Ed Smith of IBTimes writes: "The contention between these two groups (which, of course, not everyone fits neatly into) stems from, as I said, the definition of 'game.' Put simply, formalists want the definition of game to remain unchanged; zinesters want it adapted to describe works like Journey.
"But both camps are misguided. Rather than be interested in that word 'game', I feel like this debate should start and end with that other word, 'video.' We're looking at two completely different forms of expression here and trying to shoehorn the definition of one into the other is redundant.
"We shouldn't be trying to redefine the word 'game'. We should be looking at creating a new definition for a new word: 'Videogame.'"
The Chinese Room's Dear Esther goes free on Steam to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this foundational title.
Eh.
I mean free is free, but I found this to be a boring slog.
Not to mention this remasters actually made the game look worse in multiple areas.
I did quite like their A Machine for Pigs and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture though.
On Valentine's Day a decade ago, Dear Esther went from a Source Engine mod to a full-fledged indie game, catalyzing the "walking sim" genre. How does it measure up today?
"The China-based indie games publisher Secret Mode and Brighton-based (the UK) indie games developer The Chinese Room, are today very pleased to announce that they will celebrate the tenth anniversary of "Dear Esther" by making the genre-defining 2012 narrative exploration game free to download from February 14th to February 15th via Steam." - Jonas Ek, TGG.
