How to save the games industry in 60 seconds flat

Lately, I've been, perhaps, somewhat disenfranchised with video games. I always assumed it was due to my growing interest in film and inability to hold too many interests at once, but there seemed to be very little for me in gaming. The video games media are hounds, the developers fronted by heartless suits and the community overflowing with the ravished and the dumb. All unfair generalisations, but I suppose I just found cinema more welcoming, and as I began to see that, I began to wonder why I continued to follow games as I had before. The list of games I actively wanted to play shrunk to a handful of first-party Nintendo titles. All of these were perhaps a factor, but I do wonder whether the true reasoning is infinitely simpler and infinitely sadder: I like to view video games as an art. While Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time may not necessarily be thought-provokers, they are intricately designed to within an inch of its life. You wouldn't discount van Gough's Sunflowers as art because they're not there to question the human condition: Instead, they celebrate what there is in this world. In the case of video games, they celebrate what there isn't.


The video games industry nowadays is dominated by generic AAA releases. Without pilaging the online store, -Where I'm informed there are more interesting items, thanks to the rebirth of the indie scene- it's hard to come across something that grabs my attention. I'm bored of dark, grimy action games. The only FPS I've ever truly enjoyed is Portal (And it's glorious sequel). Identikit racers? Snore. Every game claims to boast "Exciting new ways to play" and "Fresh gameplay experiences", but oh so rarely do I see them. That's why I took to sticking to Nintendo; I know what I'm getting, and what I'm getting is generally genius.

These feelings only worsen when we hit E3 time of year. Suddenly, for one week of my life, my time is taken up watching greasy besuited weasels splurt the words 'Innovation' and the phrase "For gamers". The artifice of these men's relationships with those they are addressing is as obvious as their toupees, and it hurts. Playstation 4's "For the players" tagline is the absurd pinacle. Who else is it going to be for? it's only an issue because this is an industry dominated by moneymen who want to come across as cool. Seeing as western gaming seems to be taking all its other cues from cinema, it's about time they took a backwards step and let the developers become, as they should be, the creative faces of the industry, much akin to directors in film or writers in TV.

This is exactly what happened for one shining moment during Sony's E3 press conference. I had, that day (Which, funnily enough, is also this one, but I'm assuming you're reading in the future), sat through god knows how many dull trailers and generic gameplay demonstrations. Not even the annual  studio exec live demo cock-up (This year's fluffed game of choice: LittleBigPlanet 3, and it's faultering wall-jump mechanic) could keep my spirits up as we trudged through more reasons to hate the industry. Then something happened.

A trailer for a game I was vaguely aware of was playing. It was called No Man's Sky or something. It looked ambitious, but it was going to be a failiure. It was, I was convinced, going to be a bold stab at an all-encompassing space-exploration concept that ultimately didn't work. I've seen this thing too many times before. I wrote it off until the trailer finished and there stood a timid Anglo-Irish man with a nicely-cropped beard.

"Umm, wow." He began. His name flashed along the bottom. 'Sean Murray - Founder, Hello Games'. "I'm getting a lot of emotions right now..." he said. This was unprecedented at E3. I stopped and leaned in to listen. He began to speak honestly, from the heart, about how, as a kid, he just wanted to disappear into the worlds presented by the sci-fi books he would read. He rattled off examples- Arthur C Clarke, Asimov, etc. He was frail yet passionate. He mentioned this was the game he'd always wanted to make. He threw in the obligatory details he'd been prepped to say, but when he began to tell us every player would start on a different planet, he sounded genuinely excited. His 'We'll be learning about the game as you do' line wasn't a lie: This was a man, doing what he always wanted to do, to the best of his ability. He'd been thrown onto the biggest possible stage his chosen medium has, and was trying to contain himself and do a good job representing his and his friends' project (His studio literally comprises of four people). Murray was clear, passionate, intelligent and humble. Try telling me this man isn't an artist.

And then, in under a minute, it was all over and everything went back to normal. A short video played and out came a man with jet black hair and fridge white teeth to read out some sales figures. 95% of PS4s are connected to the internet, apparently. He was ultra-slick and highly trained, but I found it so hard to pay him any credence. I've seen an awful lot of devs come up onto stage over the years, but never have I been as enamoured by one as I was by Sean Murray. In fact, since then I've seriously considered buying a PS4 and his game just to support him and his vision. He was up there for maybe sixty seconds and he barely managed to communicate what his game was about, but he won me over without having to show any footage. It was a small, odd minute for many, and a nervous, mumbly one for him, but I feel it was very much an important one for me. To see that the games industry has figures like him, who are so dedicated and caring about their work, has changed how I look at it. It doesn't even matter whether No Man's Sky is an ambitious flop or the new Ocarina, in his own strange little way, I reckon Sean Murray may have just rekindled my video game fire.