unbibium: (Default)
unbibium ([personal profile] unbibium) wrote2003-12-05 11:05 pm

(no subject)

And 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.

[identity profile] mmcirvin.livejournal.com 2003-12-05 11:26 pm (UTC)(link)
TV had a strange quasi-golden age in the mid-1990s. I'm not sure why it happened, but the quality of popular programming had definitely improved since the previous couple of decades. It's gone disastrously downhill since then or else I've just gotten old and gotten interested in other things.

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.

[identity profile] lots42.livejournal.com 2003-12-06 01:34 am (UTC)(link)
1997 was a boobish year but 2003 is much more mature. (Yeah, I read video game mags way too much)

[identity profile] dumplechan.livejournal.com 2003-12-06 03:48 am (UTC)(link)
When I think of "video-game culture", I think of the good things, the things on the side of the angels, like remix.overclocked.org, and Final Fantasy fan-fiction, and "All Your Base Are Belong To Us".

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!")