N’Gai Croal has a dissection of a fisking of a rebuttal that kicks up the “are video games art” question with more of the usual round and round. In a strange twist I happen to respect all three of the principals in this little drama, but reading all this spilled ink as we dig deeper into metaphor, hyperbole and concept definition a single thought rises above the rest until everything is but a hum:
What difference does it make?
Before you do anything else, head over to the Official XBox Magazine Podcast site and check out Podcast #70, specifically the interview with FASA Studio Head Mitch Gitelman which starts around the 20:00 minute mark.
Commentary on the interview below.
As an inclusively-oriented gaming site, it behooves us to stop for just a minute and think about the new Shadowrun game for the XBox 360 and Games for Windows. Because Shadowrun is primarily a pen-and-paper role-playing property, the translation from that into modern video game warrants some consideration.
It has already been said—often!—how woeful it is that this game is a First Person Shooter and not some type of role-playing adventure. Whether you share that knee-jerk assessment or not isn’t what needs to be discussed here, because reasonably you have to grant that it is at least possible that Shadowrun could be translated into a phenomenal shooter. What does need to be questioned is the design decision to make Shadowrun an online/multiplayer-only team-based shooter more along the lines of Counter-Strike than Deus Ex.