Playability
Friday, May 15th, 2009Reading an article about Six Days in Fallujah, the recently canceled title which would have been the first game to be released concurrently with the conflict it featured, I came across this line from oft-cited Gamasutra columnist Ian Bogost:
“We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don’t even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience.”
This had been my problem with Six Days from the start: the gaming business, not to mention its respective media followers, has been so focused on marketing for virtually its entire existence that when titles come along which deserve a deeper perspective, they don’t know what to do with them. Konami, the company behind Six Days, is a big name, which means they’re looking to turn a big profit. And that means pumping the brand, throwing up as much information as possible to break through the nonstop press machine — and assuring gamers that they will enjoy playing the game. It should be simple to fashion a manner of PR that connects without offense, but they blew it by trying to connect “war” with “fun.” Which it apparently is, when it’s a recreated war that was fought by our parents or grandparents, lost on the youth market’s collective memory. But not when it’s happening right now, when we turn off the console and see the caskets coming out of the planes on the news. Then the connection brings fear and outrage from a variety of sources.