Gaming PR 666

No, fuck it, I've changed my mind

Do you know why Mario and Luigi had to play their adventures separately, insteading of pairing up for a two-plumber beatdown? Do you know why Tails was a superfluous nobody who couldn't lose any lives, could be left behind and got chucked out in the flaming wreck of an airplane while the first player knuckled down for the end game? Basically, do you know why certain games used to treat the second player as an annoyance that the first player didn't need?

Because for most people he was, that's why. Anyone who grew up with a games console and a younger sibling knows exactly what I'm talking about; you didn't want to shepherd them about in a game-spanning escort mission while they blundered into enemies, and you didn't want to wait fifteen minutes at every slightly tricky jump while they tried to remember that there was a jump button in the first place. You sure as hell didn't want to take turns in the single player, because you knew, every time, that they'd haemorrhage lives at a rate of three per minute, and burst into tears when you tried to wrestle the pad back off them and salvage the crumbling remains of your near-perfect run. Sega and Nintendo, each in their own way, concocted the perfect co-op for siblings; one gave the little sprat his own adventure to ruin, and the other removed any possible way for him to be a liability. With such genius did these giants bear gifts upon the grateful elder children of the world.

If you're wondering why this nugget of childhood has burst out and mugged me on the corner of memory lane, it's because I've realised what it is that's been irritating me all along about these wretched new-wave adverts and that horrifying family attempting to play Kinect through severe muscular spasms: deep down we can see those useless ham-brains we hated playing against, and there ain't no way in hell we're going to put up with that crap all over again, the problem being that this time the kids are fully grown so we can't push them over and steal the pad back off them.

For reference, go watch that Kinect video again: god, they're like a pair of giant man-babies, oblivious to the connection between interaction and action, who have grasped on to the idea that they have to move about but don't have the brains to see that that isn't enough to get them through the game. The many months since that video's release hasn't dulled the horror of realising that the children may actually be smarter than the parents.

And while I'm acutely aware that I've defended Nintendo's adverts as being necessary for this mildly uncoordinated audience, it's only just struck me how terrifying it is that adults - real, honest-to-god grown men and women - apparently need to have it explained to them, with visual aids, that playing games with your friends is fun. They're teaching that stuff to three year olds on CBeebies, yet there's an entire marketing blitz on prime time telly devoted to people who should still be only getting a spoonful of food in their mouths one time out of three. If your opinion of Donkey Kong Country Returns is swayed less by the gameplay footage than by how much Ant and Dec seem to enjoy it then we're starting to fly into flock-following sheep country.

This isn't even a rant about having to show people how to play games; hell, with new tech like the Wii Remote or Kinect it's pretty essential. No, this is a rant about the fact that games are still being marketed as though the players are dribbling cretins, only now they're about thirty years older and have bags of skittles for brains instead of raw meat engorged with testosterone, and I'm not sure if it's an improvement.

Do these people even exist? The Kinect video certainly suggests so, as does the mountain of shovelware that Nintendo have brought upon themselves, but then take a look at the iTunes charts: at the time of writing, the iPhone Top Ten App Chart contains Angry Birds, FIFA 11 and Cut the Rope, two of which are a natty pair of physics puzzlers and the other is a franchise so long-standing that it's outlasted most real footballers. The puzzlers are cheap, casual and fairly basic, but they need a good eye and a healthy sense of trajectory to progress, something that the dimwits we're being told exist couldn't begin to make head or tail of. Or maybe they could, if they first had someone lead them to it first with easy-to-follow diagrams.

So the conclusion at the end of this hazy ramble through my brain is, basically, that I have no idea what to think any more. At first I wondered if we shouldn't just give up on these people, since the current iPhone crowd clearly have a good eye for quality even in the form of five-minute fluff, but that would just be snobbish. What would be nice, though, is if we could market to casual gamers on the assumption that they actually have a functioning brain and don't need to be marketed to in the exact same manner as nine year olds. That, I think, would make me feel a whole lot better.