Monthly Archives: August 2008

Economist Article on Changing the Game

My book won’t be in stores for another two months, and we’ve already gotten our first bit of press — from the Economist, no less. :-)

Obviously, I’m pretty excited to see (and nervous about) public reaction to the book! The Economist’s article confirms a suspicion I’ve had for a long time now — that most reviewers and journalists will choose to focus on a few specific slices of it, rather than attempt to expose the full scope of the book to their audience. For example, The Economist article focuses mainly on a reference to advergames, boosting productivity with games, and community building — which together represent far less than even a third of the major topics covered by the book. See the outline, below:

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The Definition of Lasting Appeal

I’m not as passionate as some people are about video game reviews (and how flawed they may or may not be.) I think there’s clearly room for improvement in the way the average review is conducted, but I also think that the answer to the problem will come in the form of review sites that cater to specific audiences; i.e. the 30+ crowd, or the socially-conservative crowd, etc. That said, I would like to express the opinion that all review sites, in general, should be careful how they incorporate “lasting appeal” into their scoring system.

The inspiration for this post comes from the IGN review of Braid. I’m absolutely not complaining about it — the review was positive and enthusiastic, and the reviewer did exactly what they were supposed to do within the particular constraints of the IGN review system. But IGN’s final score is one of the lowest given to Braid, apparently because Braid lacks “lasting appeal” — one of IGN’s five primary review criteria. IGN appears to define “lasting appeal” as a combination of sufficient game length and replayability. So how about it… does Braid really lack “lasting appeal?”

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Bubbling about Braid

As a general rule, I choose not to write about individual XBLA games on this blog. But this was a special week for XBLA, and I’d like to acknowledge the primary reason for that:

Last Wednesday, we launched Jonathan Blow’s Braid. As many other commentators have already noted, Braid is now the highest-rated game on XBLA. Its review score puts it in the company of Mass Effect. Rock Band, and Halo 3. It is being compared to Portal, but Portal had a much larger development budget. IMO, Braid is in a class all its own.

That said, I’m not writing this to promote Braid (it doesn’t need the help at this point.) I wanted to share some thoughts on the game itself, and on lessons that we can potentially learn from it.

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I’ll be giving a lecture at the IGDA Leadership Forum in November. Quick summary: “This session will attempt to summarize, and make relevant for the game industry, the most important lessons that I learned when getting my MBA from MIT … Continue reading