Bogged Down, Quick Rant

This past week I've gotten bogged down again. A combination of being busier than usual and hitting a patch of uninspiring games, I guess.

Something that is readily apparent in these games I've been playing is how amazingly interconnected they are. That is, a lot of these tiny games have multiple options for subscription to social networks of various kinds. It's an interesting element of these games.

The significance, I think, is that it's another demarcation of a split in video games as a medium. We're starting to see a clearer distinction between games that are deep, refulgent, genuinely meaningful works of art and simpler games that are meant to be simply thoughtless entertainment, throwaway fluff for quick consumption.

That sounds like I'm being severely critical of one category in this split, and I fully admit to having a favorite here, but the difference really is the point -- there are people who want simple, mindless video games that they can play without thinking or being challenged in pretty much any way. This type of video game isn't always short, even if they generally are on the iOS platform, and there are plenty of examples of longer video games that are linear and simplistic (the God of War and Uncharted series are very strong examples).

The networking options in these little iOS games is a striking element of this type of simplistic entertainment sort of video game. For games where the result isn't much more complicated than the outcome of a coin toss, the technology involved in reporting the results is far and away more advanced and complex than the games themselves! That is, the actual game here seems to be the networking of the results rather than the generation of the results.

All of this leads me to think that I'm not doing a great job of playing and criticizing these games. I would rather play games on the other prong of the fork, as it were, and I'm not really accessing the extended, networked nature of these little bits of fluff. So, with all that in mind, I guess everyone should take my opinions here with a grain of salt.

Basically, I'm just visiting.