First of all, I learned a lot from this great talk. I see lots of observations in this talk. I am from China. As we know, the pirate problem in game industry is very serious. As a potential game designer, I think a lot about the game industry in China. Actually, pirate problem is destroying the local game industry. It’s very hard to earn money from offline game in China. Some video game devices like PS3, PSP is not official sold in China. It’s unfortunately of the Chinese game industry. So it’s very hard for us to get opportunity to play some very good games like MGS4. I played MSG4 before, I like MSG4 very much. MSG4 is different from other games I played before. I spend more than 50 hours. There is a very successful element in MSG4—- the difficulty of setting. We can find this setting in other successful games like WOW, MHP2G. This setting make player spent more time on the game. After you finish easy model, you can challenge yourself on hard model. We spent more than 100 dollars on MSG4. IF you finish all the models, it may cost you more than 100 hours. One dollar per hour is ok for me.

As a thought experiment it’s a good talk, but I don’t really see a conclusion or resolution here. I felt like it really needed some sort of persuasive argument towards the end.

Anyway, games are games are games. AFAICT, he belief that they’re some basement subculture is a myth stuck in the heads of us classic gamers, left over from the NES days. Sure, people still don’t see it for the dramatic and transformative medium that you and I do, but that’ll change as we get greater and greater market exposure.

In only 2 and a half decades we went from a pixellated gorilla throwing barrels at a generic red-suited Jump Man to Shadow of the Colossus.

Why should games be expected to be longer than movies, etc.? Because I pay nine times the price for a game than I do a movie ticket.

And as for broad appeal: games will never have it. There are millions of people that refuse to read a book because it requires effort on their part. Games fundamentally require more effort, albeit with more immediate rewards. They’ll never have the broad appeal of zero-effort TV or movies.

I honestly feel that with the current indie scene and some of the landmark games of this millennium, games are on the right path. Now if only we could get the big developers’ costs back to a place where they’ll work on more than just first-person shooters.