Theory

[Morzas]

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/non-games ... r_retards/

Interesting article. It made me think about something that's been in the back of my mind for a while, which is this question: Why the fuck are normal people supposed to care about these sales charts? I never a buy a game based on how well it sold. Am I in the minority?

Also, you talk about casual/app games 'keeping real games off the charts', which seemed a bit odd to me because it seemed to imply that these non-games are in competition with real games.

[walrusdawg]

Does this whole issue with "non-games" have anything to do with the video game news racket that was discussed at length in a previous article? As in: "Hey, cover our bullshit software in your game news or forget about any more exclusives."

Or maybe these people just can't comprehend that something that is not a video game would be released on a "video game console". Seeing these "appz" on the DS(the worst offender) tricks and confuses people. PC game magazines never would review something like Excel because home computers early on were presented as multi-taskers

[Jedah]

As discussed in the article of video game news racket, the marketing relation between publishers and press is once again responsible for the situation. There's not a single businessman owning some kind of game press related company, who has the balls to let his editors choose the games they cover. It's the hard truth for every market, not only games.

[Demaar]

Honestly, I don't get why people that aren't either analysts or investors care about sales numbers at all either. OK sure, you wanna see if your new favourite got the recognition you think it deserves, but beyond that... why care about the top 10 (or 20, or whatever).

I mean, do these same people that parade around sales figures do the same thing with music and movies? If so... well... I sure hope I never meet them.

[DaleNixon]

I have a friend who is an extremely rabid Nintendo fan. He tends to pull the sales charts card on me a lot when we're discussing video games. It just gets annoying. Yes, I realize Nintendo makes insane amounts of money these days. It's inconsequential to me and has little to no bearing on my game buying decisions.

Hell, he even likes to bring up Sega's departure from the hardware business and all the mistakes they've made in the past because he knows I enjoy Sega games (when they get things right). It's not going to stop me from playing Fighter's Megamix on the Saturn and having a great time with it.

Should I stop buying gas at Shell and switch to Exxon because Exxon was the most profitable company last year? Fuck no! And fuck Exxon for making my dad fire his best friend then firing him as soon as that was done. Now that's a legitimate reason to hate a company!

[icycalm]

Interesting article. It made me think about something that's been in the back of my mind for a while, which is this question: Why the fuck are normal people supposed to care about these sales charts? I never a buy a game based on how well it sold.

This is an all too common misconception. Ultrahardcore gamers say the same thing about reviews. Gaijin Punch, for example, who runs the otherwise excellent gamengai, goes around forums proudly posting that "he knows what he likes", and that therefore reviews are useless to him, and he never reads them.

People need to realize that the whole world does not revolve around them. Sales charts are not there to tell you what to buy, and neither are reviews. Sales charts are there because they are interesting. It is interesting to know what other games other people are buying, and that's the end of the story. Reviews are also not there to tell you what to buy. Does anyone really believe that I give a flying fuck whether any of you buy any of the games I review? Buy whatever the fuck you want. No one cares. Human beings review things because it's in our nature. Criticism is in our nature. Expressing our opinions is in our nature. People read other people's opinions because other people's opinions are interesting. Purchasing decisions have nothing to do with it. I mean for fuck's sakes I go to the movies or rent DVDs to watch films which Ebert has TOTALLY TRASHED. At the end of the day I WANT YOU to play the shitty games I review, so that you can see why I am saying they are shitty.

I went a little off-topic there but it is an important point. The world does not revolve around us. We want to see sales charts and read reviews because they are interesting. What we buy is a completely different issue.

Honestly, I don't get why people that aren't either analysts or investors care about sales numbers at all either. OK sure, you wanna see if your new favourite got the recognition you think it deserves, but beyond that... why care about the top 10 (or 20, or whatever).

Like I said, I find sales charts interesting. If you don't find them interesting, fair enough -- don't look at them. The reason for this backlash against sales charts is that all the fucking bastard websites devote huge fucking posts or articles to talk about them. "Call of Duty 4 sold 11 squillion copies!", all the frontpages of all the retard sites are screaming every week. If they were doing it tastefully, by simply having a little chart on the sidebar of their frontpage every now and then, as Ebert sometimes does for example, there would be no backlash.

Also, you talk about casual/app games 'keeping real games off the charts', which seemed a bit odd to me because it seemed to imply that these non-games are in competition with real games.

They are indeed not in competition, but by shoving them in their charts these magazines and websites make it seem as if they are.

There's not a single businessman owning some kind of game press related company, who has the balls to let his editors choose the games they cover. It's the hard truth for every market, not only games.

http://www.cahiersducinema.com/

From Wikipedia:

Cahiers du cinéma (Notebooks on Cinema; ISSN 0008-011X) is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma (Review of the Cinema) involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 (Objective 49) (Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau and Alexandre Astruc, among others) and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (Cinema Club of the Latin Quarter). Initially edited by Éric Rohmer (Maurice Scherer), it included amongst its writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut.

Cahiers re-invented the basic tenets of film criticism and theory. A 1954 article by Truffaut attacked La qualité française (the "Tradition of French Quality") and was the manifesto for the auteur theory — resulting in the re-evaluation of Hollywood films and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, and Anthony Mann. Cahiers du Cinema authors also championed the work of directors Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls, and Jean Cocteau, by centering their critical evaluations on a film's mise en scène. The magazine also was essential to the creation of the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, of French cinema, which centered on films directed by Cahiers authors such as Godard and Truffaut.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahiers_du_cin%C3%A9ma

Does this whole issue with "non-games" have anything to do with the video game news racket that was discussed at length in a previous article? As in: "Hey, cover our bullshit software in your game news or forget about any more exclusives."

Or maybe these people just can't comprehend that something that is not a video game would be released on a "video game console". Seeing these "appz" on the DS(the worst offender) tricks and confuses people. PC game magazines never would review something like Excel because home computers early on were presented as multi-taskers

The exact causes of the phenomenon puzzled me for a while. In the end, it seems to be a combination of a number things: 1) pressure from the non-game publishing companies, which naturally want to secure as much coverage for their new products, whatever those may be, in as many publications as possible, 2) sheer stupidity on the part of magazine/website editors, who are unable to understand that just because something is released on a game console doesn't mean it qualifies as a game, and 3) simply the desire of these publications to get their fingers into everything that's considered "popular" and "hot", into everything in other words that OTHERS are talking about, so as not to feel left out. Any way you look at it, it is a ridiculous business, and proof that none of these people take their work and their publications seriously. On the one hand they are constantly whining and begging everyone to take them seriously (games are art, etc.) -- yet never realizing that if you don't first take YOURSELF seriously, you can never expect anyone else to do so.

Meh.

[icycalm]

Also, this is seriously fucked up:

And fuck Exxon for making my dad fire his best friend then firing him as soon as that was done. Now that's a legitimate reason to hate a company!

[Basil_Pesto]

Any way you look at it, it is a ridiculous business, and proof that none of these people take their work and their publications seriously. On the one hand they are constantly whining and begging everyone to take them seriously (games are art, etc.) -- yet never realizing that if you don't first take YOURSELF seriously, you can never expect anyone else to do so.

While I agree that a few gross websites grab greedily at every title that passes their way, I have found plenty of UK magazines that do not follow this 'content greed', rather focusing on informing and entertaining their audience. Take NGamer - a Brit Nintendo magazine - they find plenty of time for the casual market, not because it represents cutting edge gaming or 'that wot sells', but because it makes for an entertaining subject matter. In an age when people are questioning the point of print journalism, they are asking for your money in exchange for intelligent, game-related amusement. Whatever your thoughts on casual games, their sheer oddness is fascinating stuff.

For you to overlook this facet of casual games coverage, only to praise the fascination of chart-watching seems slightly at odds with itself. Game mags offer discussion - sure they can discuss guns, babes and fast cars, but why would they when giggling Japanese professors and wobbling balance shenanigans are staring them in the face. I am an admirer of your writing style and find your comprehensive take on the gaming scene to be most refreshing, but feel this is the first subject matter on which you have seriously missed the mark.

[icycalm]

While I agree that a few gross websites grab greedily at every title that passes their way

They do not "grab greedily at every title that passes their way", they grab greedily at every title that their advertisers shovel on their desks. There is a MASSIVE difference (see the last paragraph of my article).

I have found plenty of UK magazines that do not follow this 'content greed', rather focusing on informing and entertaining their audience.

I lived in London for five years. There is not a single UK mag that doesn't suck balls. If you think otherwise you have a lot of growing up to do.

Take NGamer - a Brit Nintendo magazine - they find plenty of time for the casual market, not because it represents cutting edge gaming or 'that wot sells', but because it makes for an entertaining subject matter.

For retards, maybe.

In an age when people are questioning the point of print journalism

Idiots are questioning the point of print journalism. And yes, idiots are people too, but it is important that the distinction be made.

they are asking for your money in exchange for intelligent, game-related amusement.

They are asking for your money in exchange for advertising dressed up as opinion. In other words, they are asking for your money in exchange for bullshit.

Whatever your thoughts on casual games, their sheer oddness is fascinating stuff.

If you are twelve, maybe.

For you to overlook this facet of casual games coverage, only to praise the fascination of chart-watching seems slightly at odds with itself.

I did not praise the "fascination of chart-watching" for fuck's sake. All I said was that charts are interesting to look at now and then. Learn to read.

Game mags offer discussion - sure they can discuss guns, babes and fast cars, but why would they when giggling Japanese professors and wobbling balance shenanigans are staring them in the face?

I added the question mark that was missing at the end of this question.

As for answering it, I won't bother. If you think that games are only about "guns, babes and fast cars" then you know next to nothing about them. Keep reading this website. In another decade perhaps you'll be able to understand why your question is stupid.

I am an admirer of your writing style and find your comprehensive take on the gaming scene to be most refreshing, but feel this is the first subject matter on which you have seriously missed the mark.

I did not miss the mark. You are just not ready yet to grasp what I am saying. Keep trying. (And, by the way, do me a favor and do not post in this thread again. It is clear that you have nothing more to say on the subject that could possibly interest me. I hope you won't take this request personally.)

[Demaar]

Like I said, I find sales charts interesting. If you don't find them interesting, fair enough -- don't look at them. The reason for this backlash against sales charts is that all the fucking bastard websites devote huge fucking posts or articles to talk about them. "Call of Duty 4 sold 11 squillion copies!", all the frontpages of all the retard sites are screaming every week. If they were doing it tastefully, by simply having a little chart on the sidebar of their frontpage every now and then, as Ebert sometimes does for example, there would be no backlash..

Well, that's kinda what I meant. I'm more against the parading around of sales chart like every body cares. I mean, I do like to know what's happening, but I usually go to dedicated sites to find out that information. I don't really want to know how random idiot #2857290 thinks Wii Play selling 279 bajillion copies means the end of MS/Sony. Though thinking about it, I'm guilty of commenting on those threads sometime ("Damn, GT5 prologue is selling insanely well, Sony needs to hurry the real deal up.."), lol hypocrisy!

[Jedah]

Sale charts

1) Feed fanboyism ( my company is selling better than yours ).

2) Fill space of publications & sites with zero effort/cost.

3) Directs the masses towards big selling crappy games ( Oh look FIFA is bought by everyone, let's buy it too! ).

4) It's a form of advertisement ( good if you sell, bad if you don't ).

[HeavyElectricity]

1/ Of course, fanboys are idiots. The best solution is to avoid them completely - basically, stop scrolling once you see the word "comments".

2/ Dozens of zero effort screenshots and news stories fill these sites, and they are almost completely provided by the software publishers. At the very least, there is usually a poor attempt to analyse a sales chart, which makes it no less valid than any news story such sites would post.

3/ This only works if the people reading the charts happen to be idiots, and idiots will always find a reason to buy drivel. If all charts were abolished tomorrow, they would still be swayed by marketing and brand names.

4/ Admittedly, I have no evidence that can support this theory, but I would wager that a game's position in the weekly sales chart is much less effective advertising than the expensive TV and print campaigns that accompany many of the best selling games.

[icycalm]

From the latest (April 14-20) Media Create Top 50 "videogame" sales chart:

04. [Wii] Wii Fit (Nintendo)
07. [DS] DS Beautiful Letter Training (Nintendo)
22. [DS] Kanji Brain Test 2.5M (IE Institute)
28. [DS] DS Bookkeeping, Level 3 (Square Enix)
32. [DS] More English Training (Nintendo)
36. [DS] Kanji Test 2 (Rocket)
42. [DS] My Housekeeping Diary (Nintendo)
44. [DS] More Brain Age (Nintendo)

(Note that many of the above titles are rough English translations; I couldn't be bothered to properly transliterate them. Guess why.)

http://www.m-create.com/ranking/

[icycalm]

A few blogs have picked up on this article recently. This guy is the most intelligent of the lot:

http://www.dsfanboy.com/2008/04/30/shou ... -coverage/

I lolled at the title of his post. At least he got the idea (not that he's going to do anything with it, of course), unlike, for example, these guys:

http://gonintendo.com/?p=41721

This was funny too:

http://prisoner889.blogspot.com/2008/04 ... -baby.html

[JoshF]

Figures the site called DS Fanboy is the most reasonable.

I love the comment that basically says "video games are things where pressing buttons makes stuff happen, sometimes with a goal." :lol:

So this whole time I've been 1CCing text documents.

[HeavyElectricity]

My personal favourite comment is this one from GoNintendo:

"It’s fine that he doesn’t like titles like Brain Age and Nintendogs. It’s not fine that he seems to judge these titles based on his personal opinions and expectations, especially when said preferences are made with knowledge acquired in a sustaining market, and when said preferences are made without an understanding of the industry as it is with and without Nintendo today."

I wonder whose opinions you are supposed to judge software by, if not your own? Metacritic, I guess - if you follow the herd, it will never challenge your opinion. Of course, that site probably treats the "Training" software as games too.

(For more lol, an arcade operator's dream customer makes an unrelated comment on the arcade culture article: "Who cares if you gotta continue? It’s just throwing in another quarter.")

[icycalm]

especially when said preferences are made with knowledge acquired in a sustaining market, and when said preferences are made without an understanding of the industry as it is with and without Nintendo today."

The above doesn't even make sense. Like, semantically, it is a meaningless statement. And it's not like some broken sentences which you can fix yourself with a little imagination; in this one I simply have no clue what he meant to say.

[new_pornographer]

The article has now been linked on everyone's favourite vacuous blog-o-thon / lol-o-thon :

http://kotaku.com/385948/non+games-are-for-non+gamers

Mr Calm, I believe you may have your page ranking increase further more as people link to your article on their respective blogs.

Respect.

[icycalm]

I quite like Kierkegaard and appreciate what he does with Insomnia, which has a very strong focus on Japanese games and developers I love like Cave.

What a fucking hypocrite. If he "loves" Cave how come he never writes about them? Too busy "loving" Wii Fit I guess... Love is just another buzzword these days.

About the only comment worth responding to from that useless page is this:

(...of course, half these charts aren't called "DS Game Chart" but "DS Software Chart", so arguably the point is already moot. But perhaps we need subset charts just for games software?)

When the Japanese use the word 'soft' in the context of videogames they mean videogames, not just any software. In the old days, when the only "softs" on consoles were games, this wasn't a problem, but now it clearly is. If Famitsu was covering PC games, for example, and they started a "PC soft" chart, would they list every freaking piece of software that comes out on the PC?

[new_pornographer]

Trust me Alex, Bash does not 'love' wii fit, he's quite vocal about it and sticks the knife into it whenever he can.

http://kotaku.com/381245/in-miyamotos-m ... video-game

As for Cave-related excitement:

http://kotaku.com/370980/cave-shooters-site-launches

http://kotaku.com/363997/cave-shmups-coming-to-xbox-360

http://kotaku.com/363439/the-400-arcade ... ard-oh-yes

http://kotaku.com/356887/aou-2008-pictures-galore

http://kotaku.com/gaming/clip/shoot-em- ... 272595.php

[icycalm]

See the thing is, those links you provided do not show that he loves Cave games either. The posts amount to nothing more than LOL BULLETHELL, while it is in fact clear from his two- or three-line comments in each post that he can't even play these games. If he loved them, wouldn't he have spent some time playing them? Wouldn't he have a bit more to say about them than:

Now this is bullet hell. Here's a superplay clip of the Cave shooter MushiHimeSama's last boss. To put it nicely: it's fucking insane. Brian Ashcraft

Is this what passes for love these days?

Here is a comment made in the last link you provided by Wired's Chris Kohler, another famous mentally retarded blogger (the emphasis is mine):

The problem with shooters is the same as with fighting games. As the target audience learns the patterns and tricks to beat the older titles, the new ones will come out offering more complex and difficult gameplay. We're now at a point in shooters where if you haven't devoted every day of your life to playing them, you're screwed. Fighters, too, largely demand such controller movements and rapid button pressing that turns off the newcomer. It's no wonder the "hardcore" genres are dying off -- there needs to be some level of accessibility to them to avoid scaring people off.

These are the kinds of misinformed -- and above all MISINFORMING -- viewpoints that Ashcraft's "love" helps perpetuate.

This isn't love. This is unapologetic ignorance mixed with malignant stupidity.

[Tain]

Amen.

Really, while you can get annoyed by people credit feeding the games, calling them mindless, claiming they're unfair, and so on, it's even more mind-blowing to me when people spooge all over the genre despite it being clear as day that they haven't spent so much as an hour or two with a single shooter.

[icycalm]

lol

Wikipedia has a non-game page up, but since the term 'non-game' is not used in the url, Google doesn't rank it very high when you search for "non-game".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_toy

Edit: Oh, okay, it does. I searched for "non-games", but if you search for "non-game" the results are very, very different. Oh well. Next time.

[icycalm]

The way I see it:

1) None of the "new gamers" that Nintendo's courting with the Wii and DS are coming out of the "hardcore" market, so companies wishing to publish those sorts of games aren't exactly losing custom.

2) The kinds of companies that quit development of their hardcore game to throw money into easy Wii and DS shovelware were probably fad-chasing time-wasters anyway. It's no great loss when SkullX Crates and Pipes 2: The Xtreme Sneakening is cancelled for David Davis' Uphill Mine Kart Challenge.

http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?s= ... &p=6030402

Correct up to a point, but entirely wrong after that point. He is basically doing what all common people do: they see things in a fragmentary fashion, they understand only a part of the process they are trying to understand instead of seeing all of it.

Because if he could see this issue in its entirety he would realize that even hardcore game developers, the ones who are not fad-chasing time-wasters, are STILL tempted to add "non-game" features to their games, to make them easier, more "accessible", to dumb them down in some respects, in order to make the final product more palatable to a greater number of people. That doesn't mean they are shovelware makers -- they are regular designers who have to balance their desire for a good product with the desire for that product to reach a wider audience. And no one is free from this temptation -- especially given all the brainwashing that happens in the press today. Even erstwhile hardcore designers have been tricked into believing that the old way was wrong, and that the way forward is with infinite lives, infinite respawns, infinite save points, infinite dumbing down, infinitely regenerating health bars, infinite everything basically, and ultimately even games that play themselves (see Nintendo's recent patent for games which do just that).

So games are not created in a vacuum, and everyone today lives in the present, not in 1989. If genuine game developers were able to carry on with their business, exactly the same way they carried on in 1989, as if the now-dominating non-game movement did not exist, it would mean that the non-game movement was having no effect on them. But we know that in this world everything has an effect on everything else -- quantum mechanics tells us that, if not our intuition -- so the question therefore is not whether there is an effect but how strong exactly it is.

And in most cases it's clearly very strong (Xboxification, indie gaming, etc.) The only areas of gaming in which non-gaming has little effect are those that deal with highly-evolved genres and sub-genres, as in competitive RTS, FPS, FTG, STG, turn-based strategy, etc. communities, were the players will simply not stand for any kind of watering-down of activities they've been involved in for decades.

[Muzozavr]

Games that play themselves?! You can't be serious, can you? Where is that patent, if it exists?

Edit: Nevermind, I found it.

Nintendo is working on a gameplay system meant to ease the pain of completing a difficult game, without watering it down so much that it turns hardcore gamers off.

The new system, described in a patent filed by Nintendo Creative Director Shigeru Miyamoto on June 30, 2008, but made public today, looks to solve the issue of casual gamers losing interest in a game before they complete it, while still maintaining the interest of hardcore gamers.

The solution would turn a game into a full-length cut scene of sorts, allowing players to jump into and out of the action whenever they wanted.

http://kotaku.com/5127251/nintendo-pate ... -in-design