(no subject)
Dec. 5th, 2003 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unbibiumAnd the third thing that depresses me today, is having watched the Video Game Awards.
The commercials were totally cool, probably because they evoked classic games, and they were clever, and fun...
...but, the show itself. Well, all most of you need to know is, it was held in Vegas. If you extrapolate from there, you'll probably get an accurate picture.
The key words were "EXCESSIVE" and "LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR". And the message throughout the entire two hours was: "People who play video games have the mentality of a 15-year-old boy." Every second presenter was some walking pair of tits that teased the crowd with some innuendo. There was a WWE grudge match held right in the middle of the show, complete with strobe lights. The guys from Jackass sat on a block of ice and showed the crowd their shrunken wieners. And there was a guest appearance by Bobby Fletcher from "Crank Yankers," who gained popularity by belching into the telephone. And the Oakland Raiderettes spent the entire show gathered around this big horizontal platform on the ground, on which the names of the winning games were projected.
They also had a halfpipe in the middle of the auditorium. I still don't know whether it was a bowl or a theater or on the roof or what. But, after Tony Hawk Underground for best sports game, he accepted his award and his huckjam crew did some tricks. Ordinarily, I think that'd be pretty cool, but against the backdrop of all the pandering, I just couldn't get excited about it.
The ads told the same story. There were video game ads, of course. But there were also those ads for Virgin Mobile, with the pixellated naked women. And ads for chat lines that claimed to connect you with local girls.
I'm starting to wonder if I should go into the closet regarding video games, because they're obviously for overgrown children.
The commercials were totally cool, probably because they evoked classic games, and they were clever, and fun...
...but, the show itself. Well, all most of you need to know is, it was held in Vegas. If you extrapolate from there, you'll probably get an accurate picture.
The key words were "EXCESSIVE" and "LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR". And the message throughout the entire two hours was: "People who play video games have the mentality of a 15-year-old boy." Every second presenter was some walking pair of tits that teased the crowd with some innuendo. There was a WWE grudge match held right in the middle of the show, complete with strobe lights. The guys from Jackass sat on a block of ice and showed the crowd their shrunken wieners. And there was a guest appearance by Bobby Fletcher from "Crank Yankers," who gained popularity by belching into the telephone. And the Oakland Raiderettes spent the entire show gathered around this big horizontal platform on the ground, on which the names of the winning games were projected.
They also had a halfpipe in the middle of the auditorium. I still don't know whether it was a bowl or a theater or on the roof or what. But, after Tony Hawk Underground for best sports game, he accepted his award and his huckjam crew did some tricks. Ordinarily, I think that'd be pretty cool, but against the backdrop of all the pandering, I just couldn't get excited about it.
The ads told the same story. There were video game ads, of course. But there were also those ads for Virgin Mobile, with the pixellated naked women. And ads for chat lines that claimed to connect you with local girls.
I'm starting to wonder if I should go into the closet regarding video games, because they're obviously for overgrown children.
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-05 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-05 10:24 pm (UTC)I'm not a very good gamer. Maybe that's why I've seen breasts.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 01:38 pm (UTC)Woo hoo, I know [how to unlock all the secrets in Mario Party 17|the entire roster of every pro Curling team]! Now to just fit that in on the resume...
But the reason I brought it up, of course, is because Penny Arcade managed to get gamers to donate over $60,000 in toys to a local Childrens' Hospital for Christmas. In about a week's time. So that's kinda nice.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-05 11:06 pm (UTC)I would blame the taint of Bad TV more than video games. Television has become a lot more hopeless and nihilistic in the last few years; stories like this make me glad I got rid of my TV.
TV is a medium in decline - in quality, certainly, but also in number of viewers. It won't be surprising if TV becomes as marginal as radio in another 10-20 years.
Video games, on the other hand, are maturing in ways they never have before - there's plenty of infantile stuff out there (Hooters Road Trip, anyone?), but there's also games like System Shock 2, or Europa Universalis. Even some childlike games like Pikmin and Mario Sunshine are just so masterful that it's hard not to love them.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-05 11:26 pm (UTC)I have a TV and use it, but I find myself watching old shows off the TiVo and DVDs, and avoiding major-network prime-time programming (except for Futurama, which is a walking-dead show, cancelled with many episodes in the can).
I'm completely out of touch with video-game culture, but once somebody left a 1997 copy of some game-developer magazine (Game Developer, maybe?) in the toilet stall at work, and I started flipping through it and was amazed at all the dumb titty-and-innuendo-oriented ads, as if only young developmentally-arrested men could develop video games. I idly wondered if anything had changed since then. Fortunately the pages were not stuck together.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 03:48 am (UTC)I wouldn't want people to judge games and gamers by crappy magazines with all their ads in the "distressed" font. It would be like associating all women with wretched supermarket magazines ("Are Your Toes Too Fat?" "Drive Him Wild With Swedish Sex Tips!")
no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 09:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-05 11:37 pm (UTC)Don't confuse SpikeTV's contempt for its audience with the actual nature of the videogaming community.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 07:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 08:48 pm (UTC)No they're not. SpikeTV is for overgrown children. Play games instead of watching that channel and your life will improve greatly.
-- Schwa ---