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Now this is interesting. Warren Spector, acclaimed designer and creator of Deus Ex, was at the DICE convention earlier today where he spoke to a room filled with industry professionals about his career and tastes in gaming. He discussed his lack of interest in “guys who wear armor and swing big swords,” his growing preference for shorter video games, and he also named a game that “should just not be made.” That game was your pick for the best new IP of 2012, Grasshopper Manufacture’s Lollipop Chainsaw.
This isn’t the first time Spector has touched on this. Last year at E3 Spector made his distaste for ultra-violent video games known. “The ultraviolence has to stop,” he told GI.biz.
He obviously isn’t a fan of the style, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s easy to compare it to the controversy the “torture porn” subgenre in films has seen over the years, but where would we be without similarly hyper-violent horror films like Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead? That over-the-top style has a place in gaming, just as it does in films.
What bothers me the most is his specifically calling out a game as one that “should not exist.” That’s a little obnoxious. I think Duke Nukem Forever is a worthless, sexist, and fundamentally broken pile of excrement, but it shoudn’t not exist. This is particularly annoying because the game in question has definite merit, as I covered in my review. It’s gorgeous to look at and is often funny, in a lowbrow way.
He went on to give a well-deserved nod to games like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain for their achievements in storytelling. The former was my pick for game of the year, so I’m all for engaging, well-written stories, but sometimes you just want to jam a chainsaw into a zombie’s crotch and lift upwards until a brilliant rainbow shoots out of its newly bifurcated corpse, am I right?
