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David Cage… Speaking truth to power or an example of Heavy Hypocrisy?
Ah, yeah, my remark about older people wasn’t as nuanced as it might have been. I edited that part several times, and it appears to have come out wrong, but still. I absolutely don’t deny that there aren’t any older people playing games or that all people above a certain age lose all interest in anything new, but the tendency is there that people are less attracted to and more wary of stuff they didn’t grow up with and stick more to what they already know.
But now that I’ve said this I’m starting to wonder whether this is really true (in a general way, so taking into account that there are always exceptions to the rule
). There might also be other barriers that make it easier for people that grew up with games to still game as they become older but prevent people that didn’t from trying it out. The portrayal of the medium by the media, for example, or the idea that games are for children.
I started using a computer and playing games 15 years, when I was 50. I think it’s more inclination and ability rather than age.
“Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.” -Bill Watterson
Cage keynote topic turned into interpersonal gaming conflict.
I agree entirely Lady Kestrel!
I’ve just watched David Cage’s speech - while he tries to come across as passionate I found most of what he had to say ill-concieved!
‘Peter Pan syndrome’ - video games refuse to grow up??? While he admits the graphics have moved on he says that the concepts are closed - does everyone playing a game need a concept?? (I personally do but accept that other players don’t!)
He talks about games not being connected to our reality - excuse me! I play games to escape reality - if I wanted reality I’d watch every soap opera under the sun instead of playing games!
He talks about having the same audience for 40 years - oh pleease, with the advent of mobile devices & younger people taking an interest I’m sure that’s not true!
He talks about lack of innovation to reach a wider audience - IMO that’s down to the gaming press!
I agree that older people are an untapped market - I don’t think it’s because there aren’t games to appeal but again down to the gaming press & where they advertise & the need for an expensive piece of equipment (even at budget prices) to play them on!
He talks about making games for all audiences including older people/adults - has he actually heard of Adventure Games as I think there’s enough variety of games to cater for all! He mentioned Indigo Prophecy which I thought was very good but also VERY HARD & David mentioned he was not interested in games that were too fast!
He goes on about the importance of meaning - the fact of the matter is that for some players the story doesn’t matter that much & doesn’t need a meaning! David says that human relationships should be in our world - the fact is that they ARE in some ADVENTURE GAMES!
He talks about games being accessible & not how fast players can move their thumbs - has anyone played Fahrenheit?
He’s a complete name-dropper & mentioned David Bowie etc - yes, outside creative input may help. He’s advocating relationships with Hollywood for the story-telling aspect - IMO AGs don’t need to link up with Hollywood for good stories & just need either a talented contact or story-teller on the development team.
He talks about ‘Changing our relationship with Censorship’ in regards to the inclusion of violence/sex scenes. IMO it doesn’t need to be changed as there is already too much of that interactive stuff in games already - watching in a film & ‘participating in/advocating’ in game where you’re more involved is a lot different.
He talks about the raise of digital entertainment to focus on a journey & not on a challenge - where is he at??? Everyone’s different, some people want a journey &/or a challenge but in the greater scheme of things most gamers (non AG players) just like the challenge - just accept! Personally I hope that handheld devices (not bought specifically for playing games on) will come to be the saviour of the AG genre!
I appreciate David Cage trying to make a difference with his speech but I got the impression that he was talking to consol players & never mentioned Adventure Games once!
Wow Lead Voiceactor of LastofUs and BSInfinite ain’t happy with Cage.
Dear David Cage, Congratulations on finally coming out of your coma. Unfortunately you weren’t brought up to speed before your talk at #DICE
David Cage basically took a 26 minute shit of unenlightened rhetoric on the entire video game industry at #DICE
I’m saddened by his comments. How dare he make blanket statements about developers not being innovative.
https://twitter.com/TroyBakerVA
Maybe he’s right that the games in the charts are immature, but why should I care about that? It’s like complaining that bestseller lists for books is made up of Harry Potter books and teen romance novels, or vapid historical/crime thrillers. A lot of kids and adolescents play games, for fun. Some people play them just to pass the time, like they would a crossword puzzle. And others play them for a mature and intellectually challenging experience.
What would a mature gaming industry look like? Ask the people who don’t want that. To use a movie analogy, if you went about converting all the movies in cinemas to mature adult films you won’t achieve anything except excluding a large segment of the audience.
He talks about the raise of digital entertainment to focus on a journey & not on a challenge - where is he at??? Everyone’s different, some people want a journey &/or a challenge but in the greater scheme of things most gamers (non AG players) just like the challenge - just accept! Personally I hope that handheld devices (not bought specifically for playing games on) will come to be the saviour of the AG genre!
I’m also trying to figure out what he means. Why can’t we do both journey and challenge?
Wow, Cage has a pretty big ego. 
At 16:29 he says “My next game…”, usually leaders of a studio say “Our next game…”
Anticipating:The Devil’s Men
Recently played:GK1 Remake (4), A Golden Wake (3), Child of Light (4) Memento Mori 2 (4) Face Noir (3.5) Tex Murphy: Tesla Effect (4) Blackwell Epiphany (4.5),Broken Sword 5(4.5), The Shivah Remake (4.5), Monkey Island 2 Remake (4.5)
Top 10 Adventure Games:Tex Murphy: Pandora Directive, Gabriel Knight:The Beast Within, Broken Sword:Shadow of the Templars, Gabriel Knight:Sins of the Fathers, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon, Lost Horizon, Grim Fandago, The Longest Journey, Blackwell Epiphany
Seems like a perfectly reasonable presentation to me. Of course there’s very little nuance; speeches like this simply don’t allow for much beyond pointed generalizations. If you have to carefully excuse all the exceptions to every rule and disclaimer the crap out of everything you say, you’d put everyone to sleep and end up taking forever to say nothing. And yes, there’s likely to be some hyperbole in there to emphasize a point. A speech isn’t meant to be broken down and criticized line-by-out-of-context-line. Overall, I’d say Cage makes a lot of sense.
Slamming the man for not being good at what he’s urging others to do is a classic ad hominem. Just because he hasn’t yet succeeded at his own goals doesn’t make the argument wrong. No one can deny he’s at least making the effort. That’s all anyone can do; he’s just asking for more people to join him.
It always annoys me when people start pontificating about what “the industry” should or should not do. Especially when all they have to say is “the world would be so much better if you all did mature stuff like I do, instead of the immature crap you’ve been doing for so long” (whatever the words “mature” and “immature” are supposed to mean). It just comes across as smug—or jealous of other people’s success.
Cage should make the games he wants to make and stop caring about what other people are doing. If other people enjoy making and/or playing shooters, that doesn’t make them “wrong” or “inferior” or “bad for the industry”.
I’m sure 99.9% of the time he is focused on making the games he wants to make. When asked to give a speech, he’s obviously going to share his vision.
In no way did he say that any type of current game is bad or wrong or inferior. (EDIT: Okay, except for the “if you buy crap, you’ll get more crap” line, but I think we can all agree there IS lots of crap foisted on us regularly.) He also didn’t remotely say that ALL games should be made differently. In fact, he specifically stated that there will always be great games of the type we already enjoy, and that’s all well and good. All he’s saying is that the industry as a whole needs to broaden, deepen its scope with more, different sorts of games that reach different people and pursue different goals. That’s maturing.
What would a mature gaming industry look like? Ask the people who don’t want that. To use a movie analogy, if you went about converting all the movies in cinemas to mature adult films you won’t achieve anything except excluding a large segment of the audience.
Everyone should want a more mature gaming industry, because that would mean greater CHOICE. Again, he is clearly not saying every game should be made in the image of the great god Cage. He just wants more developers to experiment, more publishers to support diversity, more press to be intelligently analytical, more gamers to demand more than what we get.
I get that adventure gamers might feel snubbed by the speech, because of all the genres adventures probably come closest to the kinds of ideals he’s espousing. But really we should be behind what he’s saying. In a more mature industry, maybe adventures wouldn’t be the poor man’s genre struggling to tell decent stories because they’re hamstrung by tiny budgets and niche markets. I wonder what Jane Jensen could do with a multi-million dollar budget. Or Martin Gantefohr or Dave Gilbert or [name your favourite adventure game designer here]. It’s not all about money, of course, but Cage is promoting an industry that actually embraces the kinds of games we love. Hard to argue the logic in that.
If people are bothered by this speech, you’ll probably be equally pissed off by my upcoming editorial. 
Not quite the same topic, but not altogether different.
Slamming the man for not being good at what he’s urging others to do is a classic ad hominem. Just because he hasn’t yet succeeded at his own goals doesn’t make the argument wrong. No one can deny he’s at least making the effort. That’s all anyone can do; he’s just asking for more people to join him.
It’s not an ad hominem in this case as his own games are the only specific examples he gives of this pursuit of maturity he is talking about. If you question the maturity and ambition of Cage’s games, you question the definitions of maturity and creative ambition used in his arguments. And if you ignore the content of Cage’s games, it’s absolutely not clear what he is talking about. There’s simply no more context to work on. Other ideas that he connects his vision of “digital entertainment” to - like “Hollywood” and “mainstream” - are too vague and general (even if provocative) to base a discussion on.
I have no problem with Cage slamming other games and designers to provoke them to do something different. I agree that most games target the childish aspects of our psyche (not that they shouldn’t be cherished). The same is true for blockbuster movies and most of the mainstream entertainment in general. I like calls for more connection to reality and more intellectual complexity in entertainment. But I think Cage represents those ideas very poorly and I have doubts about his motives too.
www.hardydev.com - blogging about indie and underground adventures
If anyone can’t see how Cage’s games at least make an effort to break free of typical industry conventions, both thematically and structurally, they really aren’t trying very hard. If you can name more than a small handful of games that are similar to Fahrenheit or Heavy Rain, the comparison will probably be pretty superficial. And how many of those are AAA titles, which is the primary focus of his speech?
Do you really have difficulty envisioning the kinds of games he’s promoting? Hell, we already get several of them a year as adventure gamers. He’s just suggesting that the industry grow up and make those sorts of efforts more mainstream, and continue to push the boundaries further still.
I believe he also noted Journey as an example of the sort of thing he’s talking about, by the way.
I have respect for David Cage’s continued ability to make his niche titles into big expensive mainstream blockbusters, I have no idea how he continually gets the funding or technology to do it but he’s managed to make some incredibly unique games on a very large scale.
That being said, I also think David Cage is one of the key factors in the video game world’s continued suspended state of arrested development. As someone who has literally grown up and matured alongside games, it’s not hard for me to notice how little Quantic Dream’s games have evolved over the past 14 years. I’ve witnessed the Grand Theft Auto series go from crass over-the-top silliness into multi-protagonist morality plays and yet Quantic Dream’s games continue to have the same exact problems: scripts on par with cheap direct-to-video movies, ludicrous plot twists, pointless nudity or sex added solely to appear more “mature”; David Cage’s ambitions are admirable but he represents some of the worst traits of game design, that one man can do everything (for the love of god David, don’t write your scripts!) and that you have to basically make your game into a movie for it to appear cinematic. If you give yourself a “directed by” credit, I don’t know if you’re really all that interested in the art of game design.
However, the point he makes about focusing on the journey rather than the challenge is important. Games like Journey, To the Moon and The Walking Dead are taking this approach and are making a significant impact on the people who play them while also causing resentment amongst people who want challenge. The final question from me would be - what does a grown up gaming industry look like to you?Its been discussed on Neogaf. I am huge fan of David, his game Omikron
was one of my favorites, very ambitious, i also liked him for un orthodox approach
towards gaming untill recently he has found home in interactive Movies, which i hope
evolve in his next game Beyond. His apporach and ideas are product of his age
more than his undertanding of medium itself, he himself has admitted that story and
games should be personal and reflect the maker in some way.I don’t have issues with it as long has its not the dominating genre. Mature industry is
one where there is no Black and White, no forced opinions by etiher Cage mentioned in this note or the other mentioned by Warren Spector in his keynote, he bashed violent games and Lollipop Chainsaw, mature industry should not be saturated with samey ideas and should not be forcing each other or rally some fixed approach, not even criticize others destuctively. It seems all these mature developers are just frustrated with each other approach.Last of Us is step in right direction, survival horror , challenging conventions of mass shooter mainstream that made Deadspace3 a joke.
Similar theme like walking dead but cinematic mix of gameplay, AI and cutscenes and active cinematics unlike walk in the park with invisible walls of TWD.
One hit kills. The game abandons Uncharted approach and gives challenge of some kind, the one hit kill will also bring fear of death, one of few mainstream titles i am willing to play in Hard.
Another NeoGAF citizen? Nice to see you here!
Cage’s recent comments, at least some of them, had me a bit frustrated because he wants such parity between movies and video games. He thinks he is writing for the movies. However, I’ve really enjoyed his games, especially Heavy Rain. Some aspects of it I wish were better (voice acting was bad, but that is a criticism of his directorial skills). Overall though, I agree with his point that there needs to be a reaching attempt to a wider audience; and yes, to a more diverse audience that doesn’t come from pandering. I’m torn on Cage sometimes, and I hope Beyond really brings new questions to the discussion.
... you’d put everyone to sleep and end up taking forever to say nothing.
That was what i really thought was the main problem, that he didn’t really say anything.
IMO his speech was a mix of self-evident truths, and things that have already been said or done before. And in the few places where it could have been interesting, he was far too vague.
Okay perhaps you have a point, perhaps we shouldn’t be overly critical, and simply accept the speech for what it was, after all we weren’t that main target for this speech. Thruth be told, if it wasn’t for this thread, i would pretty much just have ignored it.
You have to play the game, to find out why you are playing the game! - eXistenZ
I like Quantic Dream but that was painful to watch.
That top 30 games moment made no sense. Nintendo games = kids games? Did he really said that or did I misinterpreted? What year is this? The number one game on that list has the most diverse audience possible.
The rock paper shotgun article is mostly spot on.
However, I do hope publishers believe this fund and fund more big budget adventure games.
If anyone can’t see how Cage’s games at least make an effort to break free of typical industry conventions, both thematically and structurally, they really aren’t trying very hard. If you can name more than a small handful of games that are similar to Fahrenheit or Heavy Rain, the comparison will probably be pretty superficial. And how many of those are AAA titles, which is the primary focus of his speech?
Do you really have difficulty envisioning the kinds of games he’s promoting? Hell, we already get several of them a year as adventure gamers. He’s just suggesting that the industry grow up and make those sorts of efforts more mainstream, and continue to push the boundaries further still.
I must admit I quite like what YOU are suggesting from your position, but I don’t see it in David Cage’s words and games. Possibly I’m overly put off by how lightly the word “maturity” tends to be used in Cage’s talks (and to be fair - most of game industry talks). I don’t see just tackling the big themes of human life, Hollywood movies and soap operas (i.e. love and death) as a sufficient indication of (even) striving for maturity. And that it should be considered so, is the most sense I could make out of Cage’s call. It’s a call that brings restrictions to what is worth to be considered a mature interest. To me reaching for more abstract, mundane and less spectacular themes can be just as mature, if not more. Say, games like The Guild or Spacechem (but I believe game creators could go much farther in this direction).
For what it’s worth, I did love Cage’s Omikron and it had nothing to do with it being more mature than its competition. But what it had was lots of creative ambition, David Bowie and unusual elements like experiencing the death of a character the life of which you followed and surviving it in the form of a “nomad soul”. Ideas like that are what I’d always like to see more of. Games (AAA and otherwise) should not try desperately to be considered more mature, but try to incorporate more topics and innovations in general.
I believe he also noted Journey as an example of the sort of thing he’s talking about, by the way.
I noticed. May it be, because the creator of the Journey was present there in the audience and had his own talk just before, or was that just pure coincidence?
www.hardydev.com - blogging about indie and underground adventures
I’m one of few people who liked Heavy Rain, and I’m a bit of a Cage fan. But this talk… ugh…
I don’t know. I feel his points had more validity a few years ago. I’m also annoyed that he largely ignores indies, many of whom are doing interesting work.
And while his games are generally more interesting than most mainstream fare, I’m still annoyed at how generic some of the plots are. The first half of Fahrenheit was one of the best games I ever played; the second half, one of the worst, and mostly for plot reasons. People who’ve played Fahrenheit probably know the plot twist I’m talking about.
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