Jeffrey Yohalem Speaks Using Only His Asshole

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/05/far-cry-3-and-the-stranger-in-a-strange-land/

A lot of people have their idea of the perfect game, or they have a favorite genre, or maybe they just prefer real-time combat over turn-based in their RPGs. That's your thing. Your bag. Your whatever. That's okay. You're a unique, little snowflake and when it comes to what you like to play and (most importantly) why you like to play it, you're going to have your own opinions. Gamers are no longer a collection of people who almost unanimously played Super Mario Bros 2 (seriously, talk to anyone my age. We all played exactly the same shit). There's more variety, now; along with a lot more opinions on what makes for a good game.

So if you come across some dude playing Minecraft and you think he's wasting his time because you played Minecraft once and thought it was pointless, please recognize that you haven't come down from a mountain with stone tablets that say, "Minecraft is shit."
What you are witnessing is a gamer who plays video games for reasons different than yourself. That's a good thing. People with different opinions are interesting precisely because they're not like you.

Of course, if you're a gamer, I can give you a free pass on this one. Go troll a forum. It's your right.
And if it isn't your right, then just know that's where I set the bar on my community. I don't expect anything better than a sea of people screaming about the one true game. My bar is very low.



But if you're in the industry? Fuck you. Get your shit together.


“Another thing that’s a problem in this industry is the focus on meaningful choices. I think it’s a dead end. If you’re working all day and you’re making choices in your life, it’s not interesting to be like, ‘do I save my family or do I climb up this building’. That’s exhausting, that’s not entertainment.” - Jeffrey Yohalem



The industry doesn't have a problem. Nobody is driving sixteen-wheelers full of E.T. cartridges to a landfill. Activision's CEO isn't jumping out of a window. Why the hell are there so many people who think they know what the problem with the industry is? And why are most of them writers for major game development studios? More than one philosophy of game design can exist in this universe. Video games are not Highlander.


The fact that Jeffrey is a writer probably compounds my annoyance, and it doesn't help that the guy is intelligent. I don't mind when a dumbass gets things wrong, but this guy spends the rest of the interview making a lot of interesting, solid points on his craft.
Except for that bit about movies and how the forefathers of film were all artists with vision, and only now are video games beginning to ask the right questions and branch out to become meaningful. I've been hearing that shit for ten years, now; and I'll still be hearing it for another ten years. It's incredibly conceited.


Oh, and I should also probably mention that I'm butt-hurt about how Far Cry 3 is looking to be a serious departure from Far Cry 2. That's probably a factor that helped spawn this post.


And... There's also the possibility that Jeffrey was trolling on Kotaku. He seems like a high-concept sort of guy.