My friend Jacob is playing through Fez for the first time, and posted that he loves the game, in spite of all of the Phil Fish drama. It really got me to thinking, did Phil Fish really deserve the ire of the community? Did he really do anything to become the gaming pariah he is now eternally infamous for being?
No. The answer is no. Do you know what artists do? Or even creative types, if you can't be bothered to call Phil Fish an artist? They say stupid shit. Sometimes they are brash, sometimes they are mean. That's the tradeoff, though. That's how we get the art: through these often troubled, always different people. In my opinion, Phil Fish's public stoning spoke a lot more about the state of the community than it did the comments he made.
So that guy is an asshole. Jonathan Blow seems really pretentious. If I met him, I might even think he's an ass. Does that make Braid a piece of shit? Does that make me discredit Blow, and attack him?
Fez might be an independent, pixel-art platformer but I bet if you played the game you liked it. Many folks went as far as to call it a work of genius, and if it's not, it's very inspired and well-made. It's very fun, and very cute! I do not believe something so saccharine could be created from someone who is a genuine asshole.
Phil Fish maybe received the most flak ever after his infamous comment that "Gamers are the worst fucking people". The culture we have created though, is toxic. I'm not talking about most of this website, because I believe that Giant Bomb is a great website with a great community. I hope that none of us are homophobic, misogynist, or anything like that. I hope none of us have neck beards.
![[IMG]](http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/ignore_jpg_scale_super/1/19561/2633951-neckbeard2.jpg)
But I think we can agree that it's the stereotype, and it's not unfounded. Everything always sucks and nothing is ever good. So many people will bitch about getting the same game over and over again, but do they want a new game, or do they want a new way to blow someones fucking head off?
When I first saw the trailer for Watch_Dogs, I was smitten. But as time went on I cooled off and tried to look at the game piece by piece. Full disclosure: I haven't played Watch_Dogs, but allow me to make an assumption. I bet when the heat is on and the noodles are boiling, I'm going to be running for cover to blast some dudes away. I'm going to be running around a corner to beat someone to death with a baton. I'm going to be blowing up police cars. I'm going to be running over pedestrians. That phone is going to be the last thing on my mind, save for the 1-3 functions I find genuinely useful.
Listen, though, because I'm not really going to shit on Watch_Dogs. I'm still excited about it. It's still one of the games that are pushing me in the direction of the now-current generation of consoles. But I just beat Max Payne 3 last week for the third time.
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It's a great game. It's definitely in my favorites, even if its a bullet-romp that's full of white antiheroes and slow motion. We don't need more Max Payne's, though. This isn't where gaming stops! But I don't know where it goes anymore. Take the InFamous franchise, where not only is your character a superhero, but an unlicensed one that gives Sucker Punch free reign to do whatever they want with their characters. But somehow, I'm still shooting people? I'm still throwing grenades, I'm still shooting rockets--but it's not with bullets, so it's supposed to be different.
Games aren't bad, and they're not getting any worse so to speak. I just don't know where games are going. I caught myself a couple times this year pointing in the direction of the independent, but is that the answer? Can we really expect studios like Hello Games, Supergiant, and Devolver to be the true future of games? Fez sold a million copies not too long ago, and that's a big deal. One million is a big number. But Call of Duty: Ghosts is a game that is less than 7 months old, and has sold 14,500,000 copies. To reiterate, the state of AAA gaming involves bigger budgets, bigger, fragmented studios, and narrower avenues of gameplay.
I'm so excited for E3 because I have it in my head that it has to be good. I expect to see at least a glimpse of the future of gaming, and I just have no idea what that is. I sort of feel bad that I'm only interested in indie games, emulators, and my 3DS right now because I feel like that is somehow untrue to "real" gaming. I want to like AAA titles, I want to want to play them. I don't care about any of them, though. I'm still totally mystified by this console launch, and I feel like when the the last two gens came out of the gate, I could feel it when I woke up in the morning. I could look at cardboard boxes on store shelves in wonder thinking about the brave new worlds that awaited me, and now with the new gen, I can't even think of what game I would buy with either system aside from Infamous Second Son or Titanfall, two games I have only meager interest in.
So here we are, bombardiers. Where do video games go? What happens now? What is happening now?
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