So recently, there was an article about the game Beyond: Two Souls. The discussion, among other things, touched on how "risky" it was to make a game featuring a main character that's female. According to the article, creator David Cage was actually told by other developers the following statement:
“Oh, do you really think gamers want to be this young girl? They want to be guys, dudes, with big muscles and big guns.”
Short answer: No. Long answer: No.
The first thing that came to mind was THIS VIDEO by Jim Sterling, wherein he discusses the concept of what people "want" versus what they actually buy. His example uses focus groups, where a bunch of gamers say that they want games just like Call of Duty, so all of the developers make games like Call of Duty. And then no one buys them. Why? Because all those people who said they wanted Call of Duty already have Call of Duty.
In a lot of game genres, like the Modern Miliary Shooter (MMS) that I just mentioned, there's usually a clear leader, one game that stands above the rest. Everything else is just a copy, a cheap knockoff. And gamers know it. That's why they're not bothering to buy any of them. The market is flooded with a million copies of every kind of game out there. And the majority of them are a complete waste of time.
The point of all this is that I've started seeing more validity in games that break the mold, that really go outside of what we expect and don't simply copy other games. These tend to be smaller titles, perhaps "testing the waters" to see if gamers are interested. And so far, they seem to be. Sony has gone so far as to "open the doors" for independent developers to release their games on the upcoming Playstation 4, in order to allow gamers to get a taste of all the other good stuff out there, beyond just what the big AAA developers throw at us.
In regards to female protagonists, that alone certainly isn't enough to make a game interesting (nor is it enough to condemn it). It's cosmetic, really, just a different skin over the player character, if there's nothing else in the game to make her interesting. A good example would be the recently-released Remember Me, a game that caught a lot of flak before release because it had not only a female protagonist, but a black female protagonist. Unlike the majority, this actually piqued my interest. They were obviously comfortable enough in their creation to eschew gaming tradition, maybe this was going to be something really neat. But then the reviews came along, and despite an intriguing premise, it seems that the developers forgot to make a decent game to put this interesting character into. It was a by-the-numbers game like a dozen others I've played these last few years. Trying to shake things up in a mediocre game by adding just a different protagonist doesn't change the fact that it's still just a mediocre game. Before release, all the news was about the player character. After release, it was all about how the game just wasn't very good. Which is sad, because it seems like it had a lot of potential. I may still give it a chance later on when it goes on sale on Steam or PSN.
Now that Beyond: Two Souls has been released, I've seen something very interesting in its reviews; extreme levels of polarization. There's a very wide spectrum of review scores, ranging from very high to very low. Well, maybe "ranging" isn't the right word.. they're either very high OR they're very low. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground with this one. No "meh, it's okay". It's either the most amazing thing ever crafted by human hands or it's not even worth the few cents of metal and plastic that it's printed on.
Ironically, the game's predecessor, Heavy Rain, likewise a very polarizing game, was one that I said "Eh, it's not bad" about. I neither loved nor hated it. But I sure as hell gave it the chance, because it was something different. The same chance I'm giving to Beyond (and so far, it's paying off).
One statement that occasionally shows up when discussing games as different as Heavy Rain and Beyond, and any other game that doesn't quite fit genre stereotypes (like Journey, The Stanley Parable, or Dear Esther), is the old "If you didn't like it, then you didn't 'get' it" trope. In most cases, this is just bullshit spewed by fanboys, but in some cases, like Beyond, I think it actually has a small element of truth. A small element, mind you (I still think the statement in general is BS). The games aren't brilliant, they're not Game of the Year contenders, but they are different from anything else. And that's enough to scare some people off. They keep wanting to compare it to other similar games, but there simply aren't any. David Cage and the (admittedly very talented) staff at Quantic Dream seem to have created a whole new genre, and a lot of people just aren't quite sure what to make of it yet.
That's not saying that the negative reviews are wrong.. they're part of the picture. Some people just don't like this kind of game, and I'm okay with that. It doesn't lessen my enjoyment in the slightest. But I think it should be important for game reviewers to at least admit to the fact that, professional opinion aside, they just personally don't care for this particular genre of games. I think reviews would be a lot more balanced if reviewers would take things like that into account. Rather than going on and on about how bad the game is (to you), point out the good stuff, and how it may appeal to certain people, and how it may turn off certain other people. It's okay for a review to say "some people will like this, and some people won't". Dismissing something just because it's different isn't the way to push the industry forward. And we desperately need that right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment