09.24.08

Cheer Down

Posted in Gaming, Rants, Site News at 5:12 am

I really wanted an excuse to call attention to this, though given the massive rant I’m about to unleash, I wish it were under better circumstances (even though it is still somewhat appropriate).

So. We Cheer. You should know a couple of things about my attitude towards this game. The first is that when it was first announced, my reaction was somewhere between nonexistent to active apathy. A cheerleader game? Honestly, why? The more I thought about it, though, the more sense it made. It’s definitely a new concept (kind of; Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents are, technically, the same concept but more abstracted). It looks to make good use of the Wii’s motion controls. And, now that the track list is revealed, it looks to have some good music in it, too. (Mostly I’m wondering how BT’s “Godspeed” can be an effective cheerleading song, having no vocals and being a little too ambient, but that’s offset by it’s freaking BT.) Now that it’s closer to release, I might give it at least a rent.

Of course, now that I’ve said that, half of you are already waiting for me to finish my rant so you can get to the comments box to call me gay. At least one of you probably skipped down to the comments box to do so, made the comment, and have now returned to finish reading. (Congratulations, you’ve just gold-medaled in the Long Jump To Conclusions.) Either I’m gay for wanting to play a cheerleading game, I’m gay for expressing interest in a Wii game, I’m gay for owning a Wii still when the rest of the ‘hardcore’ community has moved on to the latest craptacular World War II shooter (now with authentic Axis uniform patches!), or I’m gay for daring to have an opinion that differs from the ‘hardcore’ crowd’s rush to judgment. There’s also the whackjob willing to call me gay for having the letter ‘e’ in my name, but let’s just ignore him.

It’s been over thirty years since the first home video game consoles hit the American market, and in that time the hobby has grown from something extremely niche to something approaching, but not quite making it all the way into, the mainstream. Video games are still just barely on the fringe of society, a fact which has caused some folks who have stuck with it since those humble beginnings to experience an existential crisis. They rely very much on games to define their self-image, and now that all three companies are branching out into areas where gaming traditionally has not tread (and you’re a fool if you think Sony and MS aren’t working tirelessly to grab some of the so-called ‘casual’ market), these people are finding that they don’t fit with where their chosen hobby is going. It’s unhealthy and wrong and it’s sadly not going to change anytime soon.

The thing is, gaming today is going through the same kind of experimentation phase that it did in the mid 80s and early 90s. New technology is making new kinds of games possible, or easier, to develop and implement properly, and as a result companies are throwing out lots of new ideas at the public to see what sticks. In the 8-bit era, it was platformers, scrolling shooters, and block puzzle games. The same thing is happening today, but on a far, far wider scale and scope as the technology involved becomes not just more advanced, but more diverse and more capable. Moreover, with bread-and-butter franchises like Mario, Metal Gear, Halo, and the like, the companies have the resources to put ideas which might not be blockbusters through to completion, so that if they’re hits, they can then do it up even bigger in the next version.

So why am I getting flak for wanting to play We Cheer? What really separates it from gunning down Covenant in Halo 3 or taking out targets in Assassin’s Creed? Is there something inherently different between that or storming Normandy for the umpteenth time in Band of Brothers, or following Fictional Military Plot #256 in Call of Duty 4? What makes it somehow less nerdy than jacking cars in Liberty City, or wrecking them in Paradise City?

Nothing. There is nothing at all different. At the core of the activity I am still playing a video game, and I am still being a nerd. The stigma still exists and in equal amounts. What has changed is that far, far more people are being nerds on a more regular basis than ever before. When that number gets as close to 100% of the world’s population as it’s going to get, then there won’t be a stigma. Of course, I’ll have been dead for centuries by that point.

Take another relatively new medium, film. There are people who would differentiate what kinds of people go to see what kinds of movies; for example, horror flicks attract a different crowd than romances. Action movies are generally seen as less weighty fare than straight dramas, and arty films are just as far beyond. Of course, at its core, it’s still “going to see a movie”. With few exceptions (yet very, very notable ones), films these days are not nearly as divisive and schism-inducing (let’s overlook the whole dustup over The Passion of the Christ, shall we?). If someone says, “Well, I hated Juno,” (for example– I personally liked it) it’s not going to cause overdue calamity within the context of the discussion– people generally accept that it’s just a difference of opinion and move on, and anyone who gets hung up on the statement had damn well better be Ellen Page or Diablo Cody, otherwise they’re just being obnoxious.

Go into a game store, however, and say that you hated Braid. Or Call of Duty. Or Halo, or any other big-budget, seemingly universally-liked game. If the clerk doesn’t shun you, you can bet that someone in the store will probably react as if you had just said “Hey, check this out, I threw a burlap sack of day-old kittens into a trash compactor just to hear them scream. It’s my ringtone, wanna hear?”. The concept of a difference of opinion does not exist within the so-called community. If you say you like games, you are somehow magically obligated to like the games everybody likes, and are further required to shun the games that everybody thinks are stupid.

You wanna know what one of my favorite movies is? Hudson Hawk. Released in 1990, it was a massive box-office bomb and is generally considered one of the worst movies Bruce Willis has starred in. I certainly won’t say it’s Oscar material, but I also think it’s a riot and very fun to watch. However, it’s got a 5.3 on IMDB. Does that mean that I can’t like it? Of course not. Unlike games, movies are somehow ‘allowed’ to be enjoyable even when they’re not super-stellar. Does the existence of Hudson Hawk somehow cheapen The Sixth Sense, Live Free or Die Hard, or Sin City? Of course not!

And yet let’s take a look at one of my favorite games, which coincidentally is getting a DS remake this week: Rhapsody. It’s not a stellar game; my biggest complaint about the original was that it was too easy and too short. The reviews of the time found it to be anywhere from dismal to sub-average. Even the biggest fans of NIS-developed games tend to take a dim view of the game. And as much fun as I had with it (because, let’s face it, the story was pretty hilarious), you’d be hard-pressed to find folks who would even admit to owning it, let alone liking it. The reason for this is that, for lack of a better analogy, it’s a romantic comedy film whereas the vocal majority of gamers are horror/sci-fi movie lovers.

There’s another important point to raise: “vocal majority” versus “actual majority”. We can safely assume that there are far more people playing games than there are those talking about them in the world. The problem is that those who don’t talk might hold wildly differing opinions from those fanatical enough about their games to participate in discussions, either online or in the flesh. Since they stay silent, their opinions fall by the wayside, and all that’s left is the very loud folks who decry anything not fitting their demands, however absurd they may be. The loudest become professional game reviewers, which you’d think would be good– except it’s not.

My mom always gets very unnerved when I talk to her about how games and (more pertinently to her experience) movies get reviewed. “I don’t want anyone to tell me how to think,” she says. That’s really the way that reviews are being received these days, which is a shame because quite frankly it’s a sickening subversion of the purpose of a review. The gaming industry and the marketing groups see reviews as further promotion, as benchmarks for the abstract “success” or “failure” of a game. That’s not what they were meant to be, and I can only hope that someone’s hooked a generator up to Gene Siskel– all that rolling in his grave he’s bound to be doing could power Cleveland.

A review, at its most basic level, is the opinion of a trusted public critic on his or her perceptions of a work’s quality. The review is not intended to convey what that critic wants the public to think about the work, but simply what that critic thought. To make an informed opinion about a work, be it a $6+ movie ticket or a $60+ game disc, the prospective consumer has to take into account not just the review’s content, but its source and context. Furthermore– and perhaps most importantly– the review is not the word of God, and the viewer/player has the right and in fact obligation to hold that reviewer’s seeming mistake against that reviewer in the future. Put another way, there’s a reason I used to make sure I know who, specifically, wrote a movie review in the Buffalo News whenever I was looking to see what I wanted to see with my sister. Some reviewers were in agreement with my opinions more often than others. After a certain number of ‘misses’, I started taking that reviewer’s opinion into account– backwards (ie “L.Lawliet said that Attack of the 50 ft. Cheese Danish was a ‘must-see masterpiece of fine cinema’, and he’s been wrong ninety times before, so I suppose I shouldn’t waste my time or money”).

Given that information, let’s go back to Hudson Hawk. I’d said that it has a 5.3 on IMDB; this score is the average of everyone who’s come to the site and given it a ranking. Presumably it’s more or less the aggregate of the world’s thought on the film, though in reality it’s mostly just the people who are most vocal about it, one way or another (“it was awesome” or “this sucked hardcore donkey sack”). The fact that its score is just barely over the median of the range (from 0.0-10.0) indicates, to me, that the world is pretty evenly split on the film. Yet in the end, I am under no obligation to score it that way in my own estimation, nor am I reasonably expected to do so. (I’d give it a 7, in point of fact.) I am aware of the prevailing opinion, though I may not necessarily be influenced by it.

Take another example, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It’s generally held to be one of the greatest games of all time; at its debut ten years ago, it was the highest-rated game of all time, and received nearly universal acclaim. I hated it, and I still take a dim view of it and any 3-D Zelda game. Now, granted, it’s a good game, but I’m as guilty of the sin of wanting more of the same as anyone else: I was expecting a 2-D style Zelda game, and I thought that OoT changed too much of what made the series distinctive. Obviously I am in the minority in this opinion. Does this invalidate my opinions on any other game? In reality, no; but in the delusional fantasyland of enforced conformity that the vocal majority of gamers inhabit, yes. Very much yes. And this is the root of the problem.

This might seem a little hypocritical, given that I just said that a reviewer is at the mercy of every opinion he’s expressed, but I’m not a professional reviewer when I walk into a store, nor am I even one on this site. People in the community lend equal weight to the opinions of reviewers and random people, which isn’t the way it’s supposed to work. Remember that I said that you had to weigh the opinion based on the source. 99% of the world doesn’t know me from Adam. My opinion, to those people, should therefore be utterly, completely meaningless; which also fails to take into account the vocal majority’s insistence that somehow I’m wrong. There are no more gray areas: either everyone must be made to like the game in question, or it somehow cheapens the game. A patently absurd idea, of course, but then again let’s not labor under the impression that the people engaged in this kind of activity are burdened with an excess of common sense. All they know is that their current favorite game is being trashed on the internet by people who they don’t know but must necessarily be wrong because they’re not agreeing with them.

Let me say this, then: I don’t begrudge anyone’s opinion. Lots of folks like GTA or Call of Duty, and that’s fine. Just don’t expect me to play them just because “everyone else” is. As I’ve said many times before, sixty zillion people can, in fact, be wrong.

Now, let’s go back (tracing the long and meandering path of this tirade) to We Cheer. It’s a rhythm game with an unorthodox control scheme and a somewhat non-masculine bent in its presentation and visuals. Objectively, from a gameplay and presentation perspective, it resembles nothing so much as Para Para Paradise. I know I’ve said this before, but can’t lay my hands on where I said it; however, I stand firm in my belief that Para Para is perfect for the Wii. This is, as stated, basically Para Para, and thus I’m interested. Sure, it might be slightly, well, unconventional, but it’s just a game. More than that, it’s what I want to play. So it’s getting a rental, at least. I might not talk much about it, but only because there’s few people with whom I could talk civilly about it. I’ve always said that making judgments about someone based on the types of games they play is always a bad idea, and I think this proves it perfectly.

That said, I probably still won’t play Doki Doki Majo Shinpan because the concept kinda makes me feel like I need a cold shower. Though I don’t begrudge people the enjoyment they may get out of witch-touching, it’s just not my thing. Much like, oh, I don’t know, being an Allied soldier. Again.

So, I guess this means I’m getting back into doing regular (kinda) blog posts. I missed being able to launch into these long discussions with you folks. I’m probably going to drop the whole LJ side as well, and just maintain that as a meme repository or some other thing. We shall see. Let’s shoot for the next post to be Thursday or Friday. After that, we’ll see where we go with this.

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