Games Aren't Numbers

Remember Super Princess Peach? The Mario game for girls? It was made back when Nintendo's was first trying to open up to their female audience, but this particular experiment wound up being pretty embarrassing. It didn't appear that anyone who knew anything about girls was actually involved the production. The game went out of its way to be extremely easy, because girls aren't good at games. The player went shopping in between levels, because girls love to shop. And and my favorite was its new twist in the otherwise typical platforming formula, Peach could switch at will between different kinds of over-the-top emotional outbursts in order to gain special powers, because apparently the most defining girl characteristics are their mood swings. It was almost like it was satirizing the male perspective of girls rather than trying to appeal to them. I imagine some director at Nintendo just wrote up a list of everything his wife does that he can't relate to and put it in the game as a feature, completely missing the point.

I'm getting a deja vu with this recent "games as art" fad. I don't see any reason why games shouldn't be artistic any more than I see don't any reason why games shouldn't appeal to female audiences, but few developers seem to understand art so they just compile a shopping list of tropes to throw in. And if its not the developers then it's the players who have an awful tendency to try finding the "deep" meaning in whatever game they love the most and declaring it as art, once again by missing the point. Bioshock's binary "moral decisions" consisting of either killing a little sister or not killing a little sister were hardly a groundbreaking artistic statements. Just because Braid's graphics look like paintings and it has piano music doesn't automatically make it high art. Worst of all among players is Portal which somehow pushes an insanity button in their brains compelling them to do stuff like this. I'm saying there's no artistic value in these games, but the apparent majority of people supporting it can obviously only recognize art in the most superficial ways.