I caught up with Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe yesterday, the one-off BBC4 special that used the format of Screenwipe and Newswipe to tackle the video-game industry. A few brief thoughts on my own gaming life and the show itself after the jump:
I'm not really much of a gamer these days. I have a Playstation 3 that spends its days playing video files and Blu-ray discs, not games. The only game I own for the PS3 is Street Fighter IV, and I've only played it three times. I also own the original, chunkier Nintendo DS (with five games) that's proving itself a great dust-collector. The only game I ever played with much regularity was Brain Training. I also have a GameCube purchased cheaply on Ebay purely to play Super Mario Kart Double Dash a few years ago; the result of a recurring five-year itch to relive my Mario-related youth.
Yes, I'm from the generation that grew up with Mario on the Nintendo NES in the '80s, before gaming took-off culturally in the early-'90s -- fuelled by the rivalry between Nintendo's Super NES and Sega's Megadrive (Genesis for any Americans reading.) The era when everyone at school owned a Gameboy and the Tetris soundtrack resonated around every playground. I bought video-game magazines, saved up months of pocket money to buy the latest SNES cartridge, and was a devout fan of Channel 4's Gamesmaster.
My gaming life started to dwindle when Sony's Playstation arrived in the mid-'90s. I was only about 16 at the time, so I still had plenty of years left in me, but I just grew bored of that pastime. I was a Nintendo brat, so seeing Sony come to dominate the marketplace just didn't sit right with me, and when the mighty internet entered many households around '97... well, my gaming life turned to computing and more "serious" ways to channel my creativity. As a result, I grew less passionate about gaming and even the arrival of the Playstation 2, with its slicker graphics and DVD-playing ability, couldn't lure me back to the gaming teat. Strangely, as the technology and graphics got better, my interest levels dropped...
Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe was a mix of nostalgia for classic '70s/'80s games (the requisite clips of Pong and Space Invaders), acerbic observations on grungy gaming culture (particularly the furor in the media over violent games), clips of odious games like 50 Cent's ugly and violent tie-in, amusing '80s anecdotes from the Scottish duo of "Consolevania" (who reflected on the days when British nerds created homemade, eccentric games that competed with massive US and Japanese corporations), intriguing ideas from comedian Dara O'Briain (who noted that video-games are the only entertainment medium that will intentionally deny you a beginning-to-end experience unless YOU prove yourself worthy) and writer Graham Linehan (who spoke on the awful storytelling in games, then highlighted the few that are immeasurably improved by treating characters and plot with respect), and it also served as a kind of Cliffs Notes exercise for newbies by explaining what each gaming genre's all about -- from the obvious "beat 'em up" to the bad round of Scrabble-sounding "MMORPG".
I found it a very entertaining fifty minutes, mainly because I've always enjoyed hearing about video-games and have long lamented the absence of a decent TV show on the subject. I'm not passionate enough to read gaming websites/magazines for news and reviews these days, but I'd certainly tune into a TV show on the subject. A restyled Gameswipe (more closely following the review style of Screenwipe) would be welcomed, if this can be considered a means of testing the water. But I suspect the grumpy middle-aged bias of Gameswipe would be something "the kids" wouldn't like. If they even manage to find BBC4.
For me, as a 30-year-old with one foot in his youth and the other in middle-age, I'd certainly watch a full series of Gameswipe -- but perhaps Brooker's patented sarcasm would grow tiring after awhile? It's a bit too easy for Brooker to ridicule terrible games in the same way he spits venom at bad TV. The difference is that TV creeps into everyone's home and we can all feel disillusioned by appalling programming, and take consolation in hearing a timely rant from Brooker. But with games, people have to decide to buy the game and play it, so in most cases people know what they're getting and hearing a rant from a man pushing 40 fall on deaf ears, and only cement an opinion in the minds of people who haven't actually played the game themselves.
Really, Gameswipe would need more balance to be of any worth as a series, but I'm not sure Brooker's all that entertaining when he's being nice. It's not really his thing, is it? It's like Adolf Hitler putting his oratory talent to good use and doing an episode of Jackanory. In leaning on Brooker's cynical verbosity, a lot of Gameswipe chose to focus on the evils of gaming because there's more mileage in that for contentious clips, so I wound up feeling that 80% of games are distastefully violent, 10% are misunderstood by hack journalists, and 10% are fluffy fun your gran would enjoy. None of that's strictly true, but it's the feeling I was left with after seeing Gameswipe, because the show tended to focus on the grubbier aspects of gaming so much, because there's more comedy there. Shame, really. There are more cheerful and life-affirming avenues to investigate about gaming, but they mostly went unexplored here.
29 September 2009
BBC Four, 10pm
