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Censorless Violence

Authored by: CapCom on Saturday, January 14 2006 @ 05:22 AM UTC

Yeah, Nintendo likes to throw these numbers around: "Out of the top games sold last year, none of them were M rated."

You might find this kind of odd considering the stereotypes of the 18-35 male gamer - the mature gamer who can buy games with the big M. Looks like more people like to throw the skin (not to mention fairly high numbers for both PS2 AND X-box - then again, the list is pretty much dominated by PS2 titles) and other sports games than they like to shoot pedestrians and the undead. Maybe we'll have to change it to the 18-35 male who likes football. Looks like games are turning mainstream. Maybe that's also why EA is the largest independent company - they own Madden, which will sell a million copies every year for minor upgrades.

The thing is, the M games dominate the popular media because it's easy to get shocked at violent games, so it's something the media can latch onto. It's not easy to get shocked at guys playing football because well, that's what guys are expected to do. What I'd like to know is how many are playing online...

And maybe those M games just don't appeal to that large an audience because people would rather do something other than kill things... Like I don't know, play a good old sports game with their buds? I keep saying co-op is the way of the future...

More odd...

Star Wars Battlefront II was only released in November and it's no. 6?

Also (and not surprising)...

No X-box 360 games on the list :P

---
"Until next time..."
Captain Commando

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This Numbers are Sick

Authored by: eben on Monday, January 16 2006 @ 10:20 PM UTC

Market forces don't make good art. They don't really make good anything; they simply make things more standard, more popular (populist?) more quickly and more cheaply. So what do these numbers mean to me?

Well, they simply confirm the fact that the videogame industry is more interested in producing numbers than quality videogames.

Why are we, as the diasporic, critical arm of the videogame medium, ( I like to call this 'simula' cause it kind of rhymes with 'cinema'. C'mon! Everyone say it now, 'simula: the medium of interactive gaming' Damn it people, say it with me or those Scandanavians will coin everything!) ...why are we subject to the tyranny of these infernal statistics? Why must we regard the demographic homunculi- that sniveling bunch of fraggers - as truth- if we ourselves are the exception?

Our job is to keep our ear to the ground, (not to industry-furnished statistics) and our eyes to the sky because the next big revolution isn't going to be new stats for the same players and a few more polygons. It will be a fundamental challenge to the (poorly) established genre conventions and codes existing today. It will come from someone or some group of individuals interested in making videogame history, not videogame revenue.

As Chris Kohler so eloquently put it, "This game are sick." Yeah, I've seen it before; it's called the number bug. If you ignore it, you won't get infected.

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This Numbers are Sick - Authored by: CapCom on Wednesday, January 18 2006 @ 06:36 PM UTC

this is my new idea

Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, August 21 2006 @ 10:27 PM UTC