Now that I’m done with work and work-after-work, I’m going to take time out of my designated Assassin’s Creed 2 Time tonight to write to you about Assassin’s Creed 2.
Looking back on the sad, bare handfuls of entries from the initial iteration of PropCal as a Video Game Blog Only, there’s a surprising amount of Assassin’s Creed (1) in the mix. I suppose that the kind of mood I need to be in to write about video games is a similar methodical mindset that compels me to play a circular, repetitive, Chinese-water-torture game like Assassin’s Creed 1.
Technical achievements have a way of obfuscating the actual creation that they are there to support (if the framing of that sentence gave you pause, please note: the question of whether Game is supported by Tech or the other way around or if both are subservient to Story is so much of another beast entirely, and you may want to stop reading fairly soon) and can even serve as intentional misdirection away from greater, more fundamental flaws.
There is a movie that was recently released (and, some might say, at least two movie directors that survive exclusively through this means) that many argued was a triumph of technical skill over artistic merit.
But! Both are so very subjective in the world of film for those who don’t speak the cinematographic language. If the key lighting is bad (and, according to my cinematographer friend, the key (keyframe? Somebody out there knows what I’m talking about) lighting in said director’s previous work (it’s about a boat that sinks) was very bad), the vast, vast majority of viewers are never, ever going to realize that that particular job of that particular craftsman was not done to its full potential.
Video games, however, don’t have the luxury of an uninformed laity. Participants (gamers, if you must) are by definition forced to interact with the game on a level that the game defines. The requirement is much more than ‘sit in a chair and possess at least two senses’. Gamers develop a literacy within a particular game’s environment that allows for fairly informed & objective analysis of the game in question.
That’s just a bit of nonsense that I’ve wanted to write in a blog post about video games for a while. Now that that’s over with: