Tagged: It’s Just Not Worth It

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 →

Anaesthetic! What operation!!

A Way to Scare Old People and Save Money

Anaesthetic! What operation!!
Anaesthetic! What operation!!

Got a letter from the Government the other day. A form letter as it goes. The kind of form letter that absolutely terrified my 80 year-old mother.

She’s an ex-Wren, ex-PA to Lord Mountbatten, now slightly demented due to a hospital trust that I won’t name that in my opinion mismanaged her discharges (yes, plural) following a kidney removal, aka her Nephrectomy

Mum lives on her own somewhere in Hampshire. Her husband, my step-father, died suddenly, in the kitchen one morning. I know where she lives, of course, because I am down looking after her for a while. I am down looking after for a while because the government hates old people.

The previous government loved hospitals and wanted all its pals in the “private sector” to love hospitals too. Hence, somewhere in Hampshire there is now a ‘Super Hospital’. This is ‘Super’ in the sense of “Oh my fuck, I am super angry at their utter disdain for old people!”

Mum’s operation was just before Xmas. I’m not going to go into the tale of how the Super Hospital tried to discharge her on Xmas Day – having said, on Xmas day, that it wasn’t going to. I am not going to go into that story yet.

I am going to make a note here about how the Hospital Trust sent a letter about a follow-up meeting from the department of Anaesthesia. To repeat, it’s a follow-up letter, sent to an old lady.

In part it reads:

Continue reading →

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.
Continue reading →

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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The Day the PR Person Failed

TerseI work providing coverage of the videogames industry. This means getting review copies of games among other things and then commissioning writers to review those games – or sometimes reviewing them myself. I’ve been doing this off and on since the late 1980s. Today I was quite taken aghast and aback by a response I received from a PR person…

We’re not a huge site with massive corporate sponsors but I’d like to think that we’re fair, rational and know that the review process is generally made of two elements:

Continue reading →

We are Excited… Zen Out

Alt for youI tend to read a lot of PR and marketing output for my job as an industry writer. I tend also to get rather uptight about the amount of psycho-dynamic language used to inspire me to jot a few words on the site. So, here’s my challenge to you…

Read the following without entering a blissful state of utter non-excitement. I’ll be adding to the list as soon as I can calm down. I am also excited to receive any additions that you might want to make in the comments.
Continue reading →

Amazing Things in My Industry #1

Kitty is not gormless. You believe in her.
Kitty is not gormless. You believe in her.

My industry is the video games industry – but I am absolutely certain that what follows (an attempt to flog things masked in heavy-handed irony) occurs in all sorts of other industries. This particular piece of flogging comes from that bastion of marketing dedication, The Guinness World Records.

Let me begin with a quote from the press release that accompanies this incredible image of lovely being used to flog the Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer’s Edition:

“Suggested Photo Caption: Iowa’s Elizabeth Bolinger, AKA Kitty McScratch, where she earned the title for ‘Most Prolific Dancing Game High Scorer’ with top scores in over 85 songs spanning across the Dance Central and Just Dance franchises. She’s featured in the Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer’s Edition out now. (Photo Credit Ryan Shude/Guinness World Records)”.

That is correct, it’s a suggested photo caption to be used in the event that you’re really, really incredibly lazy as well as brain dead enough to run an actual story about the kind of book that does indeed introduce to the world a record for…

“Most Prolific Dancing Game High Scorer”

Yes, if you ever need to be able to win a discussion of things that are not only not needed ever, by anyone, ever and which in fact take goodness, energy, honesty and hope out of the world, you can just say:

“Iowa’s Elizabeth Bolinger, AKA Kitty McScratch, who is ‘long-time fan of the Guinness World Records books’ and who ‘was first introduced to video games in the early 90’s by her father, who was immersed in the world of casual PC gaming.’

Don’t thank me. Thank Kitty McScratch and the  Guinness World Records.

 

 

The Old Bastard's Guide

How to Speak Proper Corporate – A Free Resource

The Old Bastard's Guide
What? That? Pffft!

Spending day after day reading and writing about people who are apparently in their jobs in order to communicate has inevitably lead me to distraction. Here are some of the reasons I think this is occurring.

I am listing them in no particular order other than when they strike me.

  • JULY 15th
    Vertical Mentoring Group: Seriously, this mean ‘Form’ or ‘Tutor’ group.
  • Going forward: this translates to “in the future” or, more specifically, “at some totally intangible point”. It is a replacement for the word ‘progress’, which is too weighed down with value qualifications.
  • I/we will effect an outcome: No you won’t mate, you will “Do” or rather you won’t. You will excrete more words.
  • That’s just not in our DNA: as per one Dennis Durkin, COO and CFO of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business. What he means here by using a simultaneously scientific, natural and permanent sounding piece of language is: “It’s not what we want you to think our company does”. It’s a replacement for the now derided “Mission Statement.
  • We architect our products: Again, Mr Durkin. No you don’t, you simply ‘make’.
  • Value Proposition: easily translated to ‘our product that we are selling you, for money that you give to us.”
  • Our People Resource: Again, Mr Durkin. He means “Staff” or “Human beings who work for us and have lives and families and don’t think of themselves as spreadsheet line items.”
  • Challenge: That means ‘Problem’. Not all problems have solutions and can therefore be simplified into ‘challenges’.
  • Ecosystem that we leverage: I must admit the sheer audacity of adopting a term like ‘ecosystem’ by any corporation that is divorced from ecosystems is bravura stuff. What is meant here is “our suppliers and clients”. But that phrase, once again, assumes a financial and legal transaction. Those things are unpleasant.
  • Experience: This means “Product that we sell to you for money that you earned.

More coming as soon as I become angered by them.

Of course, as my esteemed editor has pointed out: Get the readers to submit their personal ‘Proper Corporate’ terms for translation.

Okay, send me an email at: royston@gashead.net with the subject line: ‘Please Translate this Utter Bollocks’ and I’ll see what I can do.