Single-A Games

Steve Gaynor from 2K Boston coins a new term: Single-A Games; projects that have a higher risk and lower budget than typical triple-A titles (In the words of Tom Armitage, nice coinage).

Triple-A is, of course, yet another coincidental, convenient and rather subjective piece of games industry terminology, and I’m pleased to see the lexicon expanding. It has to, given the current stratification of indie gaming. While that’s a product of digital distribution, better distributed skillsets, lower barriers to entry for game development and a resulting wider breadth of cultural inputs, we’ve lacked terminology to discuss the products of it. The necessary terms are emerging organically, more or less as required. Two other terms I like that have emerged in the past 12 months or so are demake and masocore.

This also plugs into a question over criticism raised at GamesBrief recently: Are indie games looked at in a more forgiving light because of their status? It feeds somewhat into questions of the difference between criticism and review, I’d expect the former to look at work in a wider context. However, the emergence of new terminology to describe indie stratification allows different frames of reference for review too. It’ll be messy and flawed like all culture, but a wider spectrum of reviews and expectations will also be a result of this expansion.

(CC image by [ Zenat El3ain ]™).

This entry was posted by davidhayward, on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 1:30 pm and is filed under criticism, culture, digital distribution, independent development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.