This Isn't Donkey Kong

In my last post I talked about Lev Grossman's article in Time about Halo, and how he has a completely skewed perspective on the video game industry. Nintendo is barely mentioned, and only indirectly, and not as one of 3 competitors in the console market. Here's the reference:

It's difficult to explain the story of Halo, but that difficulty is in itself worthy of note. This isn't Donkey Kong. The Master Chief is not an Italian plumber whose girlfriend has been kidnapped by a gorilla. His story is rich and complicated in ways that we're not used to in video games.

Yeah. If you haven't played a single game in the 20+ years since Donkey Kong, I'm sure Halo's story seems like fucking Shakespeare or something. It's completely unfair and ridiculous to even think of comparing a current video game with a game that is more than two decades old. Of course plots and character development have gotten more rich and complex since arcades dominated. That's common knowledge. Halo should be compared to current-gen games, and by that standard, I'd have to say it's story is pretty standard. It's not that complicated, difficult to understand, or even that original. In fact, despite his wad-shooting love for Halo's 'complicated' story, Grossman manages to completely explain it in about a paragraph.

This article is completely ridiculous. And don't get me wrong. I loved the first Halo. I bought an XBox at launch just for that game. (Although I soon got rid of it for a Gamecube.) But to discretely disregard Nintendo from a look at the console market is just ignorant and a waste of three pages of a magazine.

In journalism as in life, people should write what they know. And Grossman clearly knows fuck-all about the video game industry.