Words By GreywolfeI see a lot of confusion about gaming on YouTube – why would you – for example – watch someone doing a Let’s Play of a game?  Surely it makes more sense for you to sit down and play the game from end to end yourself.  Doesn’t this process of watching someone else play the game ruin it?Well, not always.

I’m not crazy about platform games, but I like them well enough that I have consistently kept trying to play them ever since the release of Mario Brothers all those years ago.  The problem – for me, at any rate, is that my hand-eye co-ordination has never been particularly spectacular, and the result is that things that seem effortless to some people [doing a long jump to hit that flag pole so that you can rack up a whole bunch of score] are particularly difficult for me to manage, let alone perfect.For the longest time, I would watch my friends play these games.  It was quite soothing.  They’d take the controller and we’d be off in our own little world.  I might tell them where and how I thought they should jump, but for the most part, it was restful.  They would play through the game and I would watch.YouTube has just made that a whole lot easier for me, because my friends aren’t always curious about the games I am, so they don’t necessarily buy into them.

There is also the case that – where I live – not all these games happened to make it to our shores.  Getting a Nintendo 64 was tricky at best and – as a result – I missed out on a lot of those games.  [And then, when my friends who had 64’s got games, they weren’t always the ones I was interested in.]

Were it not for YouTube, I would never have known how great Conker’s Bad Fur Day was.  I would not have seen how Banjo-Tooie took that game in different directions.  I certainly would never have bumped into Glover.

In our more modern time-frame, I would not have had the gumption to try Shovel Knight, [easily one of my favourite games in the last few years] I would never have been exposed to how much work was put into the more modern ports of Myst and I would definitely not have learned of Ronin.

I’ve played through and enjoyed King’s Quest probably ten or twelve times throughout my gaming career.  At this point there’s not much I haven’t seen in that particular game.  But sometimes, it’s interesting to see someone else play through it and to see their visceral reactions to some of the more crazy puzzles.  [How I hate that beanstalk.]In this case, I’m there for the person’s personality.  Which I think is an important facet that folks sometimes overlook when it comes to the Let’s Play community.  Occasionally, it’s nice to watch someone else battle with things you battled with.  To watch them reason things out and come to – maybe – the same conclusion you did.Or possibly, they just have a style of commentary that agrees with you.  Maybe they never touch on the game at all.  Perhaps they’re funny or quite serious.

In cases like these, I find the games are merely a pleasant backdrop.  A way of listening to someone else while they happen to be playing a game.  And that might be one of the most fun reasons to stop by and watch someone work through a game you’ve already played.

[You can read an article on the idea of fake difficulty here]There are some things in games that I just don’t have the patience for.  I managed – for example – to play most of Kingdom Hearts:  Chain of Memories.  I got all the way to the top of the tower, finding all the little secrets there were to find by very carefully exploring every single bit of that game world.  I genuinely liked the game and genuinely was looking forward to finishing it.Then, I got to the top of the tower and the game basically had the gall to say, “oh, hey, in the first room of the first world you ever stepped into, there was a compartment thing that you couldn’t get into.  That’s open now and it has the best sword in the game.  You can’t finish the game until you get that sword, so you’d better hustle!”

You can understand my frustration.  I’d put twelve or fourteen hours in at that point and – like most modern games – I thought I was at the end, because everything seemed to be pointing that way, but it turned out the developer was playing an elaborate game of bait and switch.

YouTube to the rescue!  I found someone who was more patient and knew what was going to happen to them and managed to watch them play through that particular segment of the game.  No, it didn’t give me exactly the same satisfaction, but good Lord, that was something the developer didn’t need to do.

I love that gaming on YouTube exists.  I love that it has exposed me to many an experience I was never likely to have.  I love that there’s a big and thriving community on YouTube that is just as interested in gaming as I am.  It’s also interesting to me that there’s a great cross-section of folks playing a great many different types of games.  It isn’t just all Call of Duty.  Some folks have a love for nostalgic adventure games.  Some folks are more into platform games.  It’s awesome.Next week, I’ll expound a little bit more, because there are a handful of other things I’d like to cover that I didn’t manage to get to in this article.

Images courtesy of Pixabay
Pixabay

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Words By Greywolfe

You guys all know that I’m a curmudgeon, right?  I mean, I write mostly scathing opinions of the modern gaming industry because I think it’s in a pretty awful place.

So, allow me to tell you about some things that I’m truly grateful for.  Some of these have to do with the modern industry and some, of course, are of things from older times and places.

So, I am grateful for...

I avoided game communities for the longest time; they all seemed terrible.  There were no real avenues for actual conversation and most of the conversations seemed to boil down to “you suck, because of xyz.”That all changed when I started reading Joystiq. [and it’s sister sites Massively and Wowinsider.]  Sure, the community and I had our disagreements, but they were [almost] never just insult-hurling [unless we found the occasional troll ;)]

I am thankful for the fact that those sites existed and grateful that two of them now live on as separate entities not controlled by AOL.  [I am, of course, referring to MassivelyOP and Blizzardwatch.  And you should certainly go and visit them if you didn’t know about them before.  They are both worth your time.]

I am also eternally grateful that – in the wake of the AOL shut down, we – the fans – didn’t just roll over and accept that our sites were going away.  We gave those writers the money they needed to keep going, because we believed in them.

I am also very pleased that Twinstiq got born out of those deaths.  Through it, some of our community – and its spirit lives on.

One of the problems of the early industry was that the gaming industry itself didn’t always quite appreciate that it’s customers were loyal.  So you’d get hilarious debacles like proprietary hardware and software that only worked under certain conditions.  [One year, a friend of mine bought Autodesk’s 3D software – then called 3d Studio Max.  He was amused to find – in amongst everything else that came with the box – a dongle that you HAD TO plug into your machine in order for it to work.  No dongle?  The program would simply abort.]

There were various copy protection schemes that all lead to the same end-point:  making sure you didn’t disseminate the software to other people.

One good thing that’s come of the modern industry that I’m truly thankful for is sites like GOG and developers who consistently [and insistently] develop so that their games are DRM-free.  It will be far easier, in the future, to archive and preserve and play these games.

When I got into computers nearly thirty five years ago, there were a couple of big issues.  Issue number one was:  “which computer do you buy?”  Because at the time, there were several and you really had to do your homework so that you would end up taking the best machine home.  This was compounded by another problem:  if you picked up the wrong machine, well, your software library would eventually dwindle to nothing as the machine became discontinued through the advances of both competition and the march of technology.

The first computer I ever bought had no hard drive, no sound card, an amber CRT monitor, no mouse [yes, really, mice were optional back then] and just about 128 kilobytes of onboard memory.

In those days, technology zoomed by as people came up with bigger and better pieces of software.  One of the first upgrades I ever did on that machine was bump the 128 kilobytes of memory up to 640, because it turned out that most games [at the time] struggled under anything less.

I’m truly thankful that we’ve hit a sort of plateau now.  Instead of things getting more “advanced” they’re generally widening out.  That is:  Graphics cards all use a unified library like DirectX, now.  Generally, from one generation to the next, there’s no “huge leap” between older video cards and newer ones.  This makes it far easier to recommend and buy a computer.  Even console systems have evened out to about a 5 year gap between new machines.

I’m not a Steam fan.  [or a Valve fan, really, since they’re responsible for Steam] but the modern internet – and it’s distribution systems – are part of the everyday gaming culture that we take for granted, now.

There are bad things that come with the internet:  Gabe’s Internet Jerkwad Theory is a part of life on the modern internet.  Day One patches could only exist as a result of the current bandwidth situation we’re in.  The minefield of issues with social media. [and for some, the resultant Fear Of Missing Out]

Certainly, all of these things are terrible – and things that we need to be vigilant of, but to my mind, and especially as gamers, there are quite a few plusses to the fact that the internet exists.  For example, it’s now possible to find people to play a game with, even if your friends are nowhere nearby – and, in fact, you can keep in touch with those friends more easily as a result, should they move.  You can buy games without having to go to a store – and a greater number of games than you ever could before, too.  [including classics that you’d struggle to find on store shelves, today.]  You are also able to find far more resources about potential purchases than you ever could, in the past [when we were basically reliant on what your friends thought and magazines.]

And I am thankful for all of these.

Yeah, I know, they’re dead and have been gone for a long time, now and – even to this day – I miss them both dearly, but they’ve left me with a wealth of games and memories that I will cherish probably until the day I die.

While I’m not as crazy about Lucasarts [because they never felt like “a family” to me, the way Sierra did] I am grateful to all those designers that made beautiful games in the form of The Dig, Loom and Grim Fandango.

Thanks, Ken and Roberta, for believing in the medium.  [and thanks to the countless amazing developers you had at Sierra.]

I am thankful that Twinstiq gives me a place to comment on the industry as well as the readers here – and the people who keep showing up to comment on my articles with insights I have never had.

You guys genuinely make me proud that my hobby is computer games.

Image Sources:
Joystiq Logo:  Wikipedia
Massively Logo:  MMOGames.com euologizes Massively
WowInsider Logo:  Engadget.com [don't click and give AOL ad views ;)] Diablo 3 DRM:  Imgur
KQ1 Specs:  Gamefaqs King's Quest I Box Shots
Witcher 3 Specs:  VGBoxArt
Internet Map:  Wikipedia
Sierra On-Line Logo:  UMBCast
LucasFilm Games Logo:  ATMachine's Lucasarts Logos, A History In Pictures
Owl Family:  Pixabay