On Morning Wood Episode 073, @Chandler Wood and @D'yani answered the weekly email from @thewolfnears, as well as one from another viewer. The first question: what are the best and worst things about gaming culture? The second was a preview of an upcoming Ask PSLS segment: What tales should TellTale Games tell? Not pictured: cat fights in the background!
Best and Worst of Gaming Culture
Through the camaraderie of gaming, we're able to have programs like Extra Life, which is a charity that benefits your choice of Children's Miracle Network hospitals (you can donate to Team PSLS here). Unfortunately, this charity came from the perceived necessity to correct the perception that so many have of gamers being terrible people. The old couch potato / basement dweller trope combined with the school shootings, hate crimes, and other sorts of violent / self destructive acts contrived by the media circus really makes gamers look bad. Let's us also not forget that the young 18-32 crowd, a main target demographic for gaming, is often perceived as lazy and inefficient by older generations who did not have as tough of a time finding jobs when the world economy was much better.
On April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Colorado shot up their school. As authorities sought answers for why that happened, video games were among the suspected culprits.
Gaming culture used to be more of a niche environment, but as video games became a more mainstream thing, it became easier to correlate a number of problems with people who play video games. The problem with that logic is that several people from all walks of life are gamers now, so a causal relationship is kind of difficult to prove. It's easy to look at percentages of gamers who are violent offenders and cherry pick the data to death to make it say anything we want. Is there a correlation between gamers and young people committing crimes? Of course. There is also a strong correlation between people with cancer who have consumed water at some point in their lives. I'm glad that Extra Life exists, and I hope to see more programs like this in the future.
Bad journalism makes me want to... play video games.
Entitlements are big negative in gaming culture. While it is okay to ask for more when you are paying $60 for a new release, $400+ for a console, $50+ annually for online services, etc., people still take it to extremes. The ending of Mass Effect 3, I think, is the greatest example of this. People whined so much about it that Bioware went back and released a patch with extra content for the end of the game in an effort to acquiesce them (unsurprisingly, it did not work). Seriously, I don't know what's up with people. While video games tell stories and have characters and all of that, they are also the creative and immersive figments of the creators' imaginations. Forcing the creators to change their vision of how something went is like telling telling a classical composer that they scored a composition incorrectly or telling a taxidermist that a fish they stuffed needs a robot leg.
Stephen King wrote an excellent book about fan entitlement, which was later adapted into a terrifying movie, Misery.
One of the most fascinating innovations in current generation consoles is the social aspects programmed into them. Allowing gamers to capture their progress in games and livestream them as they are being played is a really cool way to help move the gaming culture forward. As gamers, we are both actors and critics. With the ability to share what it is that we are feeling in real time as we play the roles of the protagonists in these games, I think Sony and Microsoft have nailed it. Sure, we still have to deal with trolling, but the benefit seems to be greater than the cost on gamers in the greater scheme of things. Sony's super successful launch of the PlayStation 4 has been a great indicator that something is going right, correct?
Greatness in real time!
Second Email??!!! Tell The Tales!
When I think of TellTale games, I don't think of stories such as Orange is the New Black. Admittedly, I've only see the first few episodes of the first season, but that doesn't change my view at all. Like Chandler stated, a story should have a beginning, catharsis, and ending. Set the exposition through the first episode, keep building it up until the fifth, and then end that story / segment with the fifth episode. D'yani's point about entrenching the player into the story is important, too. When I play something episodic, I want it to be like a good book. I want it to make me impatient enough to keep turning the page. With those things in mind, I think that TellTale would need to pick a busy story. As a fan of anime cartoons, I think FLCL would make an awesome TellTale game. FLCL (pronounced as Fooly Cooly in the English market) has one of the most intense, in-your-face constructs of entertainment that I've ever experienced. A video game for this series is well overdue, and I think TellTale could really do this one justice. There are only 6 episodes in the series, so it almost fits with the episodic format that TellTale uses already! C'mon guys, make it happen!
In a nutshell, this is the story of FLCL.
Best and Worst of Gaming Culture
Through the camaraderie of gaming, we're able to have programs like Extra Life, which is a charity that benefits your choice of Children's Miracle Network hospitals (you can donate to Team PSLS here). Unfortunately, this charity came from the perceived necessity to correct the perception that so many have of gamers being terrible people. The old couch potato / basement dweller trope combined with the school shootings, hate crimes, and other sorts of violent / self destructive acts contrived by the media circus really makes gamers look bad. Let's us also not forget that the young 18-32 crowd, a main target demographic for gaming, is often perceived as lazy and inefficient by older generations who did not have as tough of a time finding jobs when the world economy was much better.
On April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Colorado shot up their school. As authorities sought answers for why that happened, video games were among the suspected culprits.
Gaming culture used to be more of a niche environment, but as video games became a more mainstream thing, it became easier to correlate a number of problems with people who play video games. The problem with that logic is that several people from all walks of life are gamers now, so a causal relationship is kind of difficult to prove. It's easy to look at percentages of gamers who are violent offenders and cherry pick the data to death to make it say anything we want. Is there a correlation between gamers and young people committing crimes? Of course. There is also a strong correlation between people with cancer who have consumed water at some point in their lives. I'm glad that Extra Life exists, and I hope to see more programs like this in the future.
Bad journalism makes me want to... play video games.
Entitlements are big negative in gaming culture. While it is okay to ask for more when you are paying $60 for a new release, $400+ for a console, $50+ annually for online services, etc., people still take it to extremes. The ending of Mass Effect 3, I think, is the greatest example of this. People whined so much about it that Bioware went back and released a patch with extra content for the end of the game in an effort to acquiesce them (unsurprisingly, it did not work). Seriously, I don't know what's up with people. While video games tell stories and have characters and all of that, they are also the creative and immersive figments of the creators' imaginations. Forcing the creators to change their vision of how something went is like telling telling a classical composer that they scored a composition incorrectly or telling a taxidermist that a fish they stuffed needs a robot leg.
Stephen King wrote an excellent book about fan entitlement, which was later adapted into a terrifying movie, Misery.
One of the most fascinating innovations in current generation consoles is the social aspects programmed into them. Allowing gamers to capture their progress in games and livestream them as they are being played is a really cool way to help move the gaming culture forward. As gamers, we are both actors and critics. With the ability to share what it is that we are feeling in real time as we play the roles of the protagonists in these games, I think Sony and Microsoft have nailed it. Sure, we still have to deal with trolling, but the benefit seems to be greater than the cost on gamers in the greater scheme of things. Sony's super successful launch of the PlayStation 4 has been a great indicator that something is going right, correct?
Greatness in real time!
Second Email??!!! Tell The Tales!
When I think of TellTale games, I don't think of stories such as Orange is the New Black. Admittedly, I've only see the first few episodes of the first season, but that doesn't change my view at all. Like Chandler stated, a story should have a beginning, catharsis, and ending. Set the exposition through the first episode, keep building it up until the fifth, and then end that story / segment with the fifth episode. D'yani's point about entrenching the player into the story is important, too. When I play something episodic, I want it to be like a good book. I want it to make me impatient enough to keep turning the page. With those things in mind, I think that TellTale would need to pick a busy story. As a fan of anime cartoons, I think FLCL would make an awesome TellTale game. FLCL (pronounced as Fooly Cooly in the English market) has one of the most intense, in-your-face constructs of entertainment that I've ever experienced. A video game for this series is well overdue, and I think TellTale could really do this one justice. There are only 6 episodes in the series, so it almost fits with the episodic format that TellTale uses already! C'mon guys, make it happen!
In a nutshell, this is the story of FLCL.
