Mobile Gaming, Hard Boys and Girls
TL;DR: it's false.
Recently I read the following articles:
Why Gaming Journalism Should Update Its Thinking on TechCrunch
"You're Watching It Wrong" on Wrong Every Time
And I think both articles are talking about the same thing, at least when it comes to "first impression." The religiously zealousness of how some people cling onto their one singular truths may or may not really be so much of a thing, to me, because I can't quite tell the difference between someone hating on Bobduh and someone being ironic. Thanks, Gators.
The similarity continues to games as entertainment. Ironically here, Fate/stay night is a "traditional" video game, traditional in quotes because the average commenters that left their doo doo in the internet comments section of that TechCrunch article typically would snob down on visual novels. If we describe gamers as circles of hell, Type-Lunatics are probably well above average, so maybe just the first couple circles.
Well, I don't know. The visual novel fandom out west, at least given my casual impressions, runs the gamut from terrible pirate-whiners-entitlers to bottom-feeding memesters living off just the culture that the other weeaboo fishes leaves off as scraps. I'm probably more the latter. There are above-board guys, too, especially now that this silo is being farmed as much as it has been deserving, so props to those entrepreneurs licensing stuff and localizing it for profit.
Since we're still at it, let's compare how much the particular groups make life worse for the other groups. Fate-Lunatics do not much besides harass people on the internet, casually. So not very harmful. Thanks, 4chan. The majority of mobile gamers, at least revenue-wise, come from Asia. Most of them give 2 schlicks, tops, to what western game media has to say about how terrible mobile games is for your bank account, et cetera. Of course, because they are busying playing those games. So they don't even really count, by more than one calculation .(Western) gamers are a big deal, I guess, and in a way the "bad" actors in the industry gets a lot of credit for things turning out not-so-great? The game-as-an-art, hierarchical and tradition-laden inertia behind gaming presses is only going to affect people who care to listen to them, which by this point forms more an echo chamber, even including gaters (in a "it-takes-two-to-tango" way). I think irreverence and "games as failing comic book industry" route is where things might be going, except I also don't think they would simply because people know what video games are like, and they are fun. And we want to know what's the next fun thing to try. [And on that note, Avengers 2 is not that fun.]
And starting that discovery process from friends is where I'd say most people go first. Which is to say, when they play hand-held, touch-based games and find them fun, they would probably not care too much about the snobbery either. I think there is a subcurrent about social media and how it is slowly replacing the press/media, because precisely these online friends serve both as support group and discovery mechanism. And this mobile snobbery will, in some capacity, help further drive it. Which is also why you can spend big bucks on ad revenue on mobile and do a lot of installs on mobile (at least for some of these games). Which circles back to that TechCrunch article about the problems on mobile. Which also circles back to my initial reaction after reading the first dozen comments.
It is one of empathy. It's as if none of those people had fun playing a game on their tablet or phone. I mean, there are some good games out there, and it's not that hard to find them. Even LLSIF is not horrible, although that sates a particular niche for certain gaming demographics, let's just say. The real irony is that if the game press did a better job covering what's good and what's not on mobile gaming, maybe some of these people would have had their opinion changed.
The nexus of these two narratives, between debating UBW viewing order and the nature of gaming press on mobile games, hits home for this Producer who spends his hard-earned money on Million Live. But at this point I'm not even sure the western gaming scene deserves something this good. When the conception of what makes a good game is so narrow, guarded by so many bigots, is it even worth it? It takes a dose of foolishness and a lot of tough love to bring something like that over. There is every pressure to not go outside the box. Japanese Ps understand if you got on board via Anim@s you are not automatically inferior than someone who's paid his dues during Arcadem@s. This is the kind of fandom model that builds a trashing lols game from the dim-lit and smoke-filled arcade to a baseball stadium.
I wonder if there's enough fans of Nasuverse to do the same.
Actually, I too struggle with feeling comfortable
PS. Being old enough to remember the introduction of the App store, it makes me wonder if the initial price points (and the ulterior purpose of selling iOS devices via a diverse App ecosystem of affordable applications) ultimately drives mobile gaming towards a certain direction. Like how when Apple parrots out every WWDC how much they've paid developers, maybe developers should consider the BATNA in an alternate universe where prices are not set by Apple Marketing, but by the devs themselves. Of course, F2P is still going to prevail as today's trend, but maybe this facilitation towards the bottom would've took out fewer projects and developers and made the transition less device-oriented.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2015 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Bishoujo Gaming, Modern Visual Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.