[T]hey took a look at what a good shooter would be like with Duke Nukem in it
Savage.
Raises an interesting question though - what was the last good Duke game? As someone with next-to-no experience with the series (played a few hours of Forever, and about an hour of the most recent re-release on XB1), I have to ask: was Duke ever a good character, or were they just good for the time shooters that happened to have Duke in them?
Duke was more of a icon than a character. As a character, he's basically a big dumb excuse to have big dumb stuff in a video game, which is fine if you take into account that the cutting edge of character development in shooters at the time was B.J. Blazkowicz and Kyle Katarn. Like a lot of things in Duke3D, the characterization and implementation of Duke Nukem was a gimmick, but the game was immensely successful, so they stuck with it.
I wrote at least three posts before this about necessity of quality vs. importance of emotional subtlety, creativity and integrity as a measure of success; effectiveness and efficiency with regard to communicating a message; and how the games industry only cares about wrapping itself in robes of art so it can rake in the cash without risk of censorship (By the way, I'm terrible for dissing on the industry when I'm trying to form a reasonable argument!)
The first thing I wanted to mention was how much practical thinking dominates the games industry. The way I originally expressed it was basically that every game coming from a designer comes out looking dumb, because intensity, quality and innovation dominates everything.
Games are expected to be big and loud and have lots of confict and interaction. They're expected to have a certain level of quality in terms of story, polish and fun. They're expected to do things we haven't seen before. They're expected to challenge players with their controls and mechanics. Many games have trained people not to think beyond their immediate goal.
Emotional subtlety, creativity, and integrity are important because gaming is so heavily rooted in trial and error, spectacle and unchecked passion. The industry hasn't done a great job of integrating critical thinking and art into their products. Games are all about the practicality of doing rather than thinking. Doing it right now as opposed to doing it right. Computer games encourage players to take action, but thinking is generally limited to slowly reverse engineering the game through trial and error and a certain level of intuition and creativity that can range from zero to a hundred. There's very little in the way of social challenge in gaming, so emotional subtlety is a rarity.
Quality in gaming is essentially just a measure of the ability to make a game fun, to create worlds, and to make things possible that aren't possible in the real world, which has escapist connotations. That isn't necessarily bad... video games are entertainment, not art. However, every medium of expression needs to understand the significance of an artistic approach.
Seriousness, on the other hand, is about sincerity; it's not about moral or intellectual superiority. The degree of heavy-handedness of a message depends on the level and quality of interaction. A game that covers many angles clearly and lets people explore them without spewing a lot of hot air is arguably more useful than a brief serious game that's pushing a certain agenda.
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