Michael Thomsen is one of those pseudo-intellectual douchebags who seem to think that the quality of a review is directly proportional to the number of nonsensical statements in it.
Just look at his piece about Civ 5:
What it lacks is the emotional purpose and irresolvable conflict that cinema, like every emotionally-oriented form that preceded it, leave lingering in my brain. Civ V is the plot of the Godfather, not the dark final moment where Diane Keaton stands in the door of Michael’s office and sees him, surrounded by articulate cretins, looking at her like a stranger. It’s the atmospheric science behind the tornado that destroys the town of Xenia, not the gorging anarchy of Bunny Boy kissing Chloe Sevigny in an above-ground pool in the overcast ruins. It’s a dictionary to interpret the invented foreign tongue in The Silence rather than an encapsulation of the alien mystery of a boy in a cavernous hotel with no way to understand the terrifying artefacts that surround him.
It’s a game without cinema, a logical skeleton without blood and flesh to give it human shape or empathy. It’s history as a series of straight lines whose rate of ascension can be manipulated, but it leaves out the most interesting parts of irrationality and human failing. It’s more a game and less a video game, one that could have existed as easily 1000 years ago as today. That can’t be said of cinema, and the degree to which it resists enhancing itself with cinema’s emotional agency reveals how aging and purposeless the mechanical system has become. Consider it a cultural defeat.
Or New Vegas:
Players don’t have absolute freedom but they are flooded with choices and every available choice has a negative consequence. When you meet Caesar in the latter parts of the game he describes Hegel’s concept of thesis and antithesis: in choosing one argument you essentially define what the counterargument will be. This is the area where artistry and authorship in video games is best embodied.
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I’d started the game as a victim, spent 50 hours inquisitively helping everyone I could, and come to the end as a villainous autocrat. Even looking back now, I can’t see where there was any better way, though there were options upon options to choose otherwise. There is no book I know that better captures that, nor any film. But I don’t need them because now there is Fallout: New Vegas and it is enough of a masterpiece for any medium.
Or Mass Effect 2:
At the end of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking lamented the distance that’s grown between modern science and art. Over the last century, science became a theoretical cloud in which all of the old laws are linked to the mysterious chaos of sub-atomic particles and cosmology, written in a language that might as well be hieroglyphics. Art can’t provide any answers to these murky questions, but it can account for what the eventual answers would mean to us. Mass Effect 2 is a brave and deluded attempt to bridge the gap between science and art. The end result is a beautiful catastrophe, a stolid combination of RPG abstraction with the occasional heat of interpersonal exchange.
Mass Effect 2 is an interactive plunge into the mystery surrounding dark energy, among the most vexingly unknown quantities in modern science. Its name refers to a technology that can harness this invisible energy to make possible space travel and empower sensitive life forms with biotics. While our future selves will be able to manipulate dark energy, its origin will remain a mystery. Or rather, a conspiracy. In the tradition of human paranoia and death anxiety, BioWare has created a version of the galaxy where ancient life forms use this dark energy to regularly siphon precious life force from everyone else, and then retreat into the dark corners of space. It’s like a legion of space devils have decided to spend eternity playing evolutionary whack-a-mole.
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The argument is that it builds empathy with all the characters you’ll eventually expose to deep space death. To fully appreciate the complex personas of all your squad members you’ll need a rich understanding of the worlds and species that affect them. I would argue this is a wholly unnecessary, a relic of writing which only bogs down games. Books are, by nature, an information-poor medium. Complex emotions, ideas, and characters are hard to communicate directly in writing, so books tend towards figurative language that evokes, makes metaphors, and spins interwoven yarns that mirror the complexities an author might want to capture.
