Greg Costikyan is right to want to attack Rockstar for the GTA: Hot Coffee problems. He’s also right to point out that the game is age-restricted:
Moreover, they never ‘peddled’ the game to ‘our youth;’ it’s M-rated, ferchristsake…
It was never marketted as a game for ‘our youth.’
That sound you hear is the arrow narrowly whistling past the target. It’s the right reponse to a wrong argument when the game is an ‘adult’ product. What a lot of people have missed is the simple fact that, age-restricted or not, the general public still believes that ‘games are for kids’. Play is a childish instinct. A game cannot be ‘adult’ because it is a game. As Matt Webb might say (to wildly paraphrase), the very isness of the game vacates the notion of it existing only for adults. But then he’s also tell you that snooker is all about tidying up. He’s close to being right too, except that the magic in snooker is all to do with the magic of the rolling ball.
The snooker player Terry Griffiths went some way to explaining it once.
‘Walk up to a snooker table and I defy you not to roll one of the balls along the baize.
The very isness of a shiny, boldly single coloured ball resting on a felt cloth the exists solely to ensure that the action of rolling takes place with the correct amount of friction, is the fascination with snooker. That’s before I even get started with spin. Off all the flash snooker and pool games, Lightning Pool is my favourite. It’s equal part Sonic coin collection to hi-score style pool and yet it has no mechanism for spin. It needs a mouse gesture to make the game that much more engaging. The real fascination in snooker is watching one of the top players pot and position themselves, time and again.
Whilst the Ashes is being played, it’s also a good time to point out the cricket could do worse that to make a real show of spin. In all the coverage I’ve watched this year, actually catching sight of a ball spinning or swinging as it’s bowled has been close to impossible. Slow the bowlers down, let me see the ball spin. Premiership football has done this very successfully. By all accounts the footballs used these last few season are built purely to swerve and spin. There’s no question that we’ll see goals scored over the course of the next twelve months that will have the replay appearance of a Super-Human kind of spin. They’ll look fantastic on television, from any angle you’ll see the ball dip and swerve.
From adult games to postmodern sports, I need a lie down…