I posted this to my blog, brilli.am/writes, and figure I'd post it on my c-blog too, because I have ignored it for FAR too long. I hope you like!

Before I begin, I'd just like to applaud the gaming blogosphere for their hard work in fixing the gamer's taxonomy; Mitch Krpata famously knocked it out of a park almost a year ago when he examined the "hardcore" and "casual" descriptors on games. Douglas Wilson took a crack at the term "gamer," challenging its use and its validity. Countless bloggers have questioned the definition of art, and how it relates to games. I can't remember now, but some have even questioned the term "video game," as this form of media doesn't require video (like AudiOdyssey) or, err, games, really (Anthony Burch takes the piss out of a piece of Interactive Entertainment for calling itself a game, but if we don't call it a video game, what do we call it?). Certainly, the entire industry and community is filled with terms that may have meant something once, but have since become obsolete or have fallen into misuse. While nobody has really adopted these terms, yet, it's good food for thought; knowing the value of what we're saying is integral for successful communication. For example, while I might still say "hardcore" or "casual" gamer, I am now fully aware of their limitations.

I'd like to nominate the next word for close scrutiny: retro.

Now, this isn't an entirely useless word, when it comes to games; games that are from a certain time are retro, simply because they are no longer contemporary but back in style. It's cool to have images of 8-bit sprites on your website, or Atari logos on your T-shirts. For younger generations, the simple act of playing vintage games could be considered "retro" (for those of us old enough to have played it the first time around, though, it's really just "nostalgia" or, in some cases, "preference"). New games, though, don't deserve the term. They are new games, with new ideas, and to essentially call them old is a disservice.

The worst way in which this happens has to be with games that operate on a two-dimensional plane, or with sprites instead of polygons. Braid is a wonderful example of a game that's been called "retro" that entirely doesn't deserve the moniker. To the credit of most literate game fans, I haven't seen this game get called retro much, but I have seen it. What you have here is a wildly imaginative video game that does a pretty good job of transcending its genre with mind-bending puzzles, beautiful watercolor art assets and a clever (if a bit tacked-on) speed run leaderboard. Sure, it passes reference to retro games, but if anything, that's just proof that it isn't retro itself; how many old-school games that you can think of are making ironic postmodern references to their predecessors (as nauseating at that sounds)? I can't think of any.



Another example that's come up recently is Ikaruga. That's a game that brings a lot of new stuff to the table: a veritcal shooter that brings incredible 3D graphics that aren't gaudy or inscrutable; a completely new "polarity" system that makes enemy bullets as beneficial as they are dangerous; and a bizarro plot, the likes of which I've never seen in another vertical shooter (or any other... err, media, for that matter). I just spilled the beans on why people call it retro, though; vertical shooter. Since it's a genre steeped in tradition that dates back to arcades (make a game hard and give it zillions of points so people will feed it quarters and try to beat each other), it must be retro. This simply isn't true. If that were the case, we'd call Chris Farley's comedy "retro comedy" because he was just doing mild permutations on Three Stooges physical comedy. We'd call Quentin Tarantino movies "retro cinema" because they're so heavily informed by Westerns and kung fu flicks and the nouvelle vague and whatever else he claims he loves. The thing is, we just don't do this. We call the Three Stooges retro, we call Spaghetti Westerns retro, but we don't call current things that are influenced by them retro. Why are we doing it for games? See also the incredible early 2008 Xbox Live Arcade game, n+, or the upcoming (and Montreal local!) Fez: they're certainly retro-inspired, but to call them retro is incorrect, and invalidates the new, exciting innovations they bring to games today.

It gets more dicey as we get closer to things that actually are "retro." Three recent games made me start thinking about the word retro, and really are the core of my argument: Pac-Man Championship Edition, Galaga Legions, and Space Invaders Extreme. Upon first glance, the retro moniker might make a bit of sense; after all, they're using what are essentially the original sprites in gameplay that very heavily informed by the games upon which they are based. However, Pac-Man C.E. is, when you get right to its guts, as far as possible from Pac-Man as you can get; gone are the days of pattern memorization. This game starts slow, but by the end of its five-minute runtime (a new feature), it's become a twitchy stressfest joy explosion. Similarly, Galaga Legions only looks like Galaga, and evne then, only slightly; its use of remote satellites is the crux of its gameplay, and it's entirely new. Also new: trapping bugs to make them fight for you. They've also downplayed pattern recognition in favour of an assault on the senses, rewarding twitch and improvisation in addition to committing levels to mind. Space Invaders Extreme takes one of the most simple games ever made and turns it into a maximalist circus that plays like a Basement Jaxx record sounds-- it takes the monotonous pacing of the original game and flips it on its ass.

The point is, all of these games have retro-informed art assets, but they’re all new games—whether they’re new like Chris Farley and Quentin Tarantino are “new” or not, they should be called “retro games.” Save that term for Galaxian and Pitfall and Duck Hunt. What most of these games have in common is that they reject a three-dimensional playfield, which is something that’ll never go out of style (until we have a three-dimensional game display). A two-dimensional game plays to the dimensions that your television set can actually display; it doesn’t attempt to feign a third dimension with polygons and lighting effects and bloom and blur. Personally, I need to temper my 3D game-playing with doses of 2D games, simply because I get tired of parsing foreground from background. There’s no nostalgia in it; I just don’t appreciate the added challenge of imagining depth where there is none all of the time. It pains me when people essentially call a game old because it doesn’t have that one feature that’s in most “cutting edge” games. Is a game retro if it doesn’t have online play? That’s in most current games. What if it doesn’t have branching narratives? Space Marines? Gamer points or trophies? Simply rejecting a recent development in games doesn’t automatically age or depreciate your game. So please consider this when you call something “retro,” and stop diluting the meaning of a word that means something that is outdated but has returned to “the norm.”