Badass Digest Out-Geeks "Re-Take," Again

Episode 69 is in the can and awaiting a release date (you'll find out right after I do), but it's not a spoiler to reveal that I'm going one more round with "Re-Take Mass Effect" in light of EA/BioWare's decision to attempt placating them* with "story-expanding" free DLC. I'm glad I finished it up last night, because I probably would've felt compelled to scrap my plans in a fit of "what else can I POSSIBLY add after this!?" envy and defeat after reading today's piece by Badass Digest's Devin Faraci. B.A.D. should be a daily stop for geeks and film buffs anyway, but this was a real (if SPOILER-Y!) treat.

The argument itself isn't necessarily "new;" Devin mostly laments the degradation of fandom from loving a work(s) of fiction so much that lore-obsessing and continuity gaffe "a-ha!-ing" became a fun communal game into the obsession=ownership entitlement mentality that leads people to treat - without a HINT of irony! - an ending you didn't like as a consumer-rights issue.

What I like best is that he grounds his opinion in proper historical context; not only via a pretty terrific uber-geeky Tolkien reference but with heavy reference to fanboy founding-father Philip Jose Farmer, who's not only one of the more interesting scifi/fantasy authors largely forgotten by modern audiences but also more-or-less the inventor of Professional Fan-Fiction. That kind of broad perspective is sorely lacking in a lot of the games-as-art discussion, and one of the reasons for the curious phenomenon that so much interesting games journalism pieces recently have come from folks who usually write/work in different mediums.

For some reason I've never comprehended (this is expanded upon in Episode 69, incidentally) it's considered verboten in some gaming circles to draw critical or artistic paralells between games and any other media - as though the fact that some cursory interactivity and/or player-input renders video games so incomprehensibly different from movies, books, etc that the comparison is utterly unwarranted.

In any case, read the column. Agree or disagree, I think it's an important addition to the discussion.



*Speaking of "placating," if you haven't see "Cabin In The Woods" yet, you're missing out on probably the most brutally honest piece of commentary about the fandom/creator relationship to be filmmed in a good long while. I won't say anything beyond that, other than that you really do need to see that movie - it's AMAZING.