As pretentious as Infinite is, part of me supports face authorship. Developers have a hard time making them look more relevant than publishers. There seems to be a need to produce more Miyamotos and Kojimas as it is a crowded industry these days. Although games are very collaborative process I guess it's easier for people to process that one guy is the reason a game exists. Nowadays you just see head developers be there because they happened to be promoted to such a position. Hideo Kojima had such a hard time even letting other people take control the of the MGS series. Which might have to do with japanese work force culture? I have no clue. But it seems complicated.
i buy into auteur theory a whole lot more than i probably should, so i don't disagree with this at all. i think having people who can fill those shoes is good for these sorts of mediums, at least externally, even if there is something somewhat faulty about giving certain loud people a little too much credit. it's remarkably superficial to suggest, but i feel, for example, that kurosawa's movies have a bit more cumulative value when viewed as part of the kurosawa filmography rather than purely on their own individual merits, which are still remarkable. it's good that someone like kurosawa exists, that there is some bar that other people can go out and fail miserably to reach, some known benchmark for how to do it all extremely well. there's something slightly fascist about feeling this way i think, but i feel as though the game industry desperately needs more people like this, some rough equivalent to the sorts of people the other mediums had, the indisputable genius types, the standard that all should really be aiming for. a couple people are like that in games, but it feels like with everybody you need to take bad with good, and generally you will have difficulty having a great number of people agree on who does it all particularly well. i wouldn't expect the names i'd put loosely into this category would be warmly welcomed by most.
i really dug system shock 2, so i wanted to buy into levine as that guy, but i'm just not able to do that after playing his recent works. it worries me that there may exist some lingering thought that bioshock is one of those great industry benchmarks, that unfeeling clusterfucks of unprocessed controversy is what we have to look forward to. i guess it rubs me the wrong way when he does something fairly cheap and unnatural like this to try justifying this status, even in some small part, though that's probably a byproduct of my fear that he's actually earning this place with a lot of people. worked really bad contextually, though, laboring through a game that doesn't seem to have anything of note to say, that still had time for the self-proclaimed lead to highlight himself, literally breaking the character and tone of the work, to show off one of his irrelevant home movies. he's lost me, unfortunately. the more i learn about levine the more i have come to see him as a man whose ego stands taller than any of his convictions.
i'm not entirely sure if i have responded to your statement, or just elaborated on why i had such a huge bug up my ass over levine's stupid face in the credits. maybe there is no difference? i think more likely i've taken this into an uncomfortably pretentious direction and should attempt to cut my losses, or risk further reducing my forum street-cred. i'll just say that it's nice that two strangers can travel through the cosmos to an intersecting point long enough to throw nicely-formulated sentences at each other. cheers.
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