Gonna do this thing now:
Brianna Wu said:
I find myself asking what the future of mobile games is. In 2011, when I founded Giant Spacekat, I felt certain the explosion of new, casual gamers would grow in their tastes and eventually desire deeper experiences. I thought that the popularity of Candy Crush was a fad. Now, I’m not so sure.
Brianna Wu said:
Console quality games will continue to come to your phone, like the excellent iOS remake of Indigo Prophecy. But they will be the exception, rather than the rule.
Brianna Wu said:
My soul lies with story-based games, but I admit that I’ve played a lot more Tiny Tower on my phone than Walking Dead. It’s gotten a lot more of my money, too. Form follows function, and the form of the iPhone encourages software with ephemeral, short experiences. Monument Valley, a beautiful iOS masterpiece, was created with a budget of almost a million dollars. While it might be considered one of the deeper experiences on the platform, it’s a streamlined version of Captain Toad for Wii U, a game rightly critiqued as “a bit thin” by console standards.
Wu's viewpoints portray two fundamental flaws.
In Wu's world-view, a game with a deep and persistent storytelling and narrative is king, and meets the metric of "deep." The only problem with this argument - whilst Wu herself is right to cite the Telltale Walking Dead games as a good example of great narrative, her favorites list includes
Indigo Prophecy and
Heavy Rain, which are made by Quantic Dream and have the storytelling capabilities of a half-eaten bag of potato chips.
Yet these games, which are almost universally panned as being bad at storytelling in general, are essentially Quick-Time Event simulators in actual gameplay. This is why almost all of them have done
abysmally in the eyes of the greater public. Wu vociferously defends these, despite Quick-Time Events being considered one of the worst, most over-used things in video gaming today:
Now, it's worth noting that Wu herself is not alone in defending QTEs. Katherine Cross, who many will remember as a Silverstring Media press secretary and one of the fork-and-spoon operators behind Team Anita, has
gone on-record as being totes pro-QTE because it's a part of game design now so stop bitching about it, foolish gamers, but it is notable that Wu herself actually has a reason that's - brace yourselves -
not completely retarded for why she supports them. They're good for narrative-driven gaming, is her argument. So fair enough on the QTE thing. Let's discuss the bigger issue with the David Cage epics, then: Their actual story.
Now, I'm not a complete dick, so I won't write off Wu as having no taste, but let's be fair: David Cage's games are not known for being especially good at storytelling. In most, if not all of the games Quantic Dream has ever shit out, the narrative is completely incoherent,the plot incomprehensible and the execution laughable. The nanosecond that the protagonist of
Indigo Prophecy is being assailed by digital cockroaches when talking to the police and it becomes apparent that machines plan to control the world is the very moment the plot begins shitting the bed and the second the protagonist engages in a matrix-style wire fight and talks with a dead woman is when it's shit the bed so hard that it's punched through the mattress.
But Wu
loves Quantic Dream games. They're so quirky and weird and
emotional. But they
aren't good narrative games, no matter how well she tries to claim they are. There's plenty of games that are narrative-driven and either back this with actual gameplay (why hello thar
Deadly Premoniton), or ones that have no gameplay beyond basic investigative work, but
infinitely better narratives (The
Ace Attorney series comes to mind). Both are regarded as infinitely better at storytelling than Quantic Dream games. You know what else is? The
Souls series. The first four
Silent Hill games. All of these tell their story by essentially
not telling it, and leaving a bread-crumb trail to follow that tells the actual story once everything's pieced together.
Demon's Souls and
Bloodborne do way better at this than the two
Dark Souls games, but the point still stands.
In this regard, Wu's platform of choice - iPhone - comes front and center. Wu doesn't mind games being gameplay-light or even gameplay absent, so she sees QTEs as acceptable forms of gameplay. Meanwhile most people who play video games on
literally every other platform fucking
hate "Press X to Not Die" situations in general. Wu plays mostly mobile games and strategy games, so what she describes as "deep" is a game that's emotionally moving, and
literally nothing else.
A
cursory look at Wu's steam profile shows Wu's taste in games pretty clearly.
Civ V is her favorite by a landslide, with
City of Heroes and
Plants vs Zombies right behind. I think at the core of matters, Wu understands that shitty short games like
Angry Birds and such are going to be the eternal front-runner because nobody, and I mean
nobody buys an phone, tablet, or MP3 player exclusively to game. Nokia kind of proved that with the N-Gage, and that actually had a decent level of first-party support at launch.
Which brings us to this.... Masterpiece of a comment:
Brianna Wu said:
I’ve noticed that when I do play “hardcore” games, I tend to play them on my iPad. XCOM and Vainglory just don’t feel right on a 6 Plus, but I lose hours every time I pick them up on iPad. But most people don’t buy every size and shape of Apple device. They have an iPhone they update every two years, and an iPad in the house they’ll update every three at best.
Wu has no idea how fucking false this is. Apple products are ridiculously overpriced toys and most people openly recognize this. Even people who are fans of Apple products openly say they're too expensive and tend to be feature-light. People I know who bought iPhones
close to a decade ago still uses the
same fucking phones because the upgrade is too goddamned pricey.
Wu, being insanely wealthy, has no understanding whatsoever of the needs of the common man, and cannot, thusly, see why someone would say, buy some $30 LG phone with literally every fucking feature of a comparible iPhone over a ludicrously over-priced feature-crippled Apple device, let alone
multiples of the damned things. Going just by ones she's talked about, Wu owns fucking
every Apple device, including the iPad, multiple iPhones, and the Apple watch. All of her computers are
ludicrously over-priced Macs.
So we have the fact that Wu's favorite games are obstenibly shit storytelling games and her favorite platform is the iPhone. All of this leads us
Revolution 60 itself: essentially the perfect microcosm of Brianna Wu's personal beliefs on video games and narrative. And it doesn't just stop at
Revolution 60 itself, this carries over to how she develops, too: Why is
Revolution 60 solely on IoS?
At first, it's because Wu simply was to Phones what a console warrior is to consoles, but it later became even more amusing when Wu lost her shit after
Google demanded that devs post their business addresses instead of PO Boxes in an effort to fight fraud due to a new law on the books in the EU, something which we can thank the "
do nothing but cost money" app and similar fraudsters for. Wu, of course, made this out to be the case because that mean old Gamergate was after her, and
had chased her from her home don't ya know.
What we can take home from this are four things:
1. Wu luvs narrative games, but
doesn't know good ones from bad.
2.
Wu is a total Apple fanboy.
3. Wu
has no concept of how much things cost.
4.
Wu is a pathological liar.
Wu is Chris. We have come full-circle.