A REBUTTAL TO "YOUR INTRO SUCKS."

Let me start by getting all the politically correct wishy-washy disclaimer crap out of the way. Just a warning, this is more of a philosophical discussion than a bullet-point of specifics.

I admire Brickroad's thoughts on game development. Clearly his talent with dungeon design is reflected in his Kinetic Cipher franchise, and in the opinions of the community. There are great tidbits of wisdom in most of his articles. If 95% of the community lived, slept, ate, drank, breathed those articles for a week, the state of indie RM games would dramatically improve to everyone's benefit.

Now then. Onto the real content.

At the risk of sounding like an alarmist doomsayer, I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that mainstream society (which includes the author and any reader of this article) has, in essence, no attention span. The United States, of all industrialised and even marginally industrialized nations, has the most abysmal genepool in terms of intellectual and cultural richness. With a variety of factors working to relegate the average American into a scared, obediant, lobotimized zombie, attention span is essentially a novelty in this postmodernistic world.

Why go into a giant, socratic soapbox rant you might be asking? Just a wake up call. Just like a fish unaware that the most immediate and obvious factor of its environment is water, we are so integrated into the zero attention span culture that it has become our "water," or homoginzed constant state of being. Therefore, we don't notice it. We don't notice that in our every day activities, which for this crowd includes a LOT of gaming, (which is just fine) our general lack of attention span shines through.

I'm only twenty-five years old, but in terms of gamers, I'm a geezer. I remember the days when gamers were a vast minority. We were total nerds. We played games with a true passion for the essence of the story the developer had to tell. Well, I did anyway.

Perhaps this is why folks in my generation have such a fond love for games such as Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana. With the advent of Final Fantasy 7 came the transition of RPGs into the mainstream of gamers. Somehow, for some reason, game development now feels like a soulless venture.

Games are there to entertain you. But what is entertainment?

It can be anything from satisfying your most immediate, most whimiscal, most banal and primal need for fun... to a long-lasting experience involving a deep new world to discover, characters to grow to hate or love, secrets to unveil.

Brickroad's article is correct. Most RPG intros suck. That's because they don't focus on drawing the player into the story that the developer has to tell. The author could have the most beautiful and unique snowflake of a creative mind to ever grace the earth, but if they engineer the game incorrectly, as Brickroad tries to avert, it's a moot point.

Therein lies the essence of the problem. Brickroad paints a picture of the average gamer as a drooling dolt, only able to see 2 inches past their face, barely able to grab their behind with both hands simultaneously. Well, unfortunately, Brickroad is again correct, for the most part.

"Why did you even write this article if you agree with everything he said?" Good question.

I want to inspire a different attitude than the extremely immature, harsh, impatient, and moronic average gamer that BR illustrates.

I'm not sure if the community fully appreciates the ability to create these interactive novels we call RPGs. What a wonderful gift, even if the graphics and coding capabilities are woefully archaeic in comparison to the cutting-edge commercial developments.

Don't put a game down after 5 minutes. (Unless it's spouting off pretentious gibberish and nonsensical graphical cutscenes.)

Don't put a game down after 15 minutes. (Unless you STILL haven't acquired control of the hero.)

If the author is giving you a lot of text... please at least try and make an effort to read it. There's a lot to be said for REALLY good dialogue. Ever read a book? Books are only dialogue, and some people actually read those front to back nowadays.

In conclusion, do follow brickroad's excellent advice in the smoothly-engineered creation of intros. But as a player, don't follow his lobotimized-gamer stereotype. Be deep. Be a nerd. Try to see into the author's heart and mind. (If they bothered to put those two things in their game.)