Killzone 2

In May 2005, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Sony showcased a movie of what they hoped would be a standout title for their then still unavailable Playstation 3 – Killzone 2. It was far beyond anything anyone had ever seen visually and was largely seen as an attempt to spoil Microsoft’s announcement of their new Xbox 360 console a few months earlier.

The movie had the desired effect, with news outlets saturated with the game and Sony’s claim that the movie was running on actual console – a console that wouldn’t be available to the public until November of 2006. This didn’t deter the Sony and Microsoft loyalists from staging a war across the Internet, with those loyal to Sony standing by the Japanese corporation and those loyal to Microsoft noting that if it was running on the console, then why was it only shown as a movie.

By the time of the Playstation 3’s release in November 2006, Sony had admitted that their original movie was actually what they called a ‘target render’. In other words, it wasn’t playable, nor was it representative of the final game, it was simply an illustration of what they were aiming for. Cue more online arguing.

Jump to early 2009, almost 4 years since the movie was shown to the public. The game is finished and released to magazines for review before being shipped to stores and into the hands of an eager public. One of those magazines, Edge, considered by many in the gaming community to be a beacon of intelligent criticism and comment, gives it a final score of 7 out of 10.

This does not go down well. One website - had this to say:

‘[7/10] that is...a...lie. That's right, a lie. Like it or not, opinions exist on a sliding scale, and we're not saying everyone is going to enjoy KZ2, but this review is akin to saying something similar about "The Godfather II" or "Citizen Kane." We all know that [Killzone 2] is one of the best [First Person Shooters] ever made; anyone who knows this industry and has a functioning brain will admit to this. They may not like it, but they will admit to its quality. This is what good reviewers do.’

Game developers, and the wider games community, exist in this strange world full of tribalism and desperate brand loyalty. If you dislike a game for some reason, it can’t be because you just didn’t like the game, it must be because you hold some deep-seated issue about the giant corporation who manufactured the console that enables you to play that game.

For a large section of the people who make up the games community, it isn’t enough that you like and play games, it’s that you like and play the right games. This pattern stretches all the way from the first introduction of computers and consoles from Sega versus Nintendo, with their very different public personas and mascots of Sonic and Mario, to our contemporary Sony versus Microsoft.

It isn’t a new pattern though. Other areas of popular culture have always split into factions. You don’t have to wander far around the Internet to see people deeply in love with individual characters or stories or who hold a grudge against a specific writer or director. The key difference here is that the games community focuses this same level of passion at a much broader target: the chunk of plastic and circuit boards beneath your TV that lets you play the games.

By contrast, it’s difficult to imagine a heated war being waged because two artists used different types of brushes to create something, or because two dancers chose different shoes, or because a film-maker chose a particular camera, but that’s what we see with video games - a focus on the means of experience rather than the experience itself.
Which brings up a question: What do those people who design those experiences, and who see video games as an emerging art form and cultural artefact, worthy of the same level of respect and consideration as others, do in the face of this?

It’s simple - we wait.

As with all new forms, we need time to mature, to crawl out of the cultural ghetto, to properly establish ourselves, to stop being seen as simply consumers of a particular brand who can be bought with hype and style, and to build a community that is critically engaged with the medium.

But until that day comes, and it will, those of us who care just need to ignore the vocal discussions of Sony versus Microsoft versus Nintendo and enjoy our games.