BW Media Spotlight

On the heels of yesterday’s discussion about Kathleen Kennedy departing Lucasfilm the website Geeks & Gamers posted an article about Nintendo Of America’s new president and Chief Operating Officer Devon Pritchard, who is taking over for Doug Bowser. (Yes, yes, everyone makes that joke, including himself.) I don’t know a whole lot about his time in the big chair so I can’t speak to it, but Pritchard’s comments have both the article’s writer, Martin Montanaro, and the website’s founder and main video contributor/stream host, Jeremy Griggs concerned in light of the direction the video game industry has gone, following Hollywood’s cultural trends. I usually stay out of the culture war stuff, but this does affect storytelling and ties in too closely to last night’s article because they and apparently other critics have used this to call Pritchard “Kathleen Kennedy 2.0”.

At issue are remarks Pritchard made in a pre-recorded speech to the New York Game Awards, an awards show I didn’t even know existed since the big Video Game Awards are usually the only one I hear of and all of the issues that have come up with that event in the last few years. Frankly, even that I only know for announcements like the long-awaited return of Mega Man. Awards shows are worthless these days. Back on topic: even the Geeks & Gamers contributors mention that it’s not the words themselves in a bubble but more like the history of what the words have been from other gaming studios and the overall storytelling industry in television/streaming, comics, and movies that raise certain red flags. We do not live in a bubble and history has made many of the geek community who have seen the alteration and bastardization of the stories and characters they love in the hands of the SEECA crowd (for newcomers, that would be Snobs, Elitists, Egotists, Corporatists, and Activists–an acronym I came up with recently).

Should they be worried, or are we skirting the walls of paranoia in seeing the baddies behind every tree? This isn’t a BW Vs article because they kind of have a point to the degree that using it would be more branding than actually arguing against the article. However, I worry about extremism as much from my side as the people who have ruined so many franchises out of self-interest and chasing the “cool kids” at the expense of the geeks they always looked down upon in high school. I don’t necessary disagree with Geeks & Gamers on this, but being a bit more “outsider” on the backstage stuff I want to approach with a cooler head and explain why people more into the “inside baseball” perspective versus BW’s usual approach of looking at the end product have understandable concerns. I have some, too.

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