You have an interesting point about games not having the critical or creative vocabulary that they need yet, and it almost feels like we're in a chicken-egg loop here. Can't elevate discussion above the juvenile without the proper vocabulary of critique or language of game design being somewhat more coalesced than it is just yet, but you can't easily develop that terminology unless there're enough people willing to have discourse about the medium as more than a child's toy. I feel like we're getting there, but I also fear that I may not live long enough to see games widely discussed in an academic capacity.This continues to still be a pervasive problem. It's also part of the reason why the "it's just games, stop being so serious!" line of bullshit persists. Games will never be taken seriously if the people who participate in them can't see them seriously. But even more than that, if what is created and sold to mass audiences can't even make it past the, frankly, low bar of simply being somewhere above juvenile, no audiences outside of people who love and play games will analyze them either. And without that community, a community interested in games for their merits beyond being "just games", games will continue to remain a media that might best be described as infantile.
Video games need vocabulary that they simply do not have yet, and right now most of what it uses is stolen from film, because it has not yet developed a language that allows more creators to break out of filmic confines. A large part of that is because the people who might otherwise see video games as a burgeoning medium instead see it as either unapproachable or not worth the investment required to scrape past all of the sludge video games currently carry with them. Thus, we do not get a better, more developed way of talking about games, or if we do the terms themselves are generic and not unique to games (flow is one of the most often thrown around).
Ludonarrative dissonance is a usable, recognizable term, but also not nearly as penetrable as something like auteur theory, and much more difficult to integrate, whereas the concept of the auteur drew people to it. In spite of the increased use of ludonarrative dissonance, games have not become more aware of the disconnect between the narrative promoted by the play and the narrative promoted outside of it. The narrative outside of play remains filmic in nature, while the narrative of play remains completely separate. And it's difficult to get these sorts of things to change if we still aren't at the level where a larger community of individuals are willing to take and discuss video games and play as being artistic. To do that, we need to be willing to a) be conscious of the sludge in games and b) willing to accept responsibility for how that promotes the media to the larger world.
But maybe that is the issue. Maybe the people who come in and shout about it really do just want them to be toys, enjoying them as eternal 15 year-olds. Even so, it's already clear that many want video games to be something else, something more; and once people see those possibilities and start to moving towards them... well, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. People simply have to learn that it's not just a medium for them anymore. All that anger and vitriol is simply fear of not being catered to, but no media, if it wants to continue to be relevant, can survive like that. It's a self-destructive tendency, where the fan squeezes the work they love into irrelevancy because they refuse to see its flaws or have an open discussion about it.
On the more juvenile front, I know how much you love zettai ryouiki, Morrigan , so I thought you might get a kick out of something I saw the Xenoblade 2 OT that's probably going to make some dudes a little more uncomfortable than they already were within the next week or two.
Can't write it off as a wetsuit when he's wearing armor now. Heck, I think the shorts got shorter. :^) Zettai ryouiki thighboot armor is leaking across the sex divide!
They really, really do. I do wonder how much of it is conscious marketing decisions and how much is a recursive loop of otaku artists pandering to themselves after coming up on art from otaku artists. Perhaps we'll never know.I genuinely think that they aim pretty low a lot of the time and there's no reason to hold them to such low standards