Classic screenwriting (both film and TV) does take on something of a middle school essay structure, doesn’t it. Tell the audience what you’re going to do, do it, tell the audience what you just did. I guess with a new medium it’s seen as necessary. Then when people get more comfortable with the grammar, you can stop patronizing them and get down to business.

What’s weird about videogames is that mainstream games at least have kind of gone the other way. Now you buy a top-shelf console game, you won’t even be allowed to play it properly for the first half hour. Unless it’s Zelda. Then you might have to wait three or four hours before you get started. Whereas in 1987… plop. There you are. Make sense of it the best you can.

Is there a good reason in there to assume the audience has, on average, grown less sophisticated over the last twenty years? And Wii Fit aside (which is kind of a different issue), is there much evidence that patronizing the audience leads to greater sales? Generally the only people who buy videogames are people who buy videogames (which is where Iwata comes into the discussion, and then leaves by the back door). And generally they only get to play them after they’ve made a purchase.

It’s one thing to make a game accessible. Not to overburden the player with complications right from the start. That’s just good design.
The hand-holding that’s been going on, the last ten years though — that’s something else. Something insidiously banal. It’s not just that the art hasn’t been progressing since 1998; it’s been moving backward.