Letters To The Editor: McLuhan, Museums and Merchant Ivory

Gamasutra has recently had further interesting feedback to some of our notable features and opinion pieces, as collected through our Letters to the Editor, so here's the newest weekly roundup, with some of the reactions you might have missed. Click through on each link (free reg. req.) for the full Letter. First off, regarding sister site Game Career Guide's last installment of its variously-angled Katamari Damacy critique feature, Johan H. W. Basberg writes in to say: "The author writes that "the father is doing the manliest of things – exploring space in his phallic rocket." And that the Prince is "rolling around a gigantic ball". Why does both of these observations indicate a "male-centric game" design? If the space exploration was done by the queen, and the space ship looked like the female sexual organ, would that change anything? And I know I miss the point, but that is exactly it. The game plays with the cliches and stereotypes of our time, and applies a layer of irony and sarcasm so thick there is no way to take it seriously." As expected, the majority of the other letters still continue to pertain to Ernest Adams' "high brow" follow-up feature. Anni Garza Lau notes that when games are approached as marketable objects rather than media that can communicate, there can be only one outcome, especially without a new funding model: "Of course, when a videogame is conceived as a product, the producers (I mean this for the giant companies) are mainly interested in the games to be very saleable, so give the public what they ask for. We may consider is very hard for one person, or even a group of people to develop a whole videogame without economical support; probably is time to begin the making of working teams with qualified people who share this same vision and start looking for investment in this project, Who will provide the money? Those interested in arts, technologic research, new medias or perhaps a combination of all." Maurer Sophie makes a similar point from a different perspective, saying: "Well as far as I can tell from my experience as architect: personal stardom does not help the big mass of workers (here architects). People (clients) tend to get emotional about a Guggenheim from Frank O. Gehry (and even this masterpiece is known by far less people than architects like to believe) but then go and by some prefab chain fabricated house. Not every architect is allowed to build even one museum during a lifetime." And Ryan FitzGerald follows that same commercial line when he laments the general overlooking of more artistic output such as the playable reinterpretation of Nick Bantock's Griffin and Sabine books for more easily-digestible product: "Again, I agree with Ernst's criteria, but I think he may have included one point of criteria without conscious recognition -- commercial success. If you only look for highbrow media from the offerings published by the usual vendors and promoted in the usual way, don't be surprised if your search comes up empty. If you're truly comparing highbrow games to Merchant Ivory, you wouldn't be able to turn the argument around and say cinema lacks highbrow films if you're only looking for at a Star Trek convention." For more reactions to be read and responded to, including a defense of Ico and high praise for the high-brow Total War series, visit our letters page.