Category: MediaWatch

When Games Marketing Gives Up

Dontcareanymore
The logo
“Videogames” is (sic) the story-telling, populist yet also artistic medium of the 21st Century. Or, when in the big leagues, it’s the production of can’t give a shit redeployments of old tat followed rapidly by the redundancies of most of the production team.

What doesn’t seem to suffer, what in fact appears to be able to coast along in a stinking miasma of tired, insultingly rote repuking of the same clichés is the marketing blurb from the USA’s major publishing players. Take for example Bethesda – which has some decent properties to sell and also the license for nostalgics-only WWII shooter, Wolfenstein.

For the uninitiated, Wolfenstein was an early First-Person Shooter game that has garnered a reputation akin to DW Griffiths cult-racist movie Birth of a Nation in that both are ancient and as such must be respected and gooped over by nostalgia fans. Continue reading →

The Plate has opinions too.

Quoting Toby Young

The Plate has opinions too.
The Plate has opinions too. Quote the plate.
Toby Young ran one of those non sequitur hit-begging pieces aimed at goading lefties and making the Right Wing crow and squawk and shriek in agreement at what passes for ideas in their world.

He uses George Orwell selectively to batter home a point about how dead George would have hated a prize that co-opted his name after he died being given to people who he may or may not have agreed with but we will never be in a position to know.

I like to call this technique ‘The Puppetry of the Corpse’

New Statesman’s Staggering Hit Beggary

New Statesman Burgers
Apt story for the death of the left

I write now as a lefty and not as someone whose day job is trying to get people to read the commercial website about video games (‘videogames’) that I edit. Sadly I find myself writing about this sad piece of hit-begging nonsense masquerading as economic analysis in the New Statesman magazine (Est 1913).

Diablo III is a popular product, famous in its Personal Computer (PC) gaming commercial niche. It is a game of dress up and pretend. It has a hokey premise and mildly exhilarating yet still very conservative (as are most video games produced by large publishers as opposed to the imaginative small indy makers) set of mechanics. It is played out by thousands of people who enjoy it and do no harm.

Recently its makers – Activision/Blizzard, an offshoot of Vivendi – decided to introduce real money auctions to this playground. This is a way to make more money from the harmless people playing the harmless game.
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Scaaaaary man...

Strangulation by Press and PR

Or how to frighten your staff into thinking that they’re in an abusive relationship…OK, so we asked a video game developer (D) what they were looking forward to in games in 2013 and what games stuff had been interesting in 2012. We sent a lovely email.

They panicked obviously thinking that we were going to use that information to destroy the industry…

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An Advertisment is Not a Documentary

LesterThe Verge is a tech site run by Vox Media in the United States of America. It is launching its games news site called, for some reason, ‘Polygon’. Those are the facts. Now, as ever when it comes to commerce and journalism, things get fuzzy.

Let’s watch this advert about for what Vox would like us to believe is ‘documentary’ called Press Reset: The Story of Polygon about the making of the advertising-driven website covering video games at the bottom of this piece.

Certainly, as another strand of the entertainment complex, the video game industry is worth celebrating. I agree. Some video games are good. Many people who make video games are good too. Celebration is what annual, voted on awards shows are for. It is not what news and reviews and interviews are for. Those are there to inform (maybe entertain) readers and, in the case of video games coverage, consumers.

Some people who write about people who make video games, who review games and who do interviews (me, I do that) are okay too. Some of us and some of what we do are necessary to inform consumers of video games about those products. Some of us can also be of value in informing game makers where they have progressed or regressed the industry from which we all make money. But, when all is said and done, we hacks, writers, keepers of journals and blogs are largely there to provide a service to our readers.

As I was told early in my career, “It’s great that you want to right a novel, the door to your house is through the exit of this office. I’ll buy a copy of your book when it comes out. Now, tell the readers whether this widget is any good.”

Times have changed a great deal since then. The New Games Journalism has much to say about this. From a “Manifesto” drawn up in 2004 by Keiron Gillen, who stated in the piece that:

“If Games Journalism is just a job to you, you really shouldn’t be doing it. The word should be “vocation”.”

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Whooping Olympic Hell

WhooopBig Ben is probably still ringing in London to herald the start of the XXX Olympiad. The bell began to toll at 08:12. Radio 4 played it, but there was another sound played too. A terrible, horrible sound. A sound like hyenas discovering, finally, a leader and worshipping it… Whooping.

One of the things I’ve liked about the British – the English, Welsh and Scottish at least – over the years is that they do not ‘Whoop’ or ‘Holla’. I suppose that, given I was born in England, that should be “We don’t Whoop”. I’ll be plain, since returning to the island after many years away, I feel unconnected from ‘Britishness’ or ‘Englishness’. The world is just more interesting than that.

What happened when Big Ben began what I’m sure will soon be called “Belling”, is much, much less interesting in every way.

It happened, however, in London this morning. The mighty, historic, stoic, strong and occasionally comforting sound of Big Ben was washed into the air by the sound of “Whoop!”
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Toby Young: Disability Back Pedal

Good old Toby Young. The Spectator columnist and Free School advocate has had some views on inclusion and disability. They were ill thought out and much amended.

The long and short though is that Mr Young feels that nasty Politically Correct school additions such as ramps not only means that disabled kids get to go to classes, it also means that disability gets in and probably infects the school. The infection is Inclusion.

My own daughter was heavily disabled and was confined to a wheelchair but also had access to mainstream education in Sydney. She or rather we and her school carers and friends used ramps… a lot. Ergo, I find Mr Young’s views to be unpleasant, stupid and offensive.

So, here’s a tiny little bit of criticism.

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The Least Honest Piece of TV Ever?

Thought UnprovokedThe video you can see after the break is described as, ‘The most honest three and a half minutes of television, EVER…’.

It shows “the new HBO series The Newsroom explaining why America’s Not the Greatest Country Any Longer… But It Can Be.” Yes, once more Aaron Sorkin manages to tailor more new clothes for the emperor.

This is apparently classifiable as thought provoking stuff. What thoughts, other than, “Isn’t that a speech from Mr Smith Goes to Washington or some other Frank Capra movie and one thing that most nations need is a memory which isn’t drenched in sentimentality?”

Or maybe the thought, “When was this period in American history when the USA public was more informed?”

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Zombie Counter – Join In!

ZombiesI like boingboing.net for a lunchtime read. But I’ve grown bored of the rather twee reliance on Zombies for story references. But was I wrong?

I went to find out by the simply unscientific method of carrying out an internet search using the term: ‘Zombie site:xxxx.xxx’. The results were results. I decided to check other sites out, sites that you might expect and sites that you might not (UK’s National Health Service site? Oh, yes).

So, let’s see if NHS.uk could give Zombie.com a run for its money. You’ll be SHOCKED! SURPRISED yadda yadda yadda…

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