Well I thought of the Assassin's Creed and Uncharted franchises as counterarguments by the end of your article, but, to be clear, those two are unspectacular in their own regard. When it comes to great, singular achievements, Croshaw makes a good point: never bother making a sequel; and, if such an endeavor is necessary, never listen to the fans. His supporting evidence, in that context, is appropriate. Bioshock 2, in appealing to the fans and their stimuli, simply had more philosophy and more Big Daddies, which is, by face value, precisely what people thought they wanted. But, evidently, that was not true; instead, what was learned from all of this is that deconstructing a great thing into smaller, simpler components--and subsequently using those components to create a piece altogether new--is folly. The whole tryptich--words, emotions, and drama--is instead mutilated and pieced together like a serial killer's ultimatum. There is no one leg of a game that holds it. There is no one brick that holds the entirety of a building, no one root that holds the tree, no one nail on the bedroom floor; it is the whole which shines, which is brilliant, which we cherish. Yet the fans, those removed from the creativities and artistry behind the achievement, focus their attentions on a single aspect that is the most noticeable. In the case of Portal, it was GLaDOS and the companion cube, and the portals itself. And such items clamored for, returned. Perhaps the result is not so bad. Perhaps, in plausible persistence, that this return is satisfactory, and, lacking this, the game would not be satisfactory. Well all in a pig's ear, I say. No new thing was learned by this; the game industry did not improve upon its release; the critics learned no new gesticulations from this; the artists found no new styles from this. All it does is simply exist, and in art simply existing is existence, but not at all. In books, we have likely came onto the last renaissance of technical innovation, after the modernist movement died out; the only frontier left is how much emotion we can tease from human hearts into the words. But games are not quite as developed, and we do not have the same privileges in such experimentation. We still have to push the technical boundaries of games: what we can create, how we develop them through our machinations, and, in the culmination of this, how we will make the system so perfect that every action, every scene becomes purposeful and unwasted, with the audience laughing, or crying at curtain call. We have not achieved this--our precision is too wide--but we can achieve this. So we cannot afford to continue with fluff, if we know all too well that the fluff is insubstantial; if we've resources, we must use them for the benefit of the medium. I could have let Portal 2--and all misfits like it--go, because it amuses, because it amazes, but the spark, the Promothean flame behind its human inspiration, is gone. Art is indeed individualistic passion and derives from no source, except in how we dress and carry it, but other than that its spirit is singular. I think it is time to move away from Aperture Science, and into the vast expanse with a stronger, surer vigor. Often, the only way for art to develop is to rebel against the work of old and to find greater beauty in a different attempt. Sequels, which dwell on the past, improve nothing.
Edit: Man I have no life. But I am utterly convicted that this is true. The only way that this medium will get anywhere is if we allow the game writers creative freedom. Putting on them restrictions, or allowing themselves to restrict their writing in a crazy shoot-the-hostages psychosis, is detrimental to what we can accomplish. Also, this is probably why Melville went insane over the demands of the writing industry: creative restrictions.
