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TV Execs' Attempts To Lure Gamers Not Always Best
Thanks to MSNBC for its article discussing the mixed fortunes of TV bosses trying to get videogamers to watch shows about games. The piece starts with the question: "Golf players watch golf, but will video game players watch games?", and points out the failures (UPN's previously mentioned CG sitcom Game Over, an "esoteric take on gaming culture [which] didn't last long. Amid dismal ratings, UPN yanked the show off the air earlier this month.") alongside more long-running shows such as TechTV's X-Play (the writer notes "...enough inside jokes to please the hardcore gamers, but listen closely enough and you may detect an almost mocking tone.")
'Game Over' was on UPN? I liked it, and it was canceld so quickly; I figured it had to be on Fox.
I like G4 TV, especially "10 Play" which generally does a top ten list and includes games going all the way back to NES.
They recently did the top ten Star Wars games. The number one game, in my mind, is the best reason to own an XBox - Knights of the Old Republic. By the way, if you have this game, and XBox Live, they made new content available about a month ago - 3 new light sabre crystals and a space station.
bhj
If you want me to watch a show, you're going to have to give it to me free on the internet, and support it with ads or something. Stick commercials in the middle of the stream which must be played, and tell your advertisers I'm watching them (I'll probably be playing a bit of tetris at the time, but they don't need to know that.) It's not like I pay attention to the average commercial anyway.
Television is going to be with us for a long time, but eventually it'll be eclipsed by video on demand, delivered over the internet, or by your ISP in the case of the cable companies. Video-enabled set top boxes with built in DOCSIS cable modems are being developed left and right...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is an unsurpising result if you think it through.
I would assert the success of a TV show about an activity is inversely propotional to the ease of engaging in that activity at a moment's notice.
Consider travel shows - I can hardly travel 600 miles to visit San Antonio at the drop of a hat. So if there is a show on about what there is to do in San Antonio, I may watch it to see what I might do when I have the time to go there.
Consider fishing shows - going fishing takes a degree of prep time and travel time. I might not have the time to go fishing today, but I might have the time to watch a show about it to fix my Jones'in for fishing.
Consider golf shows - if I am a golfer and I come across a golf show, I might look out the window and say "I'll bet I could get a quick nine in before dinner", but then again, I might not.
Now, in light of those examples, consider a video game show. I am ALREADY in front of the TV - you know, where I would have to be to play a video game. Now, which am I more likely to do if I am a hard-core gamer - watch a TV show about gaming, or switch on my console AND ACTUALLY PLAY A GAME?
In short, who is likely to watch a show about video game play? Just how lazy do you have to be to watch (passively) a show about an activity that is itself fairly passive?
And as far as watching to pick up tips and tricks - there is a better solution for that for most gamers. I'll give you a hint - you're soaking in it!
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I never watched Game Over, so I can't comment on the quality of the show, but the premise is straight out of some hairbrained marketing type's head. Take all the cliches about games, put them in one show, and the gamers will watch. That shows they don't understand what makes games so fun. The show itself may or may not have been clever, but the premise was never going to get the attention of gamers, and it certainly wasn't going to get the attention of anyone else. The problem is that gaming is such a diverse field. You have RPG's and RTS's and FPS's, etc., that no one show can (or should) encapsulate all that. The article is right: people play games because they are interactive, and tv can never be that. But the eyes of the gamers are not completely gone. Its mentioned in the article that sometimes people are so into a game they keep playing, sacrificing tv time. As the digital time shifting of programming becomes more widespread, people will start watching tv again, but after they finish their game, instead of foregoing it altogether.
The only thing I hate more than hypocrites are people who hate hypocrites.
That missing element is of course, quality. Game Over was horrible horrible horrible. I barely made it through one episode.
The videogame review shows have their place. They have the advantage over magazines and websites becaseu they can actually show the game being played while they talk about it.
Also, I think that interviews with creators and other behind the scenes type of material work very well for television. So there is a place for it, but it needs that element of quality and to offer something you can't get as well from a magazine or a web site.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Game Over was dumb. Awful. It just tried waaay too hard. Refering to a mall in "Vice City" does not equal a fanbase of hardcore gamers.
X-Play is much better. It succeeds where other review shows (including Extended Play, its previous life): It's actually entertaining. Most of the other review shows I've seen have nothing but review after review with the occaisonal joke thrown in - it's like watching a gadget show review printer after printer. X-Play has sketches and stuff, usually at least one per episode, along with segments like "Uncomfortable Moments in Gaming" ("The Horror of Song," a piece on awful videogame music, holds a special place in my heart ^_^). It's much more fun to watch then any other video game show I've seen (I don't have G4 though).
Game Over marketed to kids, but was foul, unimaginative drivel. We barely made it through the first episode, and that was mostly due to the promotional ads which were clean and decently cut. The show was abysmal.
The Simpsons works because it's smart. Reboot (rest in peace) worked because it was innocent and forthright.
Game Over didn't know what it was, and figured that "computer generated" and "shocking" was enough.
It's not. Good riddance.
Think about it this way...if you're going to make a show that targets a specific group, you have two options. First, you can show them the most baddass members of their group. Professional sports for the jocks, CSPAN for the political geeks, The Apprentice for the unemployed, etc. Second, you can create interesting drama around people that the group can identify with. This is basically every sitcom or whatever out there.
Here's the problem though: there aren't any games that are interesting to watch. I've seen some really awesome Q3 players play, and it's just that they have better accuracy, dodging, etc. It's not like a game of chess where you see a move and you realize that he's been planning that for six moves, now. If games evolve to the point where it's possible to be an absolute master, playing the game with such skill that it's impressive to watch, then I'm sure we'll see television coverage...until then, it's just a pipe dream.
The other option, creating drama, just won't work. The interesting people in computing are so tied to idealism and teenage angst that it just wouldn't be very watchable. Sure, I agree with RMS' viewpoints almost entirely, but watching that man on television regularly would kill me. Real-life hackers? They're so angsty any movie would have to be either totally unrealistic or totally annoying.
Emerson once observed that everything, even the railroads and the urban sprawl, would eventually become poetic...it's just that these things haven't been around long enough to get integrated into our common aesthetic. It's really the same thing with the hackers...they're pretty new to the scene, so society doesn't know how to deal with them yet; they become nothing more than an oddity, a cariacture. Perhaps as our culture becomes more and more dependent on technology these new stereotypes will become fleshed out to the point that there are interesting things to say about them in the context of news or drama, but we're just not there yet.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
That was the show from the NES era where an annoying kid dubbed "Johnny Arcade" gave obvious hints to last year's NES games to the worst MTV-style editing. Between segments they had a cartoon in which Max Force (Player One from NARC), some basketball player from Arch Rivals, Kuros from Wizards and Warriors (!) and Kwick the Tomato (!!) all in one cartoon, all trying to do something involving someone that I can't possibly bring myself to remember. All the characters were from Acclaim's NES and Gameboy product lines, but originated outside the company, making me wonder how they got the rights to them: NARC was a Williams arcade game, Arch Rivals was by Midway, Kwick was produced by some Japanese company and W&W was produced by Rare. Anyway, the show was exactly as bad as it sounds.
In its second incarnation the show turned into a gameshow, ala Starcade with one-fourth part Double Dare. Improved it greatly, well for what it was, but still forgettable.
But what about Captain N, and the various Super Mario Bros. shows? And Saturday Supercade, and the Saturday Morning Dragon's Lair and Pole Position cartoons, you ask?
I respond, you don't want to know. You know not of which you ask! Greater men than I have cracked under the pressure! You can't handle the truth!
They manage to cut the footage and hop between players well enough to keep things interesting enough to watch.
honestly, I think that most gaming shows focus too much on adding stuff to making it interesting instead of just making the footage quality enough for it to be interesting on its own merit.
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You sound like you're a Comcast customer.
:^)
Helpful tip: They actually have a special sub-basic Cable TV plan. They don't advertise it, but it covers the basic broadcast and local access channels.
The price? $13 a month.
Does it qualify you for the $15 discount on your Comcast Internet connection? Yes.
So, for $2 less per month, you could get a few local cable channels. Hey, it's always handy to have at least that.
And if you're lucky (like me) they'll forget to put on the right filter and you'll get full basic cable.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
The problem with video game shows is that they lack intelligent commentary that brings you in to the battle.
Take, for example, Football or Iron Chef.
There's constant running commentary and they have teams, TEAMS of people running around digging up statistical data and constantly trying to predict strategies and explain tactics. Tell me why the Chiefs needed to go for it on the 4th down. Tell me how this team was able to fake the pass, hand off the ball to a lineman, then have the lineman lateral the ball to an open man on the other side of the field BECAUSE the man was actually a quarterback for a division one college.
Do you think Iron Chef would be as interesting if it was just two guys cooking it out and then a panel of judges just say "it's tasty." No! You need Doctor Hattori telling you play by play what the chef is planning, what kinds of dishes he's making, what the difference is between Matsuba Crab and Watari crab, why they don't want to overcook the abalone, where this style of recipe originated from, etc.
The problem with these shows like G4's Arena is they're being produced by people that play less video games than the people that are watching the show. They know less and they're less capable. All they can do is Oooh and Ahh into the microphone dumbfounded then tell you "how bad Team Iron Ass Kicking schooled DemiDemon Dojo."
If (competitive) video game TV wants to take off they need an infrastructure of journalists, not unlike sports writers and commentators, to decompose the gameplay and present it to the audience so it is more than just "watching some guy play a video game."