The writing is cringe-inducing, it's very typical of something from 2010, but I think his argument is valid: Get over it that some people don't or won't respect videogames, and keep working on your own medium, and eventually it'll find more respect or it will reach such a critical mass of appeal that "respect" won't matter.
We don't owe anything to anybody. The future of entertainment is being envisioned not just by the games industry, but by a confluence of developers and gamers who've interacted on BBSes and the Net since our hobby began. And we're just getting started. Wait until we have had the time to develop that film and television had. We'll either be ruling the world, or we'll be the Eberts, writing dismissive essays about the newest kind of media, which of course will be irrelevant and shallow. That is something that we must not do, because that kind of thinking is the first step on the path to irrelevance.
I think he's right here, except for the thought of "once you become the Eberts you're on your first step to irrelevance." That's ridiculous, but the rest of the argument is valid.
That said I never drank the Ken Levine Koolaid, at least Levine as some brilliant world-builder or narrative crafter. The run-up to Bioshock Infinite saw so many effusive pieces about him trying to make him the Steve Jobs of videogames, which he's not. There was one brilliantly produced piece in Polygon, a visual feast, but it was this sappy love story to Ken Levine's genius where he (in)famously proclaimed he spent thousands of hours working on Infinite's story, or whatever the number was, and after playing 60% of the game I was like "you... spent thousands of hours on... on
this?" Bioshock Infinite seemed like a concept that someone came up with while sitting on the toilet, and then maybe spent 3-4 commutes-worth trying to validate the concept.
My biggest criticism of Levine's work is his self-congratulations with BIoshock as some sort of choice-and-consequence machine. It wasn't, and while he was trying to make an argument about human agency he quit at the quintessential moment when the argument would make the most sense, the climax of Bioshock, and it ruined any argument he was building up about free will and agency before that. I'll never understand why Bioshock took control away from the player in the "Would you Kindly" scene, because doing that completely upends the argument that the antagonist is making about you (the player), and about videogames as a medium... It ends up becoming the worst example of the thing that Levine is supposedly making critical commentary about.
The take that people in this thread have that this is a "Gamers Rise Up" sort of argument (whatever that means) is wrong, though. Levine's argument is "Gamers
grow up," not "Gamers rise up." E.g., grow up, mature, stop being so dependent on praise from people who aren't relevant to what you're doing, they don't justify your work, and some wider approval isn't necessary to justify your value. I don't follow this "Gamers Rise Up" bull shit, but I'd imagine their argument is the opposite of that... which is like, "Gamers need to demand the credibility [we] deserve," which... is what Levine seems to be arguing against here.
