the resigned gamer, everything I hate about the thing I love the most

F.E.A.R.: Reading is fundamental. Also efficient.

Posted by Sir Cucumber at 8:05 AM on Wednesday, September 10, 2008

video game design critique from the resigned gamer, manhunter
I don't read poetry, biographies, or non-fiction essays. I skip forewards, and afterwords, and notes about the type. I'll reach for my DS before a New Yorker or Max's copy of Lucky Jim on any given commute, but that doesn't make me illiterate.

Reading may not be rumble or motion-compatible, multiplayer-enabled in any traditional sense of the word, and you don't even earn achievement points from it, but it remains the fastest way I know to assimilate and comprehend complex strings of data. Except Excel, of course.

Bottom line is I can read quicker than listen, and the quicker I hear what you have to say the quicker I get back to killing people. Bioshock understood this. Why don't you?




okay you get a point for the word "assfuck."
That brings your grand total to...one.

Perhaps listening to a constant string of answering machines in the dark sounded like a good idea on paper, but someone in that brainstorm should have remembered that usually, when video games expect you to put down the controller and, you know, watch, they give you something to look at. So until you've merged FDR's fireside chats with Seaman or made an FPS of Lake Wobegon, lets have some text, okay?