Both AAA games and social games have no soul

[Michaël Samyn]

Leigh Alexander points out the absurdity of the rivalry between AAA games developers and social games developers and demonstrates how similar they are. And how they both lack soul.

Reminded me of a blog post I made two years ago (when social games were still called casual games).

[Thomas]

Leigh's article was quite nice, and had not seen your blog before. Nicely written too!

It is quite fun, how people can look down on "casual" games when their own games is just as "soulless". It almost feels like the rise of facebook games and similar show the hardcore videogames their true face. And they are now kicking back, trying to protect their worldview of them as the "true" usage of the medium.

[Michaël Samyn]

There's a saying in Dutch: "When two dogs fight over a bone, a third dogs takes it and runs away." Maybe Notgames can be that "third dog"!

[QXD-me]

I think social games are easier to accuse of not having soul because the game world is so abstracted (I mean that you seem very far away from the worlds surface). You're interactions are limited to clicking buttons and I think lack of animation makes them seem almost 'too static' to be alive (note: I don't play any social games so this may not even be the case). Although often maistream videogames of yore were like this too so it seems weird that the divide exists.

Obviously most AAA titles aren't much better, either lacking a coherent design or being a derrivative of what's been done many times before, thanks to being made by so many people. It's like someone's taken a huge scoop out of the general ideas of the masses and dolloped it up onto a plate. It's all a bit too 'meh' and impersonal to be interesting (with some exceptions).

[God at play]

Obviously most AAA titles aren't much better, either lacking a coherent design or being a derrivative of what's been done many times before, thanks to being made by so many people. It's like someone's taken a huge scoop out of the general ideas of the masses and dolloped it up onto a plate. It's all a bit too 'meh' and impersonal to be interesting (with some exceptions).

It sounds like you are describing gruel.  AAA games are gruel.