MRY , is not that the 1001 book didn't include King's Quest I. They didn't include ANY King's Quest game, not even V or VI. As well as no Space Quest, Wizardry, Might & Magic or Gold Box game.
I would not include any KQ game in the Vault. But, as I said, I don't think anyone could plausibly say that the list shows an anti-past bias. At a glance, it appears that around 15% of the list is from before 1990. That compares favorably to the percentage of games on the Codex's list of top RPGs from before 1990. And I trust we agree that the Codex is biased
in favor of the past.
Nor could you say there's a bias against old adventure games. We've got Zack McKraken on the list, after all! (Not to mention Planetfall, The Hobbit, etc., etc.,)
Whoever wrote the list plainly didn't like Sierra games, but that's an issue totally tangential to the gist of your article. As for the RPG omissions, again that seems a matter of taste, not historical ignorance. After all, Eamon is on the list. So is Dungeon Master, The Bard's Tale, Ultima I, NetHack, etc.
What the list reveals is not a bias against the past so much as particular preferences: Lucas over Sierra, Ultimas over Gold Boxes, etc. It is hard to avoid those creeping in. (Compare NeoGAF's RPG list to the Codex's, for example.)
Second, I speak about films with some knowledge in this area. I've been a video editor for the past 10 years and worked with various professionals and directors, with background in advertisement, TV and movies. And I did a 80 hours course on movie criticism & history a few years ago. These people are walking encyclopedias, they actively research their medium, hunt for obscure references, watch movies you never heard about and read thick books on film-making and director's biographies. You don't have gaming's "I grew up playing SNES, play ever since and that's it" journalists rampaging through - maybe on blogs, but not on serious, formal outlets.
This is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Writers on gaming sites are not equivalent to industry professionals. And film studies students very different from people in video game development courses: the latter field, at least in the United States, is a vocational / non-academic field. The apples-to-apples comparison would be the familiarity that successful industry veterans have with older games; it may still be less, but that's largely attributable to the commitment it takes to play a game vs. watch a movie.
Yes, games take longer to play, but we used to have specialists. CGW had a journalist for each genre, and they were experts of their trade. Ever since blogs replaces magazines, we went backwards a lot in this sense.
If you say so, I believe you. I never read game magazines as a kid, but the ones that are quoted on CRPG Addict compare unfavorably, in my opinion, to the average mid-to-high-end site today.
Outside of quotes on that blog, my only exposure to Scorpia (who I assume is one of the experts you're referencing) was when I read her
reaction to an article I wrote in The Escapist eight years ago. To the extent she is a paragon of the old RPG journalism, I'm underwhelmed, though obviously I have my biases. If nothing else, she seems to have misunderstood even very basic sentences (for example, reading "the player should never be
expected to save except on quitting" to mean "
permitted to save"). The only "single save slot" game she seems aware of is Diablo 2. She appears totally unaware of rogue-like games. Her design preferences are for "heroic" RPGs where you never have stat penalties. Etc.
Third, I mention the book mostly because of how they ignore Sierra but the same journos who worked on the book began to write articles in praise of Roberta as soon as the reboot was announced.
Without checking each author's bibliography, I'll have to take your word for it. But why would someone write an article about her absent the reboot? The reboot made KQ relevant, KQ made her relevant, and that prompted gushing articles. Otherwise, there have already been lots of excellent articles written about her, and I don't see any reason why more should have to be written. I'd read them if they were, but the failure to have an annual Roberta Williams festschrift is hardly something to get agitated about.
They did a decent job on their research of older titles, but too many old classics are missing in favour of listing Mario Kart 5 times or all having individual entries for each GTA IV DLC.
I have no idea what the standards for the list are. Maybe that DLC is really awesome. (I've never played the GTA games. I too am an agent of cultural illiteracy.) I agree that the later stuff on the list seems pretty stupid. But then, so does the older stuff. Surely Zack McKraken should not be on it, as much as I love the game.
Fourth, GOG removed a lot of barriers, and every day more and more old games get release on Steam. I can understand that casual players still don't want to mess with bad controls & interface, but I think it's unacceptable for someone working in the field to excuse themselves this way. Especially when they just handwave them, away saying they are "outdated" or "just not fun to play anymore".
We'll just have to disagree. I don't think a moral or practical prerequisite for "working in the field" is fiddling with awkward old games simply because they have a measure of historical importance. Even games that aren't awkward or hard to control take more time than people reasonably have. Moreover, I'm deeply skeptical that if you were able to slave-chip game developers and require them to spend all of their time consuming media (rather than, say, spending time with their kids, posting on message boards, grabbing a beer with friends, going for a jog), the best media to direct them to would be old games. As I wrote in another
Escapist article, I think one of the big problems is actually game development becoming too inwardly focused -- trying to recapture or improve upon existing games, when those games' greatness often came from exogenous influences like books, film, P&P games, board games, real-life adventuring (not LARPing, I mean like, actually going for a hike).
What next, book critic won't read Hamlet because the language is archaic and the play format is unused today?
To begin with, few book critics if any read Hamlet in the original spelling, and often not only spelling but words are changed. Moreover, no one is proposing that the Hamlet of video games should be neglected because it is hard to set up; what I am proposing is (1) none of the games you've mentioned is even semi-plausibly the Hamlet of video games; they'd be extremely lucky to be counted the Cymbeline of video games; and (2) it is quite likely that the Hamlet of video games will be one without a crappy interface because part of the genius of Hamlet is how easily it manages to speak to us even across a divide of more than four centuries. Finally, I don't think that reading Hamlet is a prerequisite to being a book critic (to be pedantic, Shakespeare didn't write it to be read as a book, in any event), nor do I think that reading Hamlet is a prerequisite to being a writer. I say that as someone who loves Hamlet and alluded to it several times in Primordia.
My very own book on CRPGs only list 300 of the more than 2000 CRPGs made in the past 40 years.
I think I've been unclear. The idea that someone should be familiar with 15% of the works in a particular genre to consider himself literate within that genre seems insane to me. No one applies that standard to films, books, or anything else. There are so many games (books, plays, movies) that it's not viable.
The reference to film is simply that in film, there is considerable winnowing that has gone on before something is called a classic. When you say, "It's unreasonable not to know City Lights" or "It's unreasonable not to know Hamlet," you're drawing up the fact that out of millions of works, a very small number have become "canonical." By contrast, you're expecting game developers to know a much greater percentage of games, even though games are much more time consuming to play and on balance probably worse, and even though the historical significance of the games at issue is at best debatable.
However, I will maintain that I find disturbing for Elder Srcolls fans to never go after the first two games in a series of mere five titles.
I agree that's a humiliating moment for the students. That said, it has as much to do with the misuse of the term of "fan" or "Elder Scrolls" as it has to do with cultural illiteracy. Probably they interpreted the question to mean, "Did you enjoy the Elder Scrolls game you've played?"
It's hard to be a serious fan. There are authors whom I adore, and I haven't read all of their writing, not even close, and there aren't even that many books at issue. There are foods of which I consider myself a great devotee, but once I look on Chowhound or Yelp, I realize I'm barely initiated.
There's nothing wrong with being proud of your depth of knowledge. You should be proud! I'm proud to even be talking with someone so knowledgeable! But it is a dangerous kind of humility to say, "My depth of knowledge is the bare minimum that a person must have to participate in the conversation." It was Harold Bloom's "Western Canon" that drove this point home to me. Check
this out. It is impossible that anyone other than Harold Bloom would satisfy his test for cultural literacy.
In a way, this discussion reminds me of the old "what makes an RPG" debates. Just as the definition of RPG shouldn't be tailored to include only games we like, we shouldn't expect others to play every game that matters to us.
And that's my main point in this article: the gaming industry doesn't encourage gamers to learn about it's history, it does the exact opposite.
I guess I'm not persuaded. It seems to me that the industry is in a fever of re-releasing old games, making sequels to old games and bundling them with the originals, Kickstarting deliberatey retro games, throwing around retrophilic terms like "NES hard," etc.
I would rather the world were filled with people of your erudition, but of the things today that make me hopeless, a fondness for XCOM over X-Com is not one of them.
I, Loom, Dragonsphere, BASS, Fate of Atlantis, SQ IV, Gabriel Knight, The Longest Journey, and Kyrandia. I also played through later Lucas games (Full Throttle and Grim Fandango) and some non point-and-clicks like GK2, Hugo Whodunnit, etc. If you add in games I started and played some significant portion of, the list grows a bit longer, but it's riddled with huge holes. So to the extent you think Primordia "succeeded" because I had a deep grounding in point-and-clicks and stole their best ideas, the premise of your argument is wrong. I'm sure almost every AGS forum regular has deeper adventure game experience.
