Grit your teeth and let those irritating adverts pass - they may be the key to attracting new gamers and keeping the games we love
Three days moving flat and five days gluing a rubber snout to your face and claiming to be a lizardman takes a lot from you, so it isn't surprising that I haven't watched a lot of television lately. The fact that a building company dropped half a mile of flats in a direct line from my aerial to the transmitter didn't help much either, so it's fair to say that I've missed out on a lot of television this past year. Now that I'm blessed with an aerial socket that actually works (and a fridge that doesn't stink of rancid milk, and flatmates who don't leave entire baguettes floating in dish water, which largely sums up why I moved in the first place) I've finally been able to discover that Nintendo's horrifying trend in advertising continues unabated.
No other form of media has to put up with this condescending bullshit. Where normally you'd be thrown a half-minute handful of reasons to hit the cinema, in the world of Nintendo, a movie trailer would consist of a group of asinine cretins guffawing and ribbing like the extras in a second-rate musical, followed by a mother and child enthusing about the whizz-bang effects for the kids to coo at, and how it was gentle enough for Gran to enjoy, and how the protagonist taught her the importance of staying true to yourself. And then Professor Layton stops the film halfway through so they can solve a puzzle.
It's this need for justification that really irritates me, because what it boils down to is that video games aren't allowed to be fun for the sake of fun. If they aren't exercising your brain, pumping your arms or keeping your social life afloat then there has to be an ulterior motive for playing, like deciding who does the washing up, which for the benefit of any non-UK gamers is literally the reason why two people are playing New Super Mario Bros Wii in a current advert. I wish I was kidding, but this is the state of play for less-than-hardcore gamers who don't want to be labelled as such.
Worse still is the UK advert for Bowser's Inside Story, a game that mashes Rampage into an RPG with two plumbers manning the valves for maximum Godzilla-sized fun. There's adventuring to do, we're told by today's motherly shut-in, but also some puzzling. Sorry, what? 'But' there's some puzzling? What the hell does 'but' mean? Is she so ashamed of enjoying a whimsical adventure that she has to justify it with puzzles? Nobody minds that Transformers or Avatar are essentially brainless with no real need to switch on your noggin, because no-one expects them to be anything more than a few hours' worth of mindless distraction. For the Wii generation, this apparently isn't enough to justify their new hobby.
But the sad truth is that all of this condescension is completely necessary, and may be one of the most incisive decisions Nintendo has made for the gaming industry. Mario has emerged from the Wii generation as hardcore as he has ever been, a fact that will become apparent to anyone who plays his games, regardless of how they are marketed. People can claim all they like that they're trying to be social or training their brain, but they're still popping fireflowers at Koopas and calculating the entry point of a turn to drop a banana peel at, and Mario is still the Godfather of gaming - fatherly and friendly, but ready to throw you to the lava pit if you press so much as one button out of turn.
What I despise isn't the way that gaming is denigrated, but the fact that this approach is necessary in the first place to (hopefully) drag gaming out of its ghetto. This is a necessary step on the road to mainstream acceptance, a way of normalising traditional video games by changing perceptions and weaning new gamers off of content-lite casual fluff. Like comic books - which in the case of Marvel and DC are as tangled as ten years' worth of Christmas lights - gaming is still insular enough that we tend to forget how mystifyingly scary a 16-button controller can be, and that dying instantly in Modern Warfare can be jarringly unpleasant instead of an expected part of the game. Having witnessed someone throw their Wii remote into the air in a blind panic during a session of WarioWare, it's easy to see why Cooking Mama got its foot in the door, despite being essentially the same as WarioWare but fifty times slower and painfully drawn out in every possible way. Swapping lightning reactions for sluggish hand-holding is a poor trade-off, but when you don't know Mudkips from Master Chief it's the only way to remove the stress of the angry swarm of sounds and images coming from your TV.
And there's the key word: stress. Video games are like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket; they beat you and harass you, they punish you for not following their rules, pace or skilfulness, and generally favour those with a faintly masochistic streak. Most video games are a pleasant challenge in the same way that Everest is; invigorating for the seasoned pro, yet so insurmountable to novices that they're barely going to consider more than a brisk walk around the foothills. It isn't just non-interest that keeps people from gaming, it's seeing the same thing from a completely different perspective. It's no wonder that games are being marketed like the Andrex puppy when they're more like the Rottweiler that savaged next door's cat.
And that's why we need these adverts. They're simpering and condescending, but if we can get just one octogenarian to upload a speedrun of New Super Mario Bros, then they've done their job. And it'll be a better world for gamers everywhere.
Three days moving flat and five days gluing a rubber snout to your face and claiming to be a lizardman takes a lot from you, so it isn't surprising that I haven't watched a lot of television lately. The fact that a building company dropped half a mile of flats in a direct line from my aerial to the transmitter didn't help much either, so it's fair to say that I've missed out on a lot of television this past year. Now that I'm blessed with an aerial socket that actually works (and a fridge that doesn't stink of rancid milk, and flatmates who don't leave entire baguettes floating in dish water, which largely sums up why I moved in the first place) I've finally been able to discover that Nintendo's horrifying trend in advertising continues unabated.
No other form of media has to put up with this condescending bullshit. Where normally you'd be thrown a half-minute handful of reasons to hit the cinema, in the world of Nintendo, a movie trailer would consist of a group of asinine cretins guffawing and ribbing like the extras in a second-rate musical, followed by a mother and child enthusing about the whizz-bang effects for the kids to coo at, and how it was gentle enough for Gran to enjoy, and how the protagonist taught her the importance of staying true to yourself. And then Professor Layton stops the film halfway through so they can solve a puzzle.
It's this need for justification that really irritates me, because what it boils down to is that video games aren't allowed to be fun for the sake of fun. If they aren't exercising your brain, pumping your arms or keeping your social life afloat then there has to be an ulterior motive for playing, like deciding who does the washing up, which for the benefit of any non-UK gamers is literally the reason why two people are playing New Super Mario Bros Wii in a current advert. I wish I was kidding, but this is the state of play for less-than-hardcore gamers who don't want to be labelled as such.
Worse still is the UK advert for Bowser's Inside Story, a game that mashes Rampage into an RPG with two plumbers manning the valves for maximum Godzilla-sized fun. There's adventuring to do, we're told by today's motherly shut-in, but also some puzzling. Sorry, what? 'But' there's some puzzling? What the hell does 'but' mean? Is she so ashamed of enjoying a whimsical adventure that she has to justify it with puzzles? Nobody minds that Transformers or Avatar are essentially brainless with no real need to switch on your noggin, because no-one expects them to be anything more than a few hours' worth of mindless distraction. For the Wii generation, this apparently isn't enough to justify their new hobby.
But the sad truth is that all of this condescension is completely necessary, and may be one of the most incisive decisions Nintendo has made for the gaming industry. Mario has emerged from the Wii generation as hardcore as he has ever been, a fact that will become apparent to anyone who plays his games, regardless of how they are marketed. People can claim all they like that they're trying to be social or training their brain, but they're still popping fireflowers at Koopas and calculating the entry point of a turn to drop a banana peel at, and Mario is still the Godfather of gaming - fatherly and friendly, but ready to throw you to the lava pit if you press so much as one button out of turn.
What I despise isn't the way that gaming is denigrated, but the fact that this approach is necessary in the first place to (hopefully) drag gaming out of its ghetto. This is a necessary step on the road to mainstream acceptance, a way of normalising traditional video games by changing perceptions and weaning new gamers off of content-lite casual fluff. Like comic books - which in the case of Marvel and DC are as tangled as ten years' worth of Christmas lights - gaming is still insular enough that we tend to forget how mystifyingly scary a 16-button controller can be, and that dying instantly in Modern Warfare can be jarringly unpleasant instead of an expected part of the game. Having witnessed someone throw their Wii remote into the air in a blind panic during a session of WarioWare, it's easy to see why Cooking Mama got its foot in the door, despite being essentially the same as WarioWare but fifty times slower and painfully drawn out in every possible way. Swapping lightning reactions for sluggish hand-holding is a poor trade-off, but when you don't know Mudkips from Master Chief it's the only way to remove the stress of the angry swarm of sounds and images coming from your TV.
And there's the key word: stress. Video games are like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket; they beat you and harass you, they punish you for not following their rules, pace or skilfulness, and generally favour those with a faintly masochistic streak. Most video games are a pleasant challenge in the same way that Everest is; invigorating for the seasoned pro, yet so insurmountable to novices that they're barely going to consider more than a brisk walk around the foothills. It isn't just non-interest that keeps people from gaming, it's seeing the same thing from a completely different perspective. It's no wonder that games are being marketed like the Andrex puppy when they're more like the Rottweiler that savaged next door's cat.
And that's why we need these adverts. They're simpering and condescending, but if we can get just one octogenarian to upload a speedrun of New Super Mario Bros, then they've done their job. And it'll be a better world for gamers everywhere.
