@Kevin-V Great interview. The background noise is a bit annoying, but the actual content discussed between you and Levine was interesting, namely because you both know so much more than just the face value of gaming. I think more gamers should approach their hobbies with this level of depth because they would enjoy the artistic and philosophical context of games like Bioshock in addition to the challenge and experience. Nice work!
Gaming isn't a cause. Guns aren't a cause. Movies aren't a cause. People themselves are the cause of violence if they choose to be. Psychological breakdowns can be brought on by nearly any combination of things, but in the end, they are all influences in culture, not devices that make people bad. There simply isn't a direct relationship between these things. Unfortunately, many people like a scapegoat. So if it's guns, gaming, or yeah, even the admittedly sleezy looking CEO of EA, they'll take it without any real proof.
Unfortunately, the gaming community is plagued by this strange little creatures that hide under the bridge collecting tolls and using fanciful language. What are those things called again?... I digress, the point is, many of these "haters" criticize what is different because it offends their idea of a perfect game. You see this happen much more often now because of the increased demand for sequels. Although publishers like EA are indeed in it for the money, the designers behind the game are always pushing to innovate and improve. Sometimes we lose things that we like, sometimes we gain, and sometimes we get derivatives. But is there ever really a time that a sequel can be perfect? Perhaps if there was an objective way to define perfection, but relative the myriad of critics, it's impossible. In the end, the only reason they CAN make money is because they are indeed giving players what they want. The common gamer is flawed much like the movie-goer is desensitized to cliches and violence. The more he/she sees, the more that is expected. However, in many cases, good pieces of art are not about quantity as much as they are about balancing all aspects for their respective value. If one is only to look at one property of work, they are missing the point. Games, like film, music, and art, are to be experienced fully. People that want their Kinkade and Transformers trilogy can have it and cherish it with glee, but they shouldn't be critical of something beyond their palette.
When I first started playing video games, reviews were the furthest thing from my mind. It was about the novelty of ideas on a new platform I had never experienced. I would go to whatever retail store that had these "video games" and pick what seemed to be the most unique. In a sense, it could likened to picking your favorite painting from an art gallery. It was highly a subjective experience. Now, reviews make that experience a bit more objective. Why? Because that's America. We don't want to waste our time on the horrible games that seemed promising at first glance. Why do that when we can have someone else do it for us? But just because games are more mainstream these days doesn't mean we can't have that same "magical" feeling we had at the beginning. The usefulness of reviews is - if you know what to look for and who to look to (hint: Kevin VanOrd) - is less about the score and more about identifying what the game is trying to do. Take games like League of Legends for example. As it stands today, I would give this game an 8 and there are plenty of other games I've experienced of higher quality, more diversity, and better production value. But at the end of the day, I play this game more than any other because it is fun as hell. What the game does, although extremely limited, it does VERY well. So all of this to say one thing: games are not always about the sum of their parts (i.e. their score), especially when their delivery is focused squarely on its strengths.
PC games, as always, have driven the hardware upgrades over the years. They are naturally the more powerful and diverse machine. Despite that they are indeed much more powerful and capable than their console competitors, the casual crowd sucked in by consoles simply outnumber the hardcore gamers of the world, namely, those who use PCs. In the end, the way many developers see it is that larger numbers means larger bills. So development on consoles and their respective quality will be spurred by consumerism, not by what it used to be, which was a type of artistic proving ground. This ideology doesn't necessarily create all bad products, but games like MW and Mass Effect get dumbed down for the masses and lose that extra bit of effort that true gamers appreciate.
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