In Addition to This Week's Article

There's another thing I thought of after writing the article about comparing film to video games.  That is, why do we treat the medium different than it's genres on this matter?

In genres, bending and combining is encouraged and praised.  RPG elements such as leveling and skill trees have been incorporated into even the most mindless of genres, and though it's perhaps gotten a little commonplace, I can't think of anyone who actually condemns that trend.  When Mirror's Edge mixed platforming with the first-person perspective, even people who disliked the game for its very imperfect nature agreed that it was inventive and interesting in its concept (I recommend it highly).  When a movie mixes genres, such as Shawn of the Dead (for a rather extreme example), it gets highly praised.  So why is it when we try to mix mediums, this is doing video games a disservice?

I think part of it may sprout from the recent mainstream nature of interactive media.  All of us who are really dedicated to gaming and have been since before it was cool get kind of threatened now and again by the encroachment of "casual gamers" on our territory, and perhaps this is one of our ways of trying to keep our medium separate, out of reach of those who would dare defile it with ideas from outside the gamer's realm.

Okay, so that's a bit overdramatic and exaggerated, but the point stands.  But I think it may play a part in why we sometimes try to segregate our medium away from the influence of others.  Maybe the integration is bringing us too close to being normal, no longer being able to wear the "gamer" badge as an honor since everyone will be wearing one in the near future.  But the artistic and cultural development of this medium is more important than that.

On another note, I finally got around to playing Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.  I'm usually pretty good at keeping my love for a franchise out of the way of an adaptation of it (which this essentially is, seeing as it's made by a different developer and trying, yet again, to convert the series into 3D), but I just can't with this one.  It's a pretty good game on the whole; passable if typical hack-n-slash gameplay predictably reminiscent of God of War, a conflicted and mysterious protagonist the player can connect with easily, beautiful scenery that draws you into this finely-crafted world... it's all there for a decent if slightly generic action game.  But so much of it is not a Castlevania game.  There's not yet been a single mention of Dracula, for one, but mainly, the game is almost entirely linear.  Almost Final Fantasy XIII linear.  No big castles to explore, no huge side-areas just to get one powerful item, just straight pathways with the occasional offshoot or fork in the road.  There are some areas you must return to later with another ability to get by something, but it's done in chapters and levels, not a single continuous game world.  As I said, I can usually handle change in situations like this, but this just doesn't feel like a Castlevania game, and it's affecting my enjoyment of it way more than I wish it would.  Somewhere in here is a decent and rather beautiful game, but it's tough to go through it wishing it was something else entirely.

Don't think the Supreme Court decision escaped my notice; full article about it next week!