After poring over many of the discussions on this website, I have noticed a conversation that recurs frequently.
It goes something like this:
""Nintendo fanboy: Look at these sales figures! Nintendo pwns!111!!
Sony/Microsoft Fanboy: Yeah, but only because they appeal to the mass market. PS3/Xbox 360 has better games for core gamers""
These two approaches imply two very different economic models that we could use to analyze games, and I am very interested in the opinions of this community on this issue.
If games are in fact economic goods, then the goal of any game developer is to sell games to whomever will buy them. According to this model, the "best" games are the games that sell the most copies and generate the most profits. If this is the case, then there should be no distinction between "core" gamers and "casual" gamers as a value judgement, but rather purely as a marketing distinction. Applying a pure version of this model to the games market would imply that Nintendo in fact does pwn.
But we can all agree that many times the games that sell the most copies are not the "best" games, and that some of the "best" games do not sell well. This observation implies that there is some aesthetic rubric we could superimpose on games to judge their merit much as we compare works of arts; but though we may decide that one is a masterpiece while another is kitsch, many times the trailblazing "better" artist starves while the mediocre artists pump out crowd-pleasing potboilers and make good money. In light of this theory, the disctinction between "core" and "casual" gamers in very similiar to the distinction between weathered cognoscenti and uninitiated dilettantes, much the same way that the late Beethoven string quartets will put most listeners to sleep while elevating a small cadre of musical acolytes to the heights of pleasure.
After gaming for most of my life I am convinced that many games are in fact works of art. What else would move an eight-year old to tears during the ending sequence of Chrono Trigger? Still, the finer nuances of many exemplary works are lost on most people, even many who consider themselves gamers. How else can we explain the meagre sales of games like Ico for the PS2 or Demon's Crest for the SNES. And many games that most "core" gamers would consider canonical masterpieces lack the sales numbers of the many versions of Madden football that EA grinds out.
That is why I have started this thread. Every other genre of art has an extensive body of rigorous, scholarly criticism of its canon, replete with theories and anaylses of recurring forms. In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom discusses the process of canon formation and how artists are inevitably influenced by their predecessors. Only those artists that can harmonize the rigid structures of tradition with original creative thought can hope to amount to more than a cliché. This is why I cried the first time I finished Chrono Trigger. It's designers had maneuvered through every stereotype of the RPG genre; such as the besieged kingdom with an ailing king, the princess who years for the freedom of a commoner and the robot that learns to love; yet they strung them together in a novel context that mocked the overused emotions inherent in these situations and forced them to play different roles.
If we are going to maintain that games are works of art and not just cheap entertainment, let us devise formal rubrics for evaluating the structure and form of games. Perhaps it would be easiest to start with one genre and follow its evolution through several examples on several platforms, noting which games introduced novelties.
I am very interested in any thoughts any of you have on this matter.
Thanks
