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For the stray, uncompressed ramblings Nathan Ferguson can’t fit in 140 characters or less.

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Jan 29

‘Indie Delusion’ Follow-Up; or Anyone Can Crank Widgets

In hindsight and in further thought, this is about more than pageviews.

Because once pageviews are irrelevant, our inclination will be to stick to what we know we like: so, more Modern Warfare (or Battlefield), more Portal, more Zelda.

Long-term, though, this impulse would not only be unsustainable for the industry (in my opinion) but boring. The games press will soon have an opportunity to cover games their readers haven’t heard/wouldn’t normally hear about, on a regular basis, with no immediate worries of lost traffic. To use that new freedom to simply lavish more coverage on the same, established franchises—games that players almost can’t avoid hearing about—would be to squander that freedom.

Which means we, as gamers, need to be willing to go out and try things that don’t immediately captivate us with (a) surface qualities—highly polished visuals, voice acting, and scripted stories—or (b) hook us with interactive qualities—perfectly implemented mechanics and constant, unwavering, player-pleasing “fun” gameplay.

Rarely after breaking down videogames into these components and finding them each, individually or in conjunction, to our liking, do we ask (or communicate effectively in reviews) if the sum of those parts has any real meaning, or if, in actuality, it is us being played.

Instead we, in essence, describe—usually in verbose, jargon-laden detail—cranks and widgets, and how much fun cranking those widgets is or isn’t.

Which is, I believe, a supreme waste of time and energy for both the press and gamers.

Because I can find or glean fun/entertainment from almost any game, or book, or movie, or song. I’m having fun writing this blog post but… so what? It’s interactivity that sets videogames, as an expressive medium, apart; not fun.

To tweak one of the most insightful points I’ve read re: game criticism:

I don’t want to hear about whether or not the widget was fun to crank, I want to know what it meant to you.

Jan 28

IGN: ‘Indie Delusion’ ☇

Mike Thomsen, in an editorial for IGN:

For too long critics and audiences have given credence to the idea that production value, length, and competitive orientation make a game worthwhile. By even having an ‘indie’ category we agree to keep more expensively produced genre entries safely walled off from the cheaper and less polished games.

This argument could not have been made at a better time. Confession: Even I was buying into the “indie game” buzz. It’s also well argued by Thomsen. Click the title of this post and read it.

The application of “indie game” really went astray, I feel, when its meaning changed from a subjective one gamers used for describing games that they argued “broke from the ‘mainstream’” to an objective label equating small development teams, low budgets, and little or no publisher oversight with creativity, originality, independence of thought, or artfulness.

There’s a theoretical grain of truth to the myth but in reality, many of these so-called indie developers are producing games that—as Mike argues—differ from more expensive-to-produce games in budget only. And where does such a nebulous descriptor leave games like, say, Angry Birds, a game made by two guys who’ve since become millionaires?

The point Mike makes that resonated most with me as a fan of videogames that often come from small developers, is the disparity of mainstream press coverage for big budget versus small budget titles. Which works like so: The big guys get almost all the coverage and the little guys, almost none of it.

Imagine if the only games TouchArcade (or IGN’s own iPhone channel) covered and reviewed were those priced $7 and up. Absurd idea, right? Yet most game sites/blogs (for reasons I’ll posit below) apply a similar, seemingly arbitrary logic to what they will and won’t cover.

Now, those reasons…

Pageviews.
Pageviews.
A wealth of lower-budget games with no single directory listing them all.
Pageviews.

The third reason might have been more valid when outlets like IGN sought to cover every single disc/cartridge produced but even IGN gave up that task (though they keep reviewing MyNotebook DSiWare apps for god knows why).

So it’s mostly about pageviews—that is, the acquisition of as many as possible.

Pageviews are why, increasingly, you must squint to see the editorial content amidst banner ads that now border most pages on three sides, AdSense text ads, and social media widgets; I would guess the latter is used not just to share articles (which, in turn, generates more pageviews) but also, like comment systems, to keep you on the page longer.

Sensationalist headlines and sexually arousing header photos? Articles broken up into separate “pages”? Established game franchises—and little else—receiving prime coverage? All indirect side effects of the pageview as a metric for ad money.

Once the CPM model dies—and it is dying, slowly, as people discover better alternatives (not spamming) and better strategies—the Web will likely become a less noisy, more honest, more enjoyable place to browse. And for the mainstream games media, the pageview’s demise should encourage better, more holistic coverage of everything the medium offers, instead of just the ones that bring in the pageviews.