Another E3 has come and gone, or is still going on, or something and you can probably guess my sentiment pretty quickly from how vague I sound.
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| Not pictured: Me napping |
I read discussion of maybe half the Microsoft E3 "thing" which may or may not count as 'advertising' or 'razors marching up the street' depending on your personal perspective of game giants getting on stage and announcing some stuff that may or may happen in the upcoming whatever period of time. E3, like all gaming long con advertising - And that's all I'm going to call it, seriously - is mostly just announcements of vague promises and then some demos running on hardware that might not exist, or of builds that may never exist, or just other things.
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| care potato |
None of this crap excites me and yes, I fully realize, can articulate in simplicity and totality: It literally and figuratively is Not For Me. But reading through people slamming Microsoft, the schizophrenic house divided org chart like trenches in WW1 company it is, two very real things did actually occur to me. Two actual "feels" in an otherwise long yawn at gamers desperately trying to earn cred with their peers by figuring how to best summarize the atrocious rape joke MS scripted into its, uh, Killer Instinct presentation? MS is boring, and people talking about it is boring, and yes I'm boring too. Also please never mind the bit where people got excited MS is running games on the Win7 kernel, or how companies that don't have production hardware don't demo it on prototype hardware, or all that other false excitement press where we monkey around about things that Can Not Ever Actually Matter.
The
biggest thing I think about whenever I dip my toe into gaming media and mediums outside actually moving the bits and bytes in my personal computer is a friend of mine talking about Blizzard about for years back. Though the sentiment is nothing new and nothing exclusive to Blizzard by any stretch, it resonated with me. He essentially painted all Blizzard convention appearances as gleefully clapping your hands and cheering as various dudes got up on stage and then lied to you about ideas that they probably wouldn't be putting in a game you wouldn't playing any time soon, and if you were playing the game it probably wouldn't be patched in within the remaining time before the heat death of the universe. As such, it basically boils all E3 and media con convention advertising panel presentation stuff as a long
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| picture this |
blog-post from a
teenage girl about what she'd like to do to [Popular pop star] assuming she got her hands on him. The tone is breathless and excited, with lots of gaps and pauses as description fails to really conceptualize anything that ever will happen.
And that's it. It's all dreamy and lovely, a perfect white wedding fantasy, but really it doesn't amount to much of anything. And I'm specifically using teenage girl because I want you to picture something willowy and sweet, not what teenage boys generally think of which is more what the general fanboy populace has going on in their heads. We'll talk about that now, and please forgive my usage of gender stereotypes - They're cultural, not biological, I'm not a hater.
Which segues into the next sentiment I get, something newer and more interesting to me. Gamers are slowly waking up to the fact that the industry isn't really doing them any favors, and you see little dribbles of this at the edges of certain topics. I don't necessarily want to present that as a vast unified paradigm shift, but rather a very individual yet group comprehension as gamers by themselves kinda (but never totally!) clue in. You're allowed to talk shit about EA, or Sonic games, or whine about always on DRM or certain other topics but on the most part we as gamers generally just keep our heads in the sand. And other parts of the metaphor are, in fact, up in the air...
We buy into something and then you see this weird bias crop up as teenage boys try to work through two emotions in parallel: The fact they love gaming and what they game on, then the sordid reality that gaming doesn't usually love us back. Not as much as we love it, anyway. A feedback loop of resentment burns a hole between the two topics and you're left with a bunch of negative energy you want to direct somewhere. And oh boy how they ever do so! Fanboyism has raged so hot since the time of nintedo vs sega and only gotten more absurd as the anon structure of the internet brings us new ways to take out our grievances on the world. Fanboy debates are essentially how I imagine the clown college debate team would look, all spilling out of tiny cars and honking at each other with nothing meaningful to say.
In turn, the gaming giants of the world have come to an inverted conclusion: All this whining doesn't amount to anything. All this hurly-burly yell at MS about imagined slights and real ones is little more than barely influential upon their bottom line. If the Xbone or WiiU fail, it'll come down to the relationship the manufacturers have with game development and not really how gamers feel about DRM or the kinect watching you watch porn. We are given negativity in spades and then allowed to fire hose it out at convenient meaningless points. Then, as studies have shown (or just the fact D3 kept selling while it's meta critic score was in the toilet and the servers didn't work) once we're spent we open our wallets to them anyway. Feel free to watch this, too, if you want
http://www.slideshare.net/bcousins/paying-to-win
I just find it really boring. They advertise. We rage and/or geek out. Then we spend. The loop continues over and over. We might not give them our money, but it won't be because we were boycotting it, since if you're emotionally invested enough to
be angry you probably want it. And then you probably buy it. You know why? Because Gaming is actually still pretty great and still amazingly cheap. It costs $12 to see Iron Man go being boring on the big screen, for $12 I've bought 3-10 games on average! That's like x100 the entertainment!
Granted, like I said, it's all not for me. I don't buy new games, and no it's not because I'm some elitist snob who doesn't blah blah NEW GAMES ARE UNCREATIVE or whatever nonsense. I buy games off Steam and honestly? I'm just so far behind on my backlog I can't assemble the enthusiasm to buy anything new. You can easily see how many games I've finished this year and I've bought
double the number more in that same time-frame. I have a
problem. And no, several of them are excellent titles I'm eager to get to - Spec Ops the Line, The Last Remnant, Gianna Sisters: Twisted Dreams, Kingdoms of Amalur and my friend bought me Dark Souls which good lord I really should be playing. It's a damn flood of interesting gaming! I'm drowning!
The funniest thing for me though was watching this guy over here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzerU6PVTV8 which is a video from March. The funniest thing about this - It's a long complicated diatribe with a lovely voiced dude probably about my own age, and then there's 13 year old kids screaming at him for wanting loving from the xbone or that he 'should have waited for E3'. The video from March. Should have waited for E3. As if it diluted the message any. It just made me laugh and laugh. The fanboys will get mad at you for saying consoles in general aren't that exciting. The resentment, even if taught by their peers to boys not angry about anything, is running through their blood. Why get mad? Why not just say, fuck you buddy, I'm going to game and I'm going to like it. Oh, that's right, because...
I'm not saying I agree with the bunnyhop show guy's point, just that I enjoyed the video and even more enjoyed reading the comments month later where people flung spittle in his direction. Although the PC gaming master race stuff, oy~
How do people seriously use the term from
this ancient video and actually not realize "PC gaming master race" is a sarcastic term describing an unnecessary schism between two dopey groups of gamers? And what is that guy even saying? Amazing sports car?
Have you ever been outside? Hello did you know Yahtzee was trolling? This is like when people use that damn slow clap gif, isn't it? Why are we so proud of being consumer whores?
Anyway, if you enjoyed E3 and there's hot new shit coming up, please don't tell me because oh god I need to idle for cards now too? Steam is actually giving me money for owning games to spend on other games? And the steam sale is in less than a month?
I will never be free. (and it's great, praise be the holy gabens)
