Irish Coffee, April 2nd, 2013

Something has my dander up this morning, and I like it. Oh, and I mention BBC's Sherlock in this morning's post, and I can't recommend it highly enough. All six ninety minute episodes are on Netflix. You have no excuse.

Games are stupid. Or at least they assume their audience is stupid. I suppose one hand washes the other in this case. There is an ever-shrinking bubble of technical limitations placed on the modern game designer, yet the under-utilization of modern techniques has left us playing the same games in the same way for well over a decade. It’s something like buying a $100 worth of Kobe beef to make a chicken fried steak. Complete waste of talent.

I recently finished watching BBC’s Sherlock series on Netflix, and if anything can be taken away from that show, it’s that the modern television audience is quite a bit smarter than it was when CSI debuted thirteen years ago. Even if the audience isn’t any smarter, show creators are clearly assuming their audience is more intelligent and acting accordingly. While there is a glut of stupid entertainment out there for the shoveling (I’m looking at you, American reality TV), there is certainly a market for “smarter” shows like Sherlock. Where are my smarter games?

Someone call Baker Street.

Before you jump all over me in an effort to point out that there are a plenty of “smart” games, let me just say: Yes, but they’re indies, and if I play one more quirky side-scroller in an effort to escape the Michael Bayification of the modern AAA title, I’m going to beat a hipster to death with their own pomade can. Even when taking indies into account, there aren’t many games that assume the player is smart. Hand holding tutorial sequences, hyper-obvious objective markers, plots that (even when complex) are explained to us like we’re five. Sure, there are plenty of games that are a little clever, a little complex, but nothing on par with complex, intelligent story telling in other mediums. Where's our Gatsby? Our Citizen Cane? Our Sherlock Holmes? At this point I’ll even settle for a Fight Club.

Now this could be chalked up to difficulty of conveyance for the video game. Game designers can assume their audience is intelligent all they like, but if the player happens to be a chimp that got a hold of a game controller or my girlfriend on tequila night, no amount of complexity is going to keep the avatar from jumping up and down in a corner and spinning around in a circle. But I don’t know that this is much of an excuse anymore. The entertainment world seems to care less and less about the lowest common denominator. They’re taken care of: just strap on TLC or Bravo like a feed bag.

The top tier games (as far as budget is concerned) are running anywhere from one-hundred to three-hundred million dollars. What we’re being told, essentially, is that nowhere in that budget is there room to develop new and interesting ways for games to tell a story. I call bullshit. Even when considering corporate interests such as broad appeal and profitability, there is still plenty of room to improve the delivery mechanism for interactive story telling.

And yet, there seems a dearth of any real effort to do so.

How it is impossible, with all the money thrown into game creation, and all of intelligent people developing them, that the closest we can get to a Sherlockian detective tale is L.A. Noire? A game so poorly executed that any review over a 7.0 must have been the result of a reviewer taking pity on the careers of the D-list actors called in to have their heads digitized. “Look! Over here! A clue! Press ‘A!’ It’s the green button!” 

We deserve a better class of video game, dammit. Not because we’re all so smart, but because game creators should stop assuming that we aren’t.

I don’t want my games to come from a feed bag, I want Kobe, dammit.