Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [98]
An ongoing discussion among critics had tackled the question of whether games can be art. Film critic Roger Ebert says no, that the freedom games give you overrules any possible message a creator could hope to deliver. (Miyamoto agrees with the decision, if not the rationale: he says games are entertaining and challenging, but claims no art status for them.) On the other hand, Tom Bissell in Extra Lives says yes, they can be, but only if they move away from aping films and give the player alternate worlds in which to make choices and accept consequences you could never do in real life. The debate continues, but the key objection is interactivity: I watch a Kurosawa film, and observe a Dalí painting, but I take part in a Miyamoto game.
That interactivity is the rub: what the best art strives to accomplish—connection—even the most shoddy games get automatically. In one sense, then, games are superior to any other art form: if connectivity to the audience is the goal. But the art of, uh, art is forging that connection through passive observation. It’s almost not fair to compare a painting with a painting you can jump into. All parties can agree on one thing, though: if not art himself, Mario is a very reliable muse for other artists.
GAME DEVELOPERS LOVE AND LOATHE LOS ANGELES THE third week of June, for the yearly Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, trade show. Whatever they’re working on, no matter the release date, needs to have a playable demo plus a kickass trailer ready for mid-June. Time your production schedule wrong, and a full month of your development time can go to creating a very fancy ad for a select few people, who will scoff at anything other than a fully finished product. This is one of Miyamoto’s grievances as well: people who spend hours and hours on a simple presentation to him, instead of devoting that time to the game and sending him a memo.
Yet skipping E3 is a forfeit, so everyone in gaming attends, and makes his big promises, and spends the rest of the year trying to live up to those lofty words. It’s gotten better over the years, scaled down to keep the Comic-Con crowd of fans away. But E3 remains a place where no one eats steak but everyone orders the sizzle.
Microsoft’s ascent into gaming had been very successful. The Xbox 360 was a tremendous gaming instrument, and its superlative Xbox Live infrastructure recreated a vital multiplayer world. There were people out there who had played a hundred hours of Halo 3, and hadn’t once played it single-player—or ever played with an actual second person sitting next to them. Like Sega and Sony before it, it had defined itself as the base camp for the core gamer. BusinessWeek estimated Xbox Live’s subscription costs alone were bringing in a billion dollars for Microsoft a year. It spent money by the forklift to enter the gaming world, and now forklifts were bringing that money back home. There was only one problem: Microsoft was losing.
Sony was in a very close race with Microsoft. Both were trying to claim the same territory of core gamers. Sony’s PS3 architecture was arguably superior to the 360’s, but a developer could do just about anything with either machine. Many of Sony’s wounds were selfinflicted, going back to launch where its blustery president claimed it was sold out in every store, an easily disproven claim. Some outstanding games made all forgiven with the geek crowd: titles like Uncharted, Resistance, LittleBigPlanet, and Assassin’s Creed were epics. There was only one problem: Sony was in third place.
Microsoft and Sony had the same problem the book industry had during J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter opus. Bestseller lists started excluding them from the “adult” bestseller lists, saying they were for children and thus didn’t count. This conveniently freed up the number-one spot for other authors. This strategy was a sound one, so Microsoft and Sony had for five years