Harg Harfardarssen
Actually, Jade Empire had a nice little influence system, if I recall correctly. Nothing as revelatory as KOTOR 2's , but pretty okay. Origins' system is actually much worse, because if Morrigan disapproves of your actions, you can buy her a bunch of tea-cosies until she forgets all about it and is in wuv with you again.
I almost wonder if the author of the piece never understood the gifting mechanic. In which case, he had a better experience because he didn't understand the game. Which could almost be New Bioware's motto: "You'll have a better experience if you don't understand our games!"
Cowboy Moment
Ha!
Oh, I have no problem with hideously pretentious academic drivel. Gotta keep them graduate schools in business, right? ;P My issue is with poorly argued, inane I-have-a-liberal-arts-degree-and-I'm-not-afraid-to-use-it nonsense of the sort PopMatters appears to proffer on a regular basis. It doesn't make me angry so much as depressed, because it always screams that the writer is desperate to prove to Mom and Dad that hey, these games
are worth something after all, because this one thing in the game is vaguely like an old thing you (Mom and Dad) have heard of that is generally considered great!
It's a lazy, needy argument that pisses on the worth of games as an entertainment medium, let alone an artistic one. There's a difference between saying "Hey, Dragon Age is kind of vaguely like this one book I read in college that one time, ERGO ART!" and working out any kind of real correlation between the two. Real academic articles also tend to avoid implicit or explicit value judgements or the establishment of false equivalencies. However silly the articles on GameStudies may be (and the ones on the front page appeared very silly indeed), I guaran-fucking-tee you they're not equating Dragon Age 2 with Sophocles, even if they believe it to be the equal of Sophocles' work. They're not doing that because there is no evidence within the work that supports a completely subjective value statement, nor can there ever be. You could potentially argue that it contains elements of the Sophoclean tragedies, but that's a very different question. Armageddon contains elements of the Hero's Journey, but nobody's going to argue that Armageddon is a good movie because of it.
However silly it might seem, I do think the establishment of a critical vocabulary with which to discuss video games is important. If GameStudies helps with that, terrific. It's articles like the one about Dragon Age and Romanticism that turm my stomach, because they're transparent attempts to validate a medium that requires no validation by comparing a popular example of said medium to some old books that you might have been forced to read in high school. Comparing Dragon Age to fucking Percy Shelley doesn't just disrespect Shelley and everything he was trying to do with his art; it disrespects the team who made Dragon Age and everything
they were trying to accomplish.
It implies that there's no difference in intent or execution between a role-playing video game and a poem because they're both pieces of art*, which is like saying there's no difference between a baseball and a waffle iron because they're both objects. It's one of those statements that's both technically true and so general as to be utterly meaningless. The person who made the baseball did not intend for it to be used to make delicious waffles, and the person who made the waffle iron did not make it to be thrown at a person in a uniform holding a bat. To imply that one is the same as the other is to disrespect the craftsmen behind both.
* - To clarify, my use of the term "art" is not an implicit value judgment regarding Dragon Age
or Shelley's work, because my definition of the word is simply "a work created with an intent beyond the satisfaction of basic human needs." Under that definition, bad art can exist. I realize this may not be in line with the popular definition of art, or even the one in the dictionary, but I believe it to be more correct for a bunch of reasons you don't care about. If I were to judge either Dragon Age game in accordance with the popular use of the term, neither game would qualify as art, because neither game is good enough.
