If you like to play games, check out this web series.
Deep down, we all love games in some respect but it’s easy to get lost in the frills of lights, color, marketing! From sports jerseys to quarters in a pool table, money spent on fun is often intrinsically linked to a game in some way. And money is only the surface cost of the recreational aids we choose. There’s the time and energy devoted to pastimes once considered only for “kids”. When MMORPGs emerged, full-grown adults lost jobs due to the siren’s call of DING. Games make us feel rewarded and satisfied with ourselves. Tangible goals and achievements used to brighten the barren landscape of daily living.
Most of what I understand of gaming as an industry is tempered through the lens of Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade, an unconventional think tank of creativity and marketing based in Redmond, WA. Tycho’s way of phrasing things generally blows my mind about once or twice a year, on average. He provides consistently incisive perspectives that target the human element of gaming and amplify it for effect. Tycho, joined by his heterosexual life partner Gabe, also regularly appears in a PATV series called First 15 which I directed you to earlier.
Video games come in so many different formats it’s hard to like them all and yet Penny Arcade manages to play all the fields. Marketers of the marketers, they provide an environment that filters through all the nonsense and reduces all gaming to the fundamental question – is is fun? From innocent, easy games developed to help children with learning disabilities communicate are weighed on the same scale as the most recent megacorporate flagship release part IV. It’s a refreshing oasis in a world that is literally dedicated to horsing around.
If you don’t believe me, just watch this one video. It’s the First 15 for Crypt of the Necrodancer – a game I would never even glance at before but now I’m interested in playing. During the video you get to watch Gabe face something he admittedly sucks at and by the end he’s at least given it a fair chance. It blows my mind to watch human nature unfold like that. At the end, Gabe an Tycho summarize their opinions thusly:
“I think that’s something from a nightmare realm” – Gabe
“I want to invest some time in playing co-op by myself.” -Tycho
And yet the game itself is not crucified for not pleasing everybody. And trust me, some of the games they play are put on a cross and left to die – justly.