Revaulting wrote on May 17
th, 2018 at 3:43pm:
The poetry had both range and character. From a poet's perspective, I can tell you the writing was both substantive and impressive. These might not be poems you can't live without, but poems you can't live without wouldn't have fit the characters. Instead, they wrote poems they could not live without. Similar to the artwork in the code, the quality of the art isn't what makes it most impressive. Its pitch-perfect appropriateness to the game is what makes it impressive. It adds extra layers of creepy. The coding helped support the genre-subversion, as did the "hentai" artwork, as did the writing. To me, even the premise behind the sub-game of "writing" your own poem was annoying and wrong, but wrong in the exact pitch-perfect way the game called for.
Every medium eventually matures, and one of the hallmarks of its maturity is that artists start to subvert the medium for their own, weird art. Video games have been, and still are, a combined medium. Developers usually call upon artists who are professionally established, competent, but basically average in their field. They do whatever is enough. This developer set out to create a work of integrated art. You are looking at a video game that pays attention to the details of each medium in its combination, and how they blend together. Other great video games have done this much. This one takes advantage of its combined media, but also some of the aspects that only a video game can deliver. You are looking at one of the still-early works that can establish video game as its own art form.
I agree with everything you wrote. I'm a mid-40's married guy with 3 kids, a business, a house, etc. I'm not the target audience for that game. My 20 y/0 and 18 y/o teens probably are. As such, it is not surprising that it wouldn't resonate with me. I applaud them for selecting a target demographic and then designing to that spec wholly.
Had they tried to broaden the appeal it would have weakened the experience for everyone.
Bringing this back to DDO for a sec, that's one of the issues that they have. They are trying to appeal to wide an audience. Their original target was D&D PnP lovers. But in "going MMO" they have ended up trying to serve many masters and pleasing none.
Games, movies, TV Shows, books, etc can really excel when they define and know the audience well and focus on delivering for that audience.