You may be wandering why the name of this blog has been painted all French and what not. It’s a reference to the film journal Cahiers du Cinema, an important, Paris-based publication whose writers revolutionized the way the world watched and interpreted cinema. Now, by no stretch of my feeble little imagination do I have the same aspirations for these articles, especially from my humble, rarely traversed corner of the blogosphere. But mostly I just feel it’s enlightening for the few of you who do read this to be able to add that dash of supplementary spice to your already stellar enthusiasm for this great entertainment medium.
In this debut write-up I wanted to discuss the subject of the games journalist-turned-developer epidemic that’s sweeping gaming (of course, I use the term “epidemic” some what loosely.) I’d been observing the news as names from the journalistic loop quietly evaporated, only to re-appear as condensation hugging the windows of development studios from coast to coast. My interest peaked when my favourite gaming commentator and personality, a bright, young dynamo by the name of Shawn Elliott, left 1UP.com to become a part of 2K Boston. While I was sad to see Shawn go it felt as if his exit was entirely justified by his destination as he would be joining the team who created BioShock, a game I believe was the best of an impressive 2008 line-up. It is, in my humble opinion, a mind-bending marriage of creative talent.
Somewhere around the late 1950s two notable film critics, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, writers for the afformentioned Cahiers du Cinema, set about creating their own little pieces of cinema. Armed with an enthusiasm for mainstream, Hollywood film and the influence of Italian neorealist movies and surrealist art, they debuted their projects to the world. Truffaut was the first with The 400 Blows, and Godard followed him a year later with Breathless. The impact of these two projects, both low in a budget and high on concept, tore the established acceptance of cinema to shreds. These films, among others from the Nouvelle Vague film movement, went on to teach and inspire the likes of Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Robert Altman.
With critical names effecting the video game industry in more and more influential ways, names from the gaming press who are steadily being granted higher positions of power, it is not beyond comprehension to consider that these people couldn’t apply their own observations and understandings of game development. And I mean this way beyond any kind of position of consultation, these men and women plucked from journalism could one day be granted the opportunity to redfine gaming. Of course it’s highly subjective, and there were very likely as many Uwe Bolls as there were Christopher Nolan’s back in 1950s France, but the right minds with the right ideas, being vacummed into an industry they spent so very long observing could just well serve to change the standards we’ve come to accept from video game development.
