Andre Yoskowitz
7 Mar 2007 19:59
At the recent Game Developers Conference, Chris Hecker, the founder of "Defintion 6", unleashed an attack on the Wii and Nintendo claiming they fail to recognize games as an "art form".
His attack came during the "Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant session". Last year at the same rant session, he attacked the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 for focusing on graphics instead of gameplay. He finished off his 2006 rant by asking "Will Nintendo save us?". Judging by his 2007 rant, the answer to that is "No".
Included in his rant were the following comments: "I have uncovered the secret to Wii manufacturing. The way you manufacture a Wii is you take two GameCubes and some duct tape".
He continues with: "This thing is totally underpowered... This is not about graphics, more polygons, all that kind of crap. What I want to be able to do is spend CPU to make the machine smarter, more interesting and more automatically intelligent.
"It's about interactivity - that is the key differentiator of our art form, and interactivity is about doing something interesting with that input and threading it back to the user. You can't do that with a POS underpowered computer."
Hecker then questioned whether Nintendo cared about games as an "art form".He observed that a simple Google search revealed that the phrase "art form" was found on PlayStation.com 30 times, on Xbox.com 13 times, and a combined 7 times on Wii.com and nintendo.com.
Hecker then took a quote from Zelda creator Eiji Aonuma, "I don't feel that games can necessarily be considered art. There's nothing wrong with that; our goal is just to make games that are fun." His response was: "This is not good enough for people who are leading our industry... If we're going to make games the art from of the 21st century, we need people who care more than just, 'I'm going to make some fun toys."
Hecker concluded his speech by outlining his demands for Nintendo: "Number one: recognise and push games as a serious art form. Number two: make a console that doesn't suck ass."
Source:
Gamesindustry.biz