The major warning sign for me that the industry has become increasingly artistically bankrupt is that it no longer produces "names." The celebrity artists of game design, your Peter Molyneuxs, your Tim Schafers, your Sid Meiers, your John Carmacks, all emerged out of previous eras. But Peter Molyneux's particular problem is that he's still stuck in the mindset of his time. He is the undisputed king of It Sounded Good On Paper. Yeah, twenty years ago when the ability to have sex with hookers in Leisure Suit Larry blew my fucking mind, the notion of a game being so deep and expansive that after visiting an inn and flirting with the waitress on your way to slaying the dragon you can come back and buy the inn and marry the waitress, or any building or member of the service industry in the world, would have sounded like some glorious unreachable pipe dream. But now that a game can actually have those elements they're a lot less appealing than they seemed while we couldn't have them. Anything looks more appealing when it's behind the window of a swanky shop, against which we press our noses, spellbound.
