Breakin’ The Law, er, Mold

What is innovation?

Is it the way we control our on-screen avatars? Is it the fleeting feeling of having never performed a singular task before? More simply, could it just be a character or concept that has never seen the light of day? Arguments for what constitutes innovation vary from person to person. It’s a fluid concept that can’t quite be pinned down using regular variables and terms of expression.

Secondly, is innovation synonymous with good titles? It must be. That’s why a good portion of the Wii’s titles are receiving mediocre reviews despite some staggering sales number for the system itself. We all know that waggling a remote in front of a sensor bar is THE premier innovative experience of the century. It just doesn’t get any better than that! Right? Honestly, I can think of nothing more fun than shaking what my mother gave me in front of my television, pretending I’m hula hooping. Sure, I could just grab a regular hula hoop. But this is new and innovative. It’s surely the best of what gaming has to offer me. I enjoy shoddily-made platformers that force me to use a wireless controller and a small analog nub at the same time just to manipulate the camera. Because it’s new.

I look around and what I observe around me in the gaming industry is a startling amount of persuasions that believe some very preposterous things: if a title does not contain innovative material or break the mold somehow, it must not be worth their time. It’s a shame that this seems to be the mentality of an alarming amount of the populace, as there is a plentiful amount of fantastic games that have been released in just this past year alone that dazzled in the areas they set out to perform well in. Somehow gaming has turned into a hobby where only the ”new” and “captivating” will flourish as far as critics are concerned. If it brings nothing new to the table, then it must be ignored completely, or passed off as a completely broken and uninspired piece of crap.

Where critics gushed over Jonathan Blow’s side-scroller Braid, I downloaded the title and found it to be nothing more than a pretty side-scroller with time manipulation that I’d seen before. And before you assume that I just don’t “get it” or haven’t experienced its “magic,” I’ve heard all of the theories about what’s actually going on with Tim and the princess. Done my research, which is what prompted me to download the game in the first place. While they sounded like entertaining concepts, playing through to discover such secrets just didn’t interest me. A few areas in, and I found that it was no more different than the thousands of platformers I’ve seen in my 17 years of gaming.  But it was pretty, and it was pretentious.  And these days, that’s enough. Not to argue the fact that Braid’s central concept could not be classified as “art”–I just didn’t enjoy it enough to stick around and see what all the fuss was about.

Maybe it’s just me, but I promptly rid myself of Braid and went back to playing Every Extend Extra Extreme. Having already been a fan of the flash and PSP incarnations prior, I found it to be just as fun as Braid, and quite possibly more innovative in that I have not seen as many similar games, at least not in the exact same vein.

Even then, who cares?

The music we listen to has been heavily influenced by countless other artists and ideas, and chances are that amazing new song you’re hooked on has been done somewhere else before, and better. It’s the same philosophy with movies. Let’s look at the wildly popular Twilight books and the movie for example. It has to be one of the most popular franchises out there at the moment, especially with the younger crowds. What is it doing that Anne Rice hasn’t already teabagged multiple times while making out with her fistfuls of cash? The “deep” teens who eat up that sort of thing are satisfied. It’s “good” in terms of popularity. People enjoy it. But it does nothing we haven’t seen before.

So what’s wrong with enjoying, say, Call of Duty: World at War? After recently reviewing it and giving it a relatively higher score than the “important” bloggers, I’ve gotten many of the immature comments that people like to toss out when they don’t agree. You’re right. It’s exactly like Call of Duty 4. It does virtually nothing different. Does that instantly place it in the same category as ET and Superman 64? No. The game aims to be a reasonably entertaining World War II shooter, and it does just that. The public continues to eat Mario titles up, yet critics yearn for newer, more interesting concepts.

Whatever happened to simply enjoying a game for what it is? Has gaming become THAT much of a society for elitist pricks that we must nitpick at every single purchase we make because it isn’t pushing forward? If we don’t praise the titles that fulfil the requirements of the genres that we currently follow and exalt, then how will we even be able to recognize what pushes the boundaries?

With that said, I’m off to play Spider Man: Web of Shadows. Why? Take a deep breath–it’s fun.