It’s OK That The Order: 1886 is Short… But It’s Also OK to be Annoyed
February 22, 2015 | Originally Published by Polygon
The length of The Order: 1886 has been a hot topic around the virtual watercooler ever since a Let’s Player posted a video “confirming” that the game is only five hours long. Of course, not everyone plays games the same way. A professional streamer might be able to polish off The Order in five hours, but the average gamer playing an hour or two after work every night might need ten hours or even twenty. But that fact remains that paying $60 for a game that could be completed in five hours is not a great value proposition.
Polygon’s Ben Kuchera understands the length vs value argument, but he also believes that some games work better as shorter narratives. So who comes out on top of this rather silly debate? Actually, it’s everybody as it’s OK for games to be short, but it’s also OK to be annoyed at how short some games are:
The Order: 1886 has many, many problems, and its relative lack of length is not the most troubling.
But the pre-release stories about its supposed length, and what it means for its success, were passed around and fretted over endlessly among the gaming press and social media. The question of game length, and what it means for players, is a contentious one.
[…]
The Mona Lisa is, after all, very small. Does that mean it’s a lesser work of art?
Here’s the secret: Everyone is right.
Did Batman: Arkham Knight Just Kill the Teen Rating?
February 26, 2015 | Originally Published by Forbes
The gaming world was a tad surprised when Batman: Arkham Knight was awarded an “M For Mature” rating by the ESRB earlier this week, but no one has taken up the “Won’t someone think of the children!” mantle just yet. And that’s probably because the way that gamers treat a Mature-rated game is much different from the way moviegoers react to an R-rated film (to say nothing of the dreaded NC-17).
You might even wonder if this has signaled a shift away from the ESRB’s Teen rating (which has always been considered equivalent of the much-more-popular PG-13 for films). Few games carry a Teen rating in 2015 and nearly every critically acclaimed title of the past decade (BioShock, Red Dead Redemption, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto V, and many others) has been slapped with a scarlet “M.” Paul Tassi of Forbes believes the “T For Teen” rating is dead and that it’s unlikely anyone will notice or even care:
Unlike the movie industry, however, a game being rated M is not all that big of a deal. Movies will bend over backward to cut themselves down to PG-13 from an R in order to have a chance at dramatically increasing their box office haul, and there’s only one R-rated movie in the top 25 highest grossing films of all time, The Passion of the Christ. There are 16 PG-13 movies, by contrast, including the first four of the top five.
Gaming is a much different story, with rating hardly seeming to matter at all. M-rated games are routinely best-sellers, and comparatively seven out of the top 25 highest selling video games of all time are rated M, all split between Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty titles, with the non-M games mostly coming from Nintendo ’s E-rated stable. In fact, there isn’t a single T-rated game in the list.
The PlayStation’s Face Buttons Explained At Last
March 1, 2015 | Originally Published by Kill Screen
Have you ever wondered why PlayStation controllers use X-Circle-Square-Triangle for the face buttons instead of the more traditional B-A-Y-X that Nintendo has employed since the Super NES days or the mirrored A-B-X-Y that Microsoft overlaid on the Xbox controllers? It’s OK, it’s kept me up at night too. Why? Why? Why?
Thankfully, Kill Screen’s David Shimomura went looking for an answer and he found one by talking to Teiyu Goto, the developer who originally designed the PlayStation controller for Sony back in the mid 90s. Goto revealed that he named the face buttons what he did in a nod to symbolism and semiotics. However, American and European players didn’t have the same connection to Goto’s symbols as a Japanese player would and it caused all sorts of friction within Sony:
Goto wanted to be memorable but he also wanted to make sense, at least in his own mind. “I gave each symbol a meaning and a color,” he states in the same interview. “The triangle refers to viewpoint; I had it represent one’s head or direction and made it green. Square refers to a piece of paper; I had it represent menus or documents and made it pink.” So far so good, sort of. The triangle is reminiscent of an arrow or a direction. It has directionality to it and, even though it’s equilateral, it must point somewhere. The square is a little looser but the connection between a page and the square are strong, at least for Goto. One can construe it as a box and use it for inventory or some other kind of menus. But then things got weird.
What’s the Deal With Video Game Tie-In Novels?
March 18, 2015 | Originally Published by GamesRadar+
It’s no secret that a lot of gamers look down on the dreaded “tie-in novel.” Even when they’re not poorly written, your average video game tie-in doesn’t have much going on below the surface. Or do they?
Writing for GamesRadar+, Benjamin Abbott tracked down Karen Traviss and learned all about the nitty gritty that goes into creating a tie-in novel. Traviss, who has lent her pen to the Gears of War and Halo franchises, revealed that authors of tie-in novels are given much more freedom than the average reader might expect. It’s this freedom that often creates a pretty decent book:
Tie-in novels in particular suffer from growing franchise cynicism, leading to something of an image problem they don’t always deserve. Presumed to be b-side lunges at tertiary publicity, it’s tempting to dismiss them out of hand, but to do so is to misguidedly tar them with the same brush as the million cheap movie novelisations that came before them. Celebrating gaming’s capacity for storytelling is currently in vogue, and for very good reason. Consequently, books set in these worlds are contradictory blends of potential and stigma. Such projects carry potential that their inspirations simply can’t, making them ideal for expanding those universes in meaningful ways. If people will just give them the chance to.
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