One of the side effects of attending GDC last week was that I spent a lot of time in my car; not my favorite place, but at least I got to catch up with podcasts. In particular, I’m glad that I had time to listen to the three part Critical Distance “2010 in Review” podcast: it’s about three hours long, but there were great guests on it, and I always like listening to smart people talking about games. They started off by talking about events of the year, blog posts and articles that seemed particularly interesting; then they switched to going through an incredibly long list (I didn’t count, but my guess would be about 50 games; kudos to Eric Swain for assembling it) of major 2010 titles, and talking about whichever ones they had something to say about. (Which turned out to be most of them: the participants were an opinionated, talkative, well-informed crowd!)
Quite a show. But then, when it ended, I realized: I have three personal candidates for 2010 game of the year, and yet none of them made it on that list despite its length! What’s going on with that?
One of my candidates is Minecraft, and there I think the answer is clear: the game doesn’t have a release date. I can’t remember for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they actually did talk about Minecraft in the first half of the podcast; it’s just not going to naturally show up in a chronological list, though, and you could make a case that it’s not a 2010 game at all.
Another one of my candidates is Rock Band 3. I’ll have to chalk that one up to an oversight (I know one of the podcast participants is a big Rock Band fan, though I don’t think he had input into the creation of the list): it’s a huge advance in an important gaming franchise, of course it should be on there. But your eyes glaze over when going through comprehensive lists of releases, it’s impossible not to occasionally miss something when whittling them down to a manageable size.
My final candidate is Flight Control HD. It makes my list by virtue of being an incredibly fun game, superbly matched to its system, that I cannot imagine improving: it seems to me to be a local maximum in the design space of games in the same way that Tetris is. But it wasn’t on the list. In fact, no iOS games were. (I’m not a huge Angry Birds HD fan, but a lot of other people are, and Osmos has certainly gotten its share of buzz.) Actually, did I miss an Angry Birds mention in the podcast? Christopher Williams mentions it in the comment thread, so maybe it did show up in the podcast list? Unfortunately, it’s hard to check facts about a three-hour long podcast…
And the iPad and iPhone aren’t the only platforms that were left out. I honestly can’t remember if any DS games were listed, though I suspect not: I just checked July, and Dragon Quest IX is missing, which is the first candidate off the top of my head. (I also can’t remember if any PSP games were listed, but I have no idea what games came out for that platform in 2010.) And the other missing platform is Facebook: I bet CityVille has been (is still being!) played by more people than any other game in their list, but it’s missing, as are FrontierVille, City of Wonder, Ravenwood Fair, and Cow Clicker.
Lists like the one on the podcast are always going to be incomplete; having said that, this complete omission of games on three of the current most popular platforms seems like a pretty big oversight to me. So I’ll repeat my question from above: what’s going on with that?
Eric is the only person who can answer; maybe he’ll chime in in the comments. And I don’t want to turn this into some sort of big accusation or anything: I really enjoyed the podcast, and it’s a lot of work making a list like that, so I don’t want to turn that into something that’s even more thankless than it would otherwise be. But in the meantime, I’ll speculate.
Presumably he’s not a fan of games on those platforms. That is, of course, perfectly fine: there’s no reason why he, or anybody else, should be! And one’s tastes are always going to affect the contents of lists like this that one creates.
Another contributing factor is probably the fact that it’s a Critical Distance podcast. And there just aren’t that many blog posts about games on those platforms on the sorts of blogs that Critical Distance links to. (I’ve been sadly remiss in discussing such games myself.) Or at least about any of the games I mentioned above other than Cow Clicker, but that game is enough of a special case that I can see its not being included.
And another potential contributing factor is that games on those platforms aren’t targeted at people like those who participated in the podcast. At GDC, the phrase ‘forty-three year old woman’ was bandied about a lot; as far as I know, all the podcast participants are men in their twenties. As are a lot of the authors of blog posts that Critical Distance links to, so this factor and the previous one are linked.
Christopher Hyde has been pointing out for years how much tunnel vision the “critical game blogging” community has: we (and I very much include myself in this) spend an awful lot of time playing and talking about AAA games, which seems to more or less mean games targeted at men in their twenties that are expensive to make and sell lots of copies. There is, of course, nothing wrong with talking about such games; but there are a lot of other spaces worth exploring.
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Hi David, thanks for you kind comments. I put a lot of effort into the podcast and I’m happy to hear it is appreciated.
I feel the best way to dissolve these issues is with openness of method. The games discussed were not the games that personally remembered coming out in 2010. That list would have been far far shorter and would have been from September to December. I couldn’t remember what came out and was shocked to find Bayonetta and Darksiders and a few others were 2010 games. They seemed like we had 3 years worth of major releases in one.
I knew I couldn’t remember everything and would leave out a lot so I consulted a list and the only place you can get a release schedule for games that had already been released, in one place, is the 2010 video games wikipedia entry. I went down the list and pulled every title that was talked about in any detail. So the bias is not with 20 year old males, but rather the established industry for 20 year old males. It’s a small distinction, but I think an important one. Wikipedia, I believe, sees a difference between iOS, facebook and the video game industry. Not just that, but games not released through industry consensus channels get left out in the cold too, indies among them.
So to respond to the omissions. Rock Band 3 was missing? I didn’t believe it. I was reading off a list I had made before the recording (Luckily enough I still have it and found it.) so whatever I wrote down is what I said….And you were right. Rock Band 3 is not on the list. I missed it, my bad. I am human and I made an error. As you say, my eyes must have glazed over the list after a while. The same goes for Dragon Quest IX. I was all but sure I included it, but no it too is missing. Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker was mentioned, but not discussed. No one had played it.
The thing is I remembered a few games that were released not in the list and I could not otherwise find a release date for. I broke up my notes by month with an extra section at the bottom called “Other Standouts” for games I couldn’t not find a release date for whatever reason. Minecraft, Neptune’s Pride, Sleep is Death, Hey Baby and Deadly Premonition are in there. I did read them out, before we got to the game by game discussion, but no one picked out any of the titles to talk about. It got missed in shuffle I guess.
I neither have an iOS device, nor a facebook account so my memory of any games there would be from my reading. As you say those games don’t get a whole lot of writing done about them. Except that is not completely true. An amended statement would be, games on those platforms this year do not get a lot of writing written about them. Farmville (09) and Spider (09) got plenty of digital ink spilled and would have been included no doubt had I done this sort of thing last year. It’s a weak argument and yours hold up much better, but I do think it needs to be understood.
For the other titles you mentioned, Angry Birds, Cow Clicker, Frontierville and Cityville. Yeah I forgot about them and probably would have put them in my other standouts section, since I don’t know when they came out. (I never heard of the others you mentioned.)
As for there not being enough critical writing about these other titles. I don’t know if there is enough material to talk about. They may be good and fun, but the amount of critiqueable material in Angry Birds is much smaller than Dragon Age or even Black Ops. This is one of those topics that can be debated at length in its own right and I will not do it here now.
Despite the title Episode 6th, and this being the 4th CDC podcast I was on, this is the first one I ran. The other three I just showed up for and spoke my mind. This is the first one where I got a topic, did the research, asked people to join and negotiated a time. Not to mentioned edit, mix and publish. For a first time I don’t think I did too bad a job.
The “tunnel vision” criticism and the 20 year old white male criticism I’ve dealt with before. Both are a matter of breath and inclusiveness. I am doing my best branch out. My RSS feed had reached the event horizon and I keep adding new feeds. I’m looking for new voices and diversity for future episodes. I have and will do all I can to combat these criticisms with my actions and not just words, but I am one man.
3/7/2011 @ 7:29 pm
Thanks so much for the detailed response, I really appreciate it. And yeah, those Wikipedia lists have a real editorial slant, while simultaneously being so long as to make it impossible to not have one’s eyes glaze over while reading them. And I completely agree: for your first time planning it out like that, you did a great job! Like I said, I really enjoyed listening to the whole thing, and your organization definitely made a big difference compared to my dim memories of the earlier CDC podcasts.
And you’re probably right that there’s not so much to say about Angry Birds. I could certainly talk about it for a bit, but not for a very long time. I think it’s worth finding a bit of time to talk about such games (among other things, to help sharpen our own critical skills: we know the kinds of things to talk about when it comes to Call of Duty, but not so much for Angry Birds, which further magnifies that gap), but I wouldn’t expect even a very sharp 43-year-old woman to have huge amounts to say about that game.
As to “I am one man”: I guess the obvious way to combat that would be to ask for suggestions for something like this? Not that there aren’t problems with that approach: it could lead to people wanting to be guests and being offended if they aren’t on the show, and I realize that you and Ben don’t get nearly as many TWIVGB suggestions as would be nice…
3/7/2011 @ 8:09 pm