A Tree Falling in the Forest

This morning I saw some traffic on an old post I made about people who talk about "The Citizen Kane of Games." I brought it back up here to the top because the question still burns strong enough for people to talk about it on the evening news. Magicalwasteland.com, the site that linked to my post, pointed to Michael Thomsen's appearance on ABC News in which he cited the Metroid Prime Trilogy as the Citizen Kane of Video Games. The validity of the comparison is addressed much better by Magical Wasteland, unfortunately the other discussion is the one on the evening news. Here is the old post: A couple nights ago I had the good fortune of speaking in front of a class of young designers, engineers and business people in USC's game program. They are full of great ideas and I am confident many of them will create things I can't even imagine today. Their young minds are so gooey and malleable and they bring the unadulterated exuberance, brilliance and naivete of...

I am a huge fan of Flower and enjoyed Flow, so I was really looking forward to this talk. I was in the audience when it was given and she did not fail in her attempt to be provocative. While she did not give him credit, she drew from Clive Barker's defense of games as art in his on line debate with Roger Ebert to argue game are not yet art. I was not really sure whether she meant to say there was no art yet, so I asked her, and she confirmed that in her opinion no one has created art. If I agreed with her, I probably would not post it here. It is a bold statement and I invite you to consider it.

I am proud to be an American. While it is not the most popular thing to say in some parts of the world and we often joke about being the "ugly American." I am proud and Activision's choice to involve players in a terrorist act is neither who we are or who we want to be. We are a country of ideals. When our government falls short of our ideals, and it does, we can freely challenge their actions and ultimately vote them out of office. At our best, we challenge ourselves to achieve goals which appear insurmountable at the outset. Challenges like John F. Kennedy's challenge to go to moon: We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others...

The great American hero is the entrepreneur who can grow a big business from nothing. The great American pass time is tearing down the great American heroes. We should all feel sorry for the hero who builds a game company. The most painful truism of being in the game business is how easily and often we are attacked . No one admits to playing games and the mainstream perception is of a bunch of geeks, sitting in our mother's basements, playing with ourselves in front of a bunch of glowing screens. While the growing audience and mainstream migration belies the stereotype, the attacks continue. It is just too easy to look at games as a vice and tar the entire industry, or in this case, a segment, as bad, because no one really cares. But really, "If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" Most recently, Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch decided to take a very common fraud ...