14 DAY TRIAL // Often cited as being one of the most innovative works in the history of film, Citizen Kane became an aspect of great interest when Insert Credit's Brandon Lee asked if games were ever going to have a Citizen Kane moment. Some may not even understand what this means, like I did, so I had to look it up in order to have a clue.
Citizen Kane is a 1941 mystery/drama film released by RKO Pictures and directed by Orson Welles. It tells the fictional story of Charles Foster Kane, a man whose fight for power in the publishing world transformed from sheer thrill-seeking to ruthless war mongering. The story is told through flashbacks, following a reporter as he seeks to find what Kane meant by his dying word: "Rosebud."
Now, don't get bored on me because this is something you really should know, these are true facts of life. The journalist's mission of retrieving the meaning of Kane's final word leads him in the end to conclude that a man's life cannot be summed up in one word. This is exactly what the "Citizen Kane moment," regarding games, is all about.
This is where Brandon Lee steps in to answer his own question: "And here then, is the sticking point; the reason that gaming as is will never have its Kane: Those industry jokes I mentioned-Takeshi, Desert Bus-are not fun games. If they were, they'd be entirely above any type of criticism. This has always been the deciding factor; if a game is fun, it's a good game. If it's not fun, it's bad. This, though, is an almost farcically bad way to judge art. Art is as expressive as language itself-more, even."
The point is: there are plenty of games out there that have had their good dose of criticism, mainly because of just one impression that everybody later followed. Now, some games demand a trained eye to see what exactly they are all about, while some simply suck from the beginning to the end, or are just plain simple.