I’m really enjoying this conversation on Slate about video games. Nominally, it’s about the best games from this year, but the participants are getting into much more interesting topics too, exploring the nature of video games (“Video games are not a genre; they’re a medium.”), whether there has been a video game equivalent of Citizen Kane, and what might be holding video games back from being even better than they are.
There is some consensus that 2007 has been the best year for video games yet, a sentiment I agree with since it’s the first year in many that my interest has been drawn back into the medium. I bought a Nintendo DS Lite and a handful of games; I downloaded Portal; that’s more money spent on games in one year than in the past ten combined for me. (I spent most of the decade fiddling with emulators of old console systems.)
What drew me back into the fold? Probably New Super Mario Bros. And the DS in general attracted me because it seemed focused on game-play rather than graphics. (In fact, its graphics power is pretty weak, but really, who cares?) Instructively, there are very few first-person shooter games for the DS, and it’s not a conducive platform for real-time war strategy games either. It’s about simpler distractions.
I don’t necessarily think the future of video games is about simple distractions, but that’s what suits my appetite and my life’s schedule. As a result though, I’ve become more curious about other, bigger games, and so I await what lies ahead with some anticipation. I don’t think any game I’ve heard of is the gaming Citizen Kane, but then again, few realized in 1941 what an influential film Kane would prove to be. The film was hardly a box office success.