Tuesday 13 July 2010

Who have i forgotten?

After the death of Harvey Pekar  and the sadness and tributes which have flowed (and rightly so) to him from the comics community it has made me wondering if gaming has any such unsung heroes.
The medium is so young that few practitioners have been active more than a decade or so and much of the specialist medias coverage focuses on commercial successful designers.

It feels the legacy of people like Miyamoto is assured, his contribution to gaming remembered every time Mario appears.
Its good to see now that far greater efforts are being made to catalog and preserve the source code of games and the hardware they have been played on but much of the progress made here seem to be undermined by commercial interests.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and its sequel could turn out to have been breakthrough titles in terms of cultural and commercial success, but with the fallout of the Infinity Ward's mass staff exodus it feels unlikely that much information concerning its production will ever see the light of day. This secrecy seems to affect small studios just as badly as big ones certainly compared to other media .

I have some anxiety that we too early in the mediums growth to have scholars who can speak with the necessary authority to highlight and bring to prominence those who would slip between the cracks of mainstream gaming media's coverage.

So who have i forgotten?

Well the problem is i'm in no position to know, and until the game industry operates with greater transparency the number of people who might be able to shed some light on the question will remain low.

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