I believe we may just have a gaming travesty on our hands...
- Thread starter SharPhoe
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I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this thread is full of the standard "How DARE other people enjoy MY HOBBY!" whining. I can understand not liking the show, even though I find it entertaining. I can understand not liking the people on the show. I can understand being annoyed at the people responsible for the show. What I don't understand is this "ruining the hobby" nonsense. How exactly does a not very popular TV show affect how you spend your free time in any way? The WCG doesn't have any input on what games get made and bought. Competitive gaming has been put on TV before and the industry has moved on just fine. Get over yourselves.
The other things I don't understand is the posturing (I can walk all over them!) and the "Games aren't meant to be competitive" statements. In the former, you don't have enough information to definitively say that. In the latter, who says? Why do they say that? You can compete in anything if you want to and can find someone else who wants to as well. It's ridiculous to say "You can't enjoy this product that way" when it doesn't affect anyone else.
The other things I don't understand is the posturing (I can walk all over them!) and the "Games aren't meant to be competitive" statements. In the former, you don't have enough information to definitively say that. In the latter, who says? Why do they say that? You can compete in anything if you want to and can find someone else who wants to as well. It's ridiculous to say "You can't enjoy this product that way" when it doesn't affect anyone else.
See my reply to video on there. In case it's off the front page, here it is again:
Daft idea, I have something better: find the best FPS players out there, gear them up, put them on a deserted island, and give them a Free For All, Battle Royale style! Winner wins 10 million dollars, or bottlecaps, whichever is worth mroe at the time.
I blame consoles and casual game(r)s.
Daft idea, I have something better: find the best FPS players out there, gear them up, put them on a deserted island, and give them a Free For All, Battle Royale style! Winner wins 10 million dollars, or bottlecaps, whichever is worth mroe at the time.
I blame consoles and casual game(r)s.
I think what bothers most people is the fact that they would get associated with a "casual gamer" look - i.e. the public perception of people who play games as a large proportion of their free time will be shaped by programmes such as those. It's a disturbing and troubling thought, but people's opinions and perceptions can be very heavily shaped by what they see on TV.WraithGadra said:
I for one look down on casual and (some) console games, since they often defeat the point of gaming for me (ie in a FPS I expect a certain amount of realism, games like TF2 and BF Heroes just don't work for me).
Haha, oh, I watched that one day and almost shed a tear while looking at my hard earned 360. I bought that thing with two week's worth of paychecks, and I thought to myself "I'm sorry, my friend. They're turning us into a mockery."
Why do you blame consoles? I can understand why the rising trend of casual games might have something to do with it (to a degree), but there are hardcore gamers out there who game on consoles.ThorUK said:
The whole thing is ridiculous. I hate reality shows to begin with, but this just brought it to a whole new level.
Uh.. Dg.. Uhhg.. FAIL FAIL FAIL!
YOU ARE BUILT OF FAIL! You shall be rendered into such! Uhg, I thought we would resist reality TV longer than this, gaming has been tainted.
YOU ARE BUILT OF FAIL! You shall be rendered into such! Uhg, I thought we would resist reality TV longer than this, gaming has been tainted.
(wanted to address this last night, didn't want to double-post, so you get it today)nilcypher said:
No. It most emphatically is NOT a good thing. At risk of treading on the same ground as Scott Ramsoomair (who said it as well as anyone), the last thing we need is more shovelware-buying lowest-common-denominator yahoos polluting our hobby with their insistence on Flanderized crap. Having gaming go mainstream attracts the wrong kind of attention, attention we'd all be better off without.
Look at Fallout 2. That game was as close to "mature" and "adult" as I've ever seen. Drugs, child killing, a city that in its futuristic dystopia is...well, exactly like Reno in 2009 only with more radiation and Jet instead of crystal meth, but I digress. Fallout 3 couldn't walk that same line because it's a mainstream blockbuster and if they made too much of the seedier elements of Capitol Wasteland society the media would've thrown a shit fit so we got severely Flanderized Fallout instead. Yeah, it was a great game, Bethesda Softworks' guys know what they're doing, but it wasn't Fallout in anything but name. The Jack Thompsons and Hillary Clintons and Leland Yees of the world have ensured that games will never be able to fly far enough under the radar to make another Fallout 2 possible.
In the endless chase for money whole genres have fallen by the wayside because they're neither cheap enough to make nor dumbed-down enough to sell. City builders are practically extinct, point-and-click adventures are only viable on shoestring budgets and electronic distribution models and show up in retail as either shovelware or rarities, and what we're left with is an industry where everything is either huge-budget eye candy for the masses or glorified Flash games sold to the casual market. And let's not even get started on stuff like Imagine: Fashion Designer; as my wife put it, "if my mom bought me something like that instead of Starcraft back when I was 12 I'd think games are stupid too" when we saw "Pet Vet: Horsez" or something equally stupid on a recent trip to Best Buy and I pointed out that those games sell really well to parents of 9-to-12 year old girls.
When gamers could stay safely out of sight, out of mind, and under the radar, we got classic games by the bucketload. Now that the ignorant Great Unwashed are the core audience, the people who built the industry from the ground up, the consumers that made the whole business possible in the first place, we don't matter anymore. There aren't enough of us and there will never be enough of us because if gaming was the sort of hobby where anyone could be hardcore, those old genres would still sell. As far as I'm concerned I'd rather be a closeted gamer, revealing that fact only when, say, a coworker saw me at Best Buy with a copy of Empire: Total War in my hands rather than seeing a disgusting funhouse mirror image of gamers on Sci-Fi or SyFy or FuckOffAndDie or whatever the fuck that channel's calling itself these days.
Then again, I'm not trying to generate web traffic and income to a website about games that benefits from having more pairs of eyes looking at it. I'm just gazing forlornly at my collection of city builders and trade sims and realizing it's been over four years since anyone made a good one (Port Royale 2, released in September of '04, and the company that made it doesn't make trade games anymore).
You're completely correct, you can see in in other media too. After all, there's no such thing as a good TV show or a good movie or even good books anymore.SimuLord said:
Sarcasm aside, if gaming becomes more mainstream, the customer base increases which means developers and publishers make more money and with a sufficiently stable source of income, they become more willing to take risks, because they know that one game isn't going to ruin them.
There's a precendent for this in fact with Ico, released when Sony were making money hand over fist with the Playstation, and again with Shadow of the Colossus, when they were making loads of the back of the Playstation 2.
And perhaps you're happy to skulk in the shadows, but personally I'm bored of feeling slightly embarrassed when I admit that I'm a gamer to someone and I'm bored of gaming getting blamed every time some kid goes nuts with a gun, because gaming is still misunderstood by the general public. If gaming continues to be the elitist paradise you want it to be, it will continue to draw the ire of the Clintons and Thompsons of this world and only by appealing to a broader audience will gaming progress its self-imposed ghetto