When you wish upon a star

http://imagineerebirth.blogspot.com/2007/04/one-of-our-dinosaurs-is-missing.html

The link above is one of the most intelligent and disheartening posts I’ve ever seen.

I make no qualms about it that I think the Best Animated Picture is a complete farce. It was created by the MPAA because Beauty and the Beast came damn close to winning the Academy Award Best Picture. No lie. Look it up. A decent, artistic movie came along. It’s not my favorite Disney, but it is intensely beautiful and a hell of a fairy tale and any daughter or son of mine will grow up in a world where something like that magic exists on a bookshelf they can reach. But it’s not film. Not really, and this attitude will hold it back in this hemisphere long after South Park, The Simpsons, and Pixar thrash around this generation, challenging our assertions about what a cartoon is and does. Anime does this too, but as I’ve noted before they view animation on an entirely different level than we do. Attitudes change, and they will change slowly, but the ultimate prize of acclaim is officially off limits. Can’t happen. It’s not that an animated movie couldn’t be the best of the year, it’s just that officially it can never be.

When Ratatouille wins Best Picture, know that it simply is not being allowed to compete with No Country for Old Men or Juno or There Will Be Blood because it’s animated. Not because it’s less of a movie, but because of how it was created.

In video gaming, thus far, we have not reached this point, and that is reason enough to hope. So far, we don’t have to have that fear. This generation of gamers have embraced Guitar Hero so fervently, and Rock Band so feverishly, that games have changed. Where once something like Pa Rappa the Rappa seemed cute, the idea of a music game with a controller seems like slumming it.

What can gamers do? You can support change and reward quality, not name brands. Rewarding Sega for the latest stool they’ve squatted out with a Sonic brand, not good.

I’m thinking about this today because Metacritic just angered a shitbrick out of the chairman of EA, and it made the real world news of the Associated Press. Not because EA had a bad profiting year. It had an amazingly profitable year. It’s because games scores are down for the company.

And I like this man. He realizes something you don’t get in movies, that you don’t even get in music. He gets that before you begin to lose money, you begin to lose quality. That’s what goes first, then your marketshare drops out And it angered the shit out of him. Understanding the consumer, as well as the critics, is going to be an obsession for the game world, simply because they have to control quality AND volume.

And friends, that is, quite literally, where we come in.