Kanye West is six months into the development of a video game about his mother’s journey through the afterlife.
There are going to be a lot of people that are going to jump on this and have a good old laugh about the notion, partly because it does indeed sound absurd. You hear the above and all sorts of terrible and tasteless ideas fly through your head.
You can also easily picture the Photoshop contests, the Reddit memes and the comedy Twitter hashtags popping up to make fun of this (I’m even sneering at the idea a little bit with my choice of images below, but what can I say, I’m a horrible hypocrite). Maybe you see this as a tasteless side scrolling shoot-em-up, or a first person shooter flight-sim hybrid, but maybe we should be giving Mr. West the benefit of the doubt here.
But it sounds ridiculous
There’s nothing wrong with not liking Kanye West as a person and he certainly makes that easy. It’s even more understandable to not like his music, which I think either sounds unfinished or like he got bored half way through writing it. I quite liked Power when it popped up in an early mission in Saints Row 3, but that’s about it.
I’m sure his game won’t look like this, but it’s the first place my brain went. (Screenshot from Who’s That Flying?)
However, this is a high profile recording artist who has now declared he is turning to video games in an effort to express something close to his heart. This is someone who has apparently acknowledged that video games are a medium that you can express yourself in beyond expressing how many times you can shoot an alien in the head. It won’t be an entirely new project as he is basing the game off his single, Only One, but he is still exploring something outside of his comfort zone to express something personal.
Kanye West does not need any bloggers standing up for him, especially not someone like me with my five readers. His media profile is notorious, he has had arch-jesters South Park take a bite out of him a couple of times and he has enough going for him that what I write won’t make a difference, but let’s not lay into him about his choice to make a video game, even if we do think it sounds absurd.
It’s not about Kanye (sorry Kanye, it isn’t)
Why not have a good giggle if he’s not going to care? It’s not for the sake of the successful mega-millionaire Kanye West, it’s for the sake of all those other people who are contemplating making a video game to express something personal. If all of those would-be expressive developers see someone high profile lampooned for daring to try something like this, they will probably feel much less inclined to give it a shot. As an unfortunate side effect, making fun of this project is just going to reinforce the misconception that games cannot be this kind of art form and if you dig around in the indie scene long enough you will know this is not true.
I’m sure it won’t look like this either, but this is the second place my brain went. (Screenshot from Kid Icarus)
Some people work through personal issues through artistic self expression and the generally accepted forms of this are singing, painting, film making and for some reason poetry. How about we cut someone who is trying to do the same with a video game some slack?
Of course if Kanye’s game turns out to be a crass twin-stick shooter laden with micro-transactions, I will take this all back.