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Veknoid_Outcast on 22 February 2013
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pokoko said:
Veknoid_Outcast said:
pokoko said:
[...]

Hyperbole is a literary device, and I think the author uses it expertly in the piece. I'll concede your point about it being gratuitously argumentative and insulting.

But that doesn't change the veracity of his thesis, which is that power alone does not a good game make. If anything, a preoccupation with power will hurt the medium, not improve it. Who knows? Maybe PS4 will surprise all of us, and translate all that horsepower under the hood into something progressive. All I know is that there is something essential to a video game, and it doesn't require state-of-the-art graphics, sound, physics, etc.

As to your last paragraph, doesn't everyone want his hobby or passion of choice to conform to his ideal? Why invest so much time, money, and energy in a hobby and not care in which direction it goes?

And there was his strawman, that Sony's entire message was exactly that.  It wasn't, as I've pointed out.  Mark Cerny, the lead system designer, an artist who I respect far, far more than the author of the piece in question, talked extensively about making things easier for developers, taking away the roadblocks and the pitfalls of creating games on new hardware, and I'm supposed to believe that those are negative things for gaming?

The author went in with his preconceived ideas about Sony, and about hardware improving, and he heard what he wanted to hear.

As for transforming my hobby into exactly what I want, no, I don't think that way.  That would be the same as liking basketball and thus wanting all other sports to be abolished.  That's selfish and petty.

The author is making two, related comments. One about the Sony press conference and one about video games in general. He can only work with what he has, and that's his personal evaluation of what the press conference represented, and what that representation means for the industry. There have been dozens of such articles in the past two days, and his is no exception.

Even if his evaluation of the press conference is completely wrong -- and I don't think it is -- his argument about games in general is correct. The idea that a superpowered system will stir the creative juices of video game makers like never before is flawed.