Archive for the ‘editorials’ Category

Anniversaries

Monday, December 17th, 2012

I want to take you on a mental voyage. Back to the winter of 2001. December 17. A time where you couldn’t go for longer than ten minutes without hearing “Lady Marmalade”. A time where I was a student in college.

Fresh from a solar eclipse, I was finishing up another semester when I had an idle computer and an idle thought: “I should probably buy a domain name before they’re all gone, and then people will have an easy way to find all of my amazing articles about video games and video game culture”. And, since most of the short, memorable domain names were taken, I looked around my environment for inspiration. I settled on ‘Crummy Socks’ because that’s what I was wearing that day (I was a poor college student, what can I say?). So I bought the name, and immediately sat on it for a few weeks while I figured out what I wanted to do with it.

I had aspirations of being one of those professional bloggers that you used to hear a lot about, but don’t really hear anything about these days. Someone who works out of their home or office, writing every day about something that they love, while throngs of devoted fans visit every day and I would make enough money somehow to pay my bills and sustain my hobby, but that never seemed to materialize. I also tried my hand at news-reporting for a while. Each time, though, for whatever reason, it didn’t seem to work out. I even spun off a few sister sites where I wanted to try out some of my big ideas, but those, too, met with little success. It’s kind of telling that my biggest brush with anything resembling a spotlight was the time I managed to troll several high-profile blogs.

Somewhere else along the way, I also managed to get myself, at least temporarily, hired in to the video game industry, where I worked on a few titles, and got to see things from the other side of the fence. I realized my childhood dream of helping to make some video games (even though one of them wasn’t particularly well-received). Still, it was an amazing experience, and one that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

But, as time goes on, I find that I am writing about video games less and less. I find that I’m visiting video game blogs more infrequently as time goes on. But that I still love to play video games, and I still like to write on occasion. I wasn’t sure if I was feeling discouraged, disenfranchised, or burned out. After a lot of soul-searching and introspection, I think I finally have a handle on it, and, well, it’s complicated.

This site never really found much of an audience. For a while, I had friends and family who would visit (and several of them still do. Thanks, guys!), but articles don’t really propagate more than that, with rare exceptions. As of this writing, my statistics show that I had 12 visits to this site yesterday. Several of which were me, since my own site is my homepage (if you have a website and it’s not your own homepage, I wonder how seriously you take it). But some time ago I reached a point where I unconsciously decided that since I couldn’t seem to get any traction with an audience, that there wasn’t a point in trying to update regularly, if at all. I saw lots of other websites that started up at the same time or after this one, with writing that was at least the equal to or perhaps a little worse than what you find here, and they seemed to take off essentially immediately. And that kind of boiled over into jealousy, resentment, and maybe a little depression. “If these other jokers can at least get an audience of regular readers in a few months, why can’t I do it in a few years? Why don’t people tell their friends about this site or come back? I must be doing something wrong.”

A partial explanation is something that I call “Nerd Attitude”. It’s kind of hard to quantify, but I think it boils down to an arrogance that lots of members of the video game community seem to have, or, at least seem to want to have. When I was growing up, and immersed in any kind of video game-related thing I could find, in some ways, it was very exclusionary. But I could find others that had similar interests, and we formed a fairly close-knit group of peers. The group never really got very big, but we had a lot of fun hitting the local arcades, playing the newest game we could get our hands on, and discussing the tips and strategies in the current issue of our gaming magazine.

But then the Internet and the World Wide Web started gaining popularity.

Once that happened, it was a lot easier to find groups of like-minded folks to share in whatever passion you have.

Which is a good thing.

But, at the same time, video games and computers were starting to become more mainstream. Eventually, playing video games into the wee hours of the night wasn’t that weird, and hopping on a computer to spend hours chatting with people around the world, or making a website for whatever wacko idea you have, is less bizarre. And all that means is that now you have a group of people, who have grown up with video games and the Internet at parts of their daily lives, who self-identify as nerds. People who like video games, who like the Internet, who maybe even are passionate about those things, but who aren’t really nerds.

From the linked Wikipedia article:

However, those simply adopting the characteristics of nerds are not actually nerds by definition. One cannot be an authentic nerd by imitation alone; a nerd is an outsider and someone who is unable or unwilling to follow trends. Popular culture is borrowing the concept and image of nerds in order to stand out as individuals. Some commentators consider that the word is devalued when applied to people who adopt a sub-cultural pattern of [behavior], rather than being reserved for people with a marked ability.

Which leads to a whole lot more people interested in video games, and that, in turn, will ensure that there are almost always new and exciting games being released practically every day (which is kind of a problem in itself). But it also leads to two main issues:

  • If you spend much time at a website that talks primarily about video games, you’ll end up talking to more people who like video games, but who aren’t nerdy about video games. That’s actually mostly okay, since you get exposed to other points of view, including those you don’t like. But it also means that:
  • There are many people who aren’t nerds pursuing a previously-nerdy hobby.

Which is also fine (heck, you can never have too many ham radio operators, right?). But when the editor-in-chief of a certain high-profile video game website has a video game collection that fits on one shelf (now three shelves), when I have collections for single systems that won’t even fit on one entire bookshelf (I haven’t traded in a game since 2002). I have to wonder if he’s really a nerd. I’m sure he enjoys video games, but I wonder, does he like them as much as I do? It’s like someone who writes about music, but has a collection made up solely of a couple-dozen best-of collections. And, if that’s the chief, it’s no wonder that the site (and many, many other sites on the Internet) no longer speaks to me.

Now, I don’t want to imply that I hate what these guys are doing. I think that it’s great that we live in a time where you don’t have to be embarrassed or ashamed that you like video games. It’s great that you can walk into a gas station and find video games for sale, and nobody thinks that’s weird (okay, maybe I think that’s a little weird).

But those kinds of sites do speak to a huge number of people. People who aren’t really nerds. People who have decided that knowing a lot or being passionate about something makes one a nerd (it doesn’t), that being labeled a nerd is awesome (it’s not, usually).

And it’s mostly those people that I haven’t been able to reach in the last 11 years.

People who visit websites that tell you how awesome they are because they’re not like the other guys (when they’re pretty much identical to the other guys, down to posting essentially the same stories as everyone else, with a few comments added). People who want some snark mixed in with their reporting (or, perhaps, more accurately, a little reporting mixed in with their snark)

So we have a combination of people who like video games, but aren’t nerds, telling other people who like video games, but who also aren’t nerds, that their websites are awesome because they can update 20-50 times a day. And that they, themselves, are also awesome. They must be, because they can update their sites 20-50 times a day. Which creates a situation that feeds on itself, and a niche that is so overcrowded with people reporting on every facet of a part of culture that I love, and telling me how awesome everything is, and how great they are for being gutsy enough to tell me all about it. That’s what video games and video game news is now: a barely edited, pandering stream of consciousness spewed out with such force and intensity, that it’s hard to find much that I can relate to or are interested in.

Which is why this humble site never quite took off like I wanted. It’s a one-man shop of a guy who actually is a bit of a video game nerd, talking about whatever I think is interesting, not necessarily what is popular, or even timely.

And that’s alright. Even though I’ve been close to throwing in the towel on more than one occasion, I’m actually happy with what I’ve built here and elsewhere. This site is not going away any time soon. It will continue to be available for as long as I’m able to keep it going. Which, if I have anything to say about it, will be for a long time yet.

Posted in about, achievements, articles, blog, confessions, destructoid, dumb, editorials, left field productions, not news, opinion, relics, site news, sites, time wasters, updates, video games | 1 Comment »

Never trust a gamer who doesn’t own any bad games

Sunday, August 5th, 2012

It’s no secret to anyone that’s visited the Crummysocks family of sites that I do sometimes play the odd, or sometimes very odd, terrible game, and then talk about it at length. Sometimes that’s because the game I played was so bad it crossed over into awesome, but that’s not always the case. A lot of times, the game is just bad. And, yet, I keep most of them.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially for the truly bad ones. Why would I keep something around that I didn’t like, and have very few (if any) good memories about. I’ve touched on this before, but I think it can be summed up as: bad games make me appreciate the good games more.

Take a site like IGN for example. They love to gush on about how great Latest Blockbuster 4 HD is, and you will find the occasional review where they find something terrible and treat it appropriately. They even address this in their site’s Ratings FAQ

And yes, sometimes people are eager to play games that turn out to be really bad. No one wants to review just the AAA titles. It gets boring after a while to write high praise for everything.

And, even though IGN is currently hovering at about a 68% aggregate rating, which tells me that they might give some of the good games a little too much praise, and might knock a few too many points off for the faults in the less-than-stellar ones, they at least acknowledge that if all you have is wonderful things, those wonderful things become pedestrian, and your perspective is skewed.

So, with that said, I figured I’d share a few of the games from my actual collection, and how they make me appreciate something better.

Exhibit A:

Kung Pow

The uploader of this video has disabled embedding, so you’ll have to click the image above to view the video, and you really should. 15 years later, I’m still wondering how this game got released.

Game: Clayfighter 63⅓
Genre: Fighting
System: Nintendo 64
Released: October 21, 1997
Offenses: Aside from the massive delays, cut features, and the most unfunny jokes imaginable, this game also includes: poor controls, uneven difficulty, blatant racism (it was a different time, 1997), unbalanced characters.
What it makes me appreciate: The very games that this is attempting to parody: Killer Instinct, Street Fighter, Marvel v. Capcom, etc.

Exhibit B:

Game: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan
Genre: Side-scrolling beat ‘em up
System: Nintendo Game Boy
Released: August 1990
Offenses: Prerendered cutscenes, challenge-free gameplay, somehow combines cartoon ninja turtles and video games to create something that boring and tedious.
What it makes me appreciate: That we live in an era that allows for video previews, enemies smart enough to not get stuck on terrain, player characters who aren’t just re-skins of each other.

“Oh sure,” you’re probably saying, “pick on games that are 15 years old or more.” Alright, how about something from the last five years?

Exhibit C:

Game: Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Burning Earth
Genre: Beat ‘Em Up
System: Xbox 360
Released: November 12, 2007
Offenses: Just the one. If you’re (somehow) unfamiliar with how the Xbox Achievement system works, it goes something like this: the game developers put in a series of tasks that a player can perform during the course of the game. These can range from hitting certain plot points to collecting some arbitrary number of widgets, to finding all of the secrets hidden in the whole game, to just about anything. Each of these tasks is worth a certain amount of points, which go on your profile along with a little picture and date you performed the task. Most games top out at 1,000 points for completing all of the tasks. Avatar, however, dispenses with most of the challenge of completing the tasks, and instead of giving you numerous varied tasks to perform, it asks you to do one thing. And, even if you weren’t trying to complete all the achievements in two minutes, you’d do it in pretty short order anyway.
What it makes me appreciate: I get it, coming up with achievements that are interesting, challenging, and achievable in a reasonable length of time, is really hard. So, it’s really great to see a list of achievements are actually fun to do, and not tedious grinding.

Now, I’m sure someone will point out that a lot of people sell their used games back to Gamestop or wherever. That they take the bad ones back and exchange them for store credit on something that they’d actually enjoy. And that’s fine. But if I can’t find something at least a little bit bad on their shelf, I start to wonder about where they’re coming from.

Posted in articles, classic gaming, collecting, confessions, crummysocks, culture, editorials, gameboy, opinion, site news, video games, wii, xbox | No Comments »

Community Building (a.k.a. Don’t Be A Jerk)

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

If you missed it (like I did), there was some hullabaloo yesterday when a guy by the name of Aris Bakhtanians had a partial meltdown where he defended a few ideas including:

  1. Sexual harassment is a part of the Fighting Game Culture
  2. People who play fighting games are an elite club, and
  3. Deal with it, if you don’t like it, too bad

There’s a pretty good rundown here for you (and there’s a sort-of-apology available from Aris here.

In my pre-Intenret days (the 1990′s), I played a lot of fighting games, but I never really got to anything that could be considered a competitive level. I did notice that there were a few faces that I would see around my local arcades (back when my town actually had arcades) pretty regularly that were way better than I was. People who could play the fighting games like they were musical instruments. People who were so into the games that they would hang around the arcade and watch me play, newbie that I was, and offer tips on how to play better. Looking back, it’s pretty amazing that we created this ad-hoc community with a welcoming atmosphere without even knowing each others’ names.

I’m willing to admit that maybe this was a product of me living in the Midwest rather than on the West Coast. But around that time I also got into the XBand scene, which let me, for the first time, play fighting games against people from all over the country. I still never really got great at the games, but most of the people that I met who were better than me were more than happy to offer up pointers if I would just ask. It was hardly the ‘nobody will like you until you prove yourself’ scene that this guy is making it out to be.

But why is it different?

I can’t say for sure, but I have a few guesses.

My local fighting game community (and, by extension, the entire arcade game community) was (with a few exceptions) never really a group of friends. We were acquaintances with a shared hobby. Most people that I know, when they’re around people they don’t know well, rein in their behavior, slowly testing the waters, and gradually figuring out what’s acceptable.

But as you get further along in the ranks, you find that there’s less turnover. You find that you see the same people all the time, those barriers that held your behavior in check start to crumble since you’re just playing with your buddies. And since your buddies are okay with homophobic remarks or racial slurs, then they’re okay, as long as they’re just joking.

And somewhere during that process, these people have become what I like to call “microcelebrities”. They have gotten to a position actually start paying attention to the things they say, but their filter is long gone. And their audience, which is now huge, will latch on to any stupid thing you say.

I have no doubt that most every other sport or professional endeavor is largely the same. That there are tasteless comments being made in locker rooms all over the world. But those comments stay in the locker room. You don’t see someone on commentary for an NFL game trying to guess the breast size of the person reporting from the field.

Another point he made was that he loved the fighting game community because you have to prove yourself to get in. Like it’s a kind of elite club, and if you’re not coming into it on a high level, don’t even bother.

To draw a parallel, let’s say you have an interest in geology and want to get involved in the geology community. But when you go to a gem and mineral show, everyone starts out hating you, and you have to prove yourself somehow to be a part of that group. It’s ludicrous.

“But that’s different,” I hear you saying, “fighting games are a form of competition and geology isn’t!” Fine, replace “geology” with “tennis” and “gem and mineral show” with “tennis club” and it’s equally absurd.

The defense to most of this, of course, is that the fighting game community is full of 15-year-olds, and that’s just how they act. This was probably more true 15 or 20 years ago than it is now, but any of those 15-year-olds who are still playing are now in their 30′s. And, like it or not, we’re the adults here. We have to lead by example and let newcomers know what is and isn’t acceptable. We need to encourage participation by casual fans instead of making them feel unwelcome at the outset, and we need to stop alienating females.

A lot of us have been playing games for over 25 years. It’s up to us to lead by example. To treat other gamers with respect, and to call out those who step over the line. I’m not suggesting that everyone become a paragon of virtue or the Moral Police, just don’t be a jerk. Think before you speak, and help out if you can. It’s easy to forget that we were all newbies once, and how useful it is to have an old-hand guide you along some of the bumps in the road.

Posted in conjecture, editorials, opinion, site news | No Comments »

Not all activities translate well to video games

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Over my gaming career, I’ve worn a lot of hats. I’ve vicariously led armies in campaigns across real and fictional lands, rolled marbles through a series of mazes, wrestled for the world title, shot lots of zombies in the face with heavy artillery, demolished buildings, been mayor of a city, gone fishing, explored dungeons, and dozens of other things. And across all of those games I’ve realized that not all activities translate well to video-game forms.

For instance, I managed to find a copy of the King James Bible for the original Game Boy, and because if its novelty, I was compelled to buy it. And, aside from some really terrible games, the only thing to do with it is to read the Bible… on a 2 inch screen that can show about 40 words at a time, and according to this page, there are 783,137 words in the whole thing. Which means you’re going to go crosseyed trying to work your way through the thing. Though, thankfully, you’ll probably run out of batteries first.

Or we could consider something like video slot machines. With the mechanical arm taken out of the picture, and the tumblers reduced to video game representations, we’re left with just pressing the ‘insert coin’ button and then the ‘spin wheels’ button over and over and over and over.

Yee. Haw.

Of course it goes the other way, too. I mean, could you imagine a non-video game version of something like Tetris Attack?

Because I sure can’t.

Posted in articles, editorials | 1 Comment »

Top five reasons why your Top X list is dumb and wrong

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

About a year ago I successfully played a prank on the Internet, and the results were better than I expected, and I thought it did a pretty good job of explaining why I have such a strong dislike for ‘Top X Lists’, but I figured I could expand on that with a more generalized tack.

And with that I’d like to present: The top five reasons why your Top X list is dumb and wrong

5. Lists are lazy. All Top X lists, including this one, are lazy. They take very little effort to produce and are really just filler. All you need is some space to fill, a desire to not really talk in depth about anything, and a wacky topic, which brings me to…

4. Topics are getting wacky. There have been so many Top X Lists that it’s getting tougher to find a way to connect ten or so seemingly unconnected things. Stuff like, “Top 13 games where the number of powerups you can get is a prime number” or “Top 7 cartoon characters based on ancient Greek cartographers” is becoming the norm.

3. Your rankings are wrong. No matter your methods, about half the people who read your list will find something wrong with it. You ranked something dumb as super-high, or left something off the list that obviously should have been there. What are you, an idiot?

2. When you’re doing “Best of” or “Worst of” lists the same things pop up over and over again. Top whatever video games: Final Fantasy something, Zelda something, Mario something. Worst video games: ET, Atari 2600 Pac-man, Smurfs, and then some terrible adult game. Yawn, seen ‘em.

1. Once you reach a big enough mass of material, trying to pick the top few is futile. According to this list in 2005 alone around 175,000 books were published just in the United States, not to mention the rest of the world. And you’re going to tell me that you can pick the top 25 of them that featured protagonists riding on the back of a talking dinosaur? You’ll have to pardon my skepticism.

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Game Blogging for Fun and Profit

Saturday, June 9th, 2007

I’ll admit it, when I see stuff like this, I get a little jealous. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no allusions about the reach of this site. I understand that I’m not a member of the press proper. I don’t have press contacts, and I don’t get press releases. People don’t come here for breaking news, reviews, and previews. Sending me anything would have limited benefit to any of the companies involved.

“More after the jump”

Though Kotaku is not shy about posting about whenever they get free stuff, you might notice that the staff does not post much in the way of reviews (and no, their “Frankenreviews” don’t count. So why does the site get free stuff from vendors? They get stuff because they have lots of readers, and they’ll tell their readers. It’s that simple. It’s no secret that to get lots of readers you need several things, but chief among them are: consistent updates and compelling, well written content. Press releases by themselves are pretty are pretty dull material. Rewritten press releases are slightly better, but press releases with snarky commentary seem to be a path to success, and indeed, seems to be the crux of the content stream of the major video game news sources. I don’t mean to single out Kotaku, original content aside, several of the Big Few sites post the same news, rewritten with the editor’s comments: Exhibits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. It’s a formula that’s worked for Paul Harvey’s News & Comment since 1951 (although admittedly quite a bit more subdued).

I suppose the point that I’m trying to make is that there doesn’t really seem to be anything particularly special about the Big Few gaming blog sites. In fact, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the big sites and this one (you might notice that I posted that a couple of days sooner… just sayin’), except that I don’t post rewritten press releases with comment, or silly links with comment, or scuttlebutt with comment. But I could. I already trawl the Internet looking for video game news, rumors and information. It would be trivial to set up a mailbox and subscribe to all of the press release lists I could get my hands on. I could then sift through them, pick out the juiciest cherries, rewrite them, and post them every day. I could post the links that I seek out and find every day. It would certainly shake this site up a little bit, and heck, I might increase my average daily visits into the triple-digits.

It’s a lot to consider.

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