The Mammon Philosophy

MadWorld isn’t out until March, but the developers are already talking sequels. Catch this exchange in an interview at That VideoGame Blog with producer Astushi Inaba:

TVGB: So if this is a big success will you move on to a different title on the Wii or are you thinking about sequels?

AI: Platinum Games has several rights so we’ll be developing something new after this, but if there is a lot of interest in MadWorld then maybe we will make another one.

Not to turn this quote inside out with meanings that aren’t there, but some of the usual suspects are already treating this as a given. What particularly stings is that the news is routinely paired up with a reference to “some of the developers” having been part of the team that brought us Okami, a game much more deserving of a true sequel (not just a Wii-make) than an as-yet untested new property. But even that would be pushing the prognostication envelope too far. Why can’t we ever concentrate on the games that are coming out now? Does the gaming news media machine really devour so much information every day that we can’t sate it with actual titles, forcing the invention of speculative products from thin air to keep the RSS feeds running? Surely someone has another set of panty-shot screens from Street Fighter IV or some more honed rage over allegations of racism in Metroid. (”Samus Aran doesn’t care about Elysians.”)

Of course, I have a vested interest in keeping this sort of Ouija-board reporting down, since I’m generally playing games after they’re released, so perhaps my own editorial bias should be critiqued as well. We’re none of us free from sin.

In the wake of the European Parliament’s Internal Market Committee’s released statement that parents should have a “red button” to disable online games, a prominent Canadian game design philosopher has suggested that even further steps should be taken.

“Your game-obsessed kids need a good spanking,” said Simon Roberts of The Mammon Industry. “Spank ‘em until their cheeks are red.”

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If there’s one problem with today’s games, it’s that the number of large-scale treks greatly outweigh the simpler start-to-finish titles. It seems as if all but the most casual of titles are now packaged with “adventure” or “storyline” modes, sending players on journeys that deliver an overload of information as a balance to the time spent actually playing the game. And woe unto you if you get a game that was designed from the ground up as an adventure: every dungeon (palace, temple, abandoned nuclear missile complex…) has a story, a secret, and a four-minute cutscene detailing its connection to the NPC who oh-so-gently goaded you into visiting it with a series of yes/no questions where the answer was always yes.

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