We’ve played Whirlyball here at Airtight too, maybe we could set up a match between our companies sometime.

- JJ

Friggin’ princes, thinking they’re so big, lording their fancy armour and hygeine over me, we’ll see who “needs a bath” and smells “just….just awful” after a thorough browsacking!

…By spelling the word out for “pc” but not for “website,” you betray your own bias! You blatantly prefer pc gaming to website gaming!

I believe art can certainly be nihilistic and express hopelessness . . . I believe evil can win in fiction, as it often does in real life. But I prefer that the artist express an attitude toward that evil. It is not enough to record it; what do you think and feel about it? Your real purpose in making “Chaos,” I suspect, was not to educate, but to create a scandal that would draw an audience. There’s always money to be made by going further and being more shocking. Sometimes there is also art to be found in that direction, but not this time. That’s because your film creates a closed system in which any alternative outcome is excluded; it is like a movie of a man falling to his death, which can have no developments except that he continues to fall, and no ending except that he dies.

The entire response is here. I can’t read it without thinking of Super Columbine Massacre.

The real problem with Half-Life is not the silent protagonist (as someone mentioned above, Zelda has a silent protagonist as well). In reality, it is the fact that the (non-interactive) story sequences are mixed in with the (interactive) main game. This creates the danger that “nine out of ten players will likely miss (the cutscenes) altogether and, even when they do see them, will still not understand the significance”. The player expects the cutscene gameplay to be similar to the main game, and vice versa, because there is no real transition between cutscene and main game. Traditional cutscenes work better than Half-Life’s cutscenes at establishing a story because they are well defined and separated from the main gameplay.