Weekend Confirmed Episode 27

Oh for the love of god, really? More football talk? Cripes, I fall asleep whenever you guys talk about Madden or NCAA or whatever, but at least that's excusable because they're actually videogames, but just straight up talking about football? No thank you.

Disclaimer: The following rant does a lot of generalizing. I understand this.

The fact that Madden even requires talking about sort of pisses me off. I remember a day when the kind of person who called themselves a gamer was the kid who begged his parents for a note to get out of gym class, but the mainstreaming of the medium is such that now the kid who calls himself a gamer is just as likely to be on the football team. The kind of person who loses their shit and lines up overnight waiting for the new Halo is quite possibly the same kind of person who would have beaten the shit out of the kid playing Zelda back in the day.

And I can't even call that good for the industry. Once regular people started playing games, companies wanted to make actual money on these things, which leads to enormous budgets and the same pitfalls that come with making a shit-ton of money being the entertainment business. Lack of innovation, sequels out the ass, and your big-name titles catering to the lowest common denominator. Case in point: The dominance of the shooter.

This is not an attempt to stir up the "why are we always killing things in games" debate. We've always killed stuff in games. Link kills monsters, Mario kills turtles, we kill tiny little army men in Civ and Starcraft, I'm sure there are point-and-click adventure games where you killed a ton of dudes. Roguelikes. Zork. Whatever. Things die. But there is a giant chasm of difference between jumping on a goomba or smiting a moblin and picking up some realistic assault rifle and mowing down terrorists or zombies. We killed things in the old days because we were trying to save a princess. Why do we kill things in Call of Duty? Because shooting people in the head is fun?

Compare the gaming space to the other facets of the entertainment world and it starts to look pretty juvenile. Except for when a new Pokémon game comes out, the yearly top 10 sales charts look pretty much like a top 10 box office full of Jean Claude Van Damme movies.

Jesus I should have gone to bed an hour ago.