By Pentadact

“There are really two big ideas in these two games: The passage of a person through life and the idea that takes control by default in the other, the passage of SKUs through retail stores.” Oh come on.

Nick’s a great writer (mainly of interactive fiction), but it’s like he picked his words specifically to be wrong on as many counts as possible here. Portal was the only unknown name in a package with four huge titles, and Valve have just spent ten years devoting their entire company to finding a way to avoid retail stores.

In general his point seems to be that The Passage is superior and will be remembered longer because it has a message, whereas Portal doesn’t. But the Passage doesn’t have a message – both its creator and Nick himself stress repeatedly that it doesn’t try to push any particular agenda on you, instead leaving you to draw your own conclusions.

I just played it for the first time today. I thought it was a great argument for the case that games can be art, and a great argument for why that isn’t really an interesting, important or fun thing for them to be. Compared to what entertainment has become, compared to Portal, art is just dull, and crude, and passé.

Thanks to Graham for the link.