| I admire the adherence to principle and depth of execution, however I find something about this incoherent. Shaving off some aesthetic components of violence and positioning the work as anticapitalist does not address the core issue of every game project: What does the game facilitate a study of? That's not a leading question or "gotcha". It's just the thing every game player will ask at some point: What is it about? What do you do? I believe the most likely answer to that is that it's primarily a technical study, and the game part of it is not exactly the focus, which is why the content of it is directionless "filler", opting to say less of the thing it emulates, but to on some level venerate it rather than critique it: it's still a game about shooting stuff and...that's it, it has nothing more to say, it doesn't "go" somewhere. And it will stay stuck there so long as it stays within the subset of what the original game did. Which makes it, in some sense, incomplete as a work. A tech demo with a bit of game bolted on, call it what you may. If we proceed further in the direction of staying within principle and do not halt at the point where something Doom-like is possible, all these other development opportunities come up that seem more coherent with the ideology at play: * Mazes/exploration gameplay(finding one's way home)
* Procedural landscapes/dream simulator
* Sports gameplay
* Networked virtual worlds The only problem, then, is the feeling that this would break with tradition, but that's exactly it: it would be radical from a "positive" standpoint rather than a "negative" one to develop in a new direction. |