#5. We Can't Shake the "Lonely, Anti-Social Virgin" Stereotype
I like to think that something like the existence of 5punk is enough to disprove this. Not just demonstrably by our ever-increasing contribution to the planet's population, but how most of us have made real, actual friends here.
Since it's a game site, that rather removes any stigma about us being gamers, but we've also worked hard at removing any other stigmata about our other hobbies and encouraged discussion about them. What's left is people, interacting socially, who happen to have an interest in games.
#4. The Industry Thinks We're All 17-Year-Old Douchebags
They do, (although I'd put it more in the 11-14 year-old age group where you've discovered masturbation as a hobby, but before you decide drinking on the streets and smashing up cars is more fun) and every preview video I see which highlights kill streaks, blood splattering or an awkward sex scene makes me cringe internally at the image they project to outsiders.
While not immune, it seems European developers seem to think their audience is a little more grown up, and use this kind of thing less, ironically (like the DMA GTAs) or as some sort of statement (The Witcher).
Looking through the PSN stores in the respective territories is quite eye-opening. While the UK one has stuff subdivided by console, types we'd recognise (action, rpg, etc) and so on the Japanese version has at least
three different categories for those creepy games where you select from a series of conversation options in order to elicit a response from a cartoon cutie. Browsing through the US wallpapers reveals an entire category dedicated to "babes" - it even has its
own icon. Given this is all stuff you pay for, it's clear what the makers think of their audience, but also depressingly suggests that it's working.
#3. Video Game Storytelling is Still at the Level of B Movies
Perhaps, although it's not entirely a problem, or one of their own making. Games which try to have a grown-up, engaging story are often either roundly mocked or actually aren't very much fun to play.
I like a bit of mindless B-movie action to unwind and anyone who considers them a shameful guilty pleasure you can't admit to probably needs to get over themselves. Still some of them are
embarrassingly bad, in the same way as point #4, in a really shit cliché-without-irony MW2 way, or in an I-don't-actually-care-about-any-of these-fucks FFXIII way.
Games where it's possible for you make the story, even if that story isn't the one it was supposed to be, which as 5punkers we seem adept at finding, can be much more satisfying than films, because you're the star and the other characters in the game react to you and your actions accordingly. Nobody played Oblivion, or Thief or Hitman the same way and we all have our own memories of our
own particular story.
#2. We're Still Obsessed by Shiny Gadgets
(The point was about the bitching over technologies used in a game, like less-than-full resolution on XBox titles)
The floating apple vid showed we're not all like this, and can have a laugh at the minority that are. As PC gamers, though we do tend to scoff at the supposedly crappy console versions, even though they are rarely in any way inferior enough to sensibly damage anyone's enjoyment. Many of
us like to play older titles, though - often ones that we know to be horrifically broken - it isn't all about new advances and graphical excellence and we accept that every new game can't be a new Half-Life, even if that does make us less excited than if it was.
#1. We Have Some Serious Entitlement Issues
I no longer want everything for free, perhaps as I've aged I get the sense of satisfaction from buying and owning a game that I used to get from ripping a CD-load of titles and never playing half of them. I've even gone back and re-bought games I wasn't sure I had legitimately and even some I
was to save me looking for the CD.
Game piracy seemed different in the old days. £10 for a game on my C64 was maximum two games a year for birthday and Christmas and they were often atrocious. Inflation calculators tell me that's £20-25 in today's money which doesn't sound so bad, but it was a lot of money for a kid at the time.
My reckoning is that the cost of entertainment has increased far ahead of inflation - which is largely a measure of how much everyday basics cost, most of which are price-fixed to make things look better than they really are.
Here's me with my last 1p after spending it all in the arcades on holiday:
No more games for another year for you, Goldilocks.
So we copied games a lot, as you could rent them from most video shops. My Dad was fully complicit, first letting me use his tape decks, then building a circuit board to connect and provide power to two 1530 Datassettes. Games magazines
openly advertised piracy devices which would "freeze" memory contents and stream it off to tape/disk. We did it with music cassettes and taped stuff off the radio, since
clearly that was why tape decks were invented. It was widespread, almost universal - nobody seemed to think there was anything wrong with it.
That was when the personal computer games market pretty much crashed. Studios closed, there were no major releases anymore, only 1.99 specials from Mastertronic. To my shame, I wasn't above copying those, either.
Later came the cartridge years, which mostly meant you had to pay up, rent, or just not have stuff, but with the birth of the internet and games moving back to optical media came the massive backlash, where people who knew where to look could get you
anything for free. It was kind of an addicting thing, not just games but music and movies too, even before most of them were released, and in increasingly higher quality.
Now, there's DRM and online registering - it seems like some producers treat
all their customers as potential pirates. I don't generally mind it until it goes wrong, but it's still a bit offensive as a paying customer.
The other tack is the "think of the poor developers" option. Trying to make gamers feel a link between them and the makers of the game, offering greatly reduced prices or "pay what you want" deals. The author seems to think that the Humble Indie Bundle deal demonstrates failure, given the average price paid was a mere 10% of the normal one and a good number of people refused to pay at all. What's not clear is whether they actually achieved ten times as many sales as they would have ordinarily, thus negating the price reduction - the people who stole it clearly wouldn't have ever paid anything for it anyway, even 1p was too much for them (although I think it was actually a $1 minimum).
I admit I've been moaning about new games costing a lot recently, particularly those over £30, even though from the 90s through to a year or two ago I'd routinely pay £40 or more. It's because I have less money of course, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse to pirate them anymore, I'll just not have them, wait until they're cheaper (which seems to now happen quicker than it ever did) or play some of the many games I already have.
