| He's making two separate points. 1) Video game developers should just go ahead and make games instead of going through a lengthy planning process. I agree with this in the context of indie games, and I guess in the context of most games pre-1990 or so. I can't see this working with modern big-name games. (Some day it will, but at that point the modern big-name games will have moved on.) 2) Video games should have less text and go with other ways of conveying stuff. This would be better written as "games which don't use much text can be lots of fun". I don't think a stronger thesis can easily be supported. Zelda games since Link to the Past have used more text than the original, but they've also told stories that wouldn't have been possible without it. Metroid Prime doesn't have much text unless you go around scanning things. But that's also where the plot comes from. The world is atmospheric by itself, but atmosphere doesn't tell us how the world came to be like it is. I would love to see a story and characters as intricate as (say) Final Fantasy VI conveyed without much text, but I just don't see it happening. There are games which can be communicated well without using text and there are those which can't. The author seems to be saying that the latter category either don't exist or are somehow less pure. I think a more reasonable argument would be that the former category deserves more exploration. |