a cutscene.

Oh Bard's Tale. Good(?) times: starting a new map when you hit a teleporter and then fitting the resulting pieces together like some demented jigsaw puzzle.

"May I propose something like invitation only commenting, as a kind of middle ground. If someone wants to add something to the conversation, they can apply to join or to have their opinions heard." Isn't that essentially a whitelist? Which would be *more* exclusionary, not less, than banning offenders (i.e. a blacklist), no?

I imagine part of the goal of a site like this is to improve the image of gamers among non gamers. If that's so then I think it's best served by presenting itself as an alternative to the vitriol that might be found elsewhere. If the choices are: a) filter & ban b) allow people incapable of disagreeing civilly to comment and allowing those comments to stand Then b wouldn't be in service of that goal. What other options are there?

I don't know about the choice of Mario Kart as the ludic leg. I mean I get how its nice that you can draw the parallel that GTA and Mario Kart are both ostensibly at least partly about getting in cars and going fast, but it seems that if the comparison is going to break down on Wii Fit, you might as well have gone with something abstract like Tetris. I can't really articulate why, but the absence of any avatar & not having recognizable objects (like cars) feels a "purer" ludic experience IMO.