Just a quick heads up from me today. I was browsing my usual news pages and came across this as the most read article on the BBC (as of around 1 o'clock today).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17274186
Quite apart from the fact that the main source is a guy I know from Cambridge, it is great to see 40k getting some mainstream media. Not only that, but I feel the article gives a very fair summation of tabletop gaming without the usual ridicule. It also touches on some of the controversies associated with GW.
What do you guys think?
Nice to see 40K getting some mainstream press attention for the right reasons! Not just an article about how dark and sinister it all is and "should we let our children play this?".
ReplyDeleteGood to see they recognise it's mostly 20-30 somethings not kids anymore.
Also interesting to see #69 on the comments. Rick Priestley who co-authored 40K!
Oh and it's a shame they didn't show it in it's fully painted glory in the video!! Tell your mate to get a brush out!
ReplyDeletegood point, all the paint-jobs are crap. i have to say they didn't really emphasise the modelling and painting aspect as much as i might have liked.
DeleteGonna read it now, hopefully its not like the tripe I had to put up during my pro online gaming time, that was retarded.
ReplyDeleteFor a media article that is ok. It shows two fair sides, one that its just another form of hobby entertainment, though they do not touch at all, apart from "I get to game with my dad" on the social side of things. The negative is actually the cash side of the game, opposed to the "geek" or "malicious nature" of the game.
ReplyDeleteIts interesting they do not touch on the social side of the game. I remember when I was in the midst of my FPS career, I was doing a lot of writing (various big sites, not small blogs!) and I'd keep an eye on news sites quite a lot because online/lan gaming was about to become mainstream. However, the articles and videos back then were not about an positives (to use Magic The Gatherings phrase "play the game, see the world") but about how disconnected you were from the world.
There was a famous clip of a player called shaGuar, shot by his own father for what I think was CNN. His father follows him to a lan cafe and videos him for hours, the narrative being "I am mere inches from my son and he is obvious to my presence ...") This painted the picture of gaming as this all engrossing machine that shuts you off. Enter the clips on the net of "nerd rage" keyboards flying at lan and bit more than chubby kids screaming at monitors over a game that promoted killing ... well the daily mail mums weren't happy.
Then enter Everquest / World of Warcraft and the shit hit the fan. Children died, the sky turned black, and for a minute I think the world ended.
But the whole time they concentrated on the whole idea that it was completely disconnected - you didn't physically interact. The whole idea of internet grooming was thrown around, men posing as women, adults as children etc ... It is a system built on pretending its social but it isn't really (supposedly, funny how some of my good friends are guys I met during my professional gaming days ... see them more in real life than online)
40K is the complete opposite to that. It FORCES interaction - I am really surprised they didn't focus on that.
The BBC did have a few condemning articles on online gaming that received quite a bit of backlash from the online community so I can't help but think that figured into it.
At least it wasn't like the gizmodo/jon finkel article from last year. That (tried) to make gamers look bad ....
Dude, I really struggle with seeing anything other than South Park where they do Warcraft online when I think of online/mmo/lan gaming.. Now, intellectually, as a guy that plays with toy soldiers I know that there is a phrase based around kids and glass houses..but I can't help it!
ReplyDeleteDid anybody else think the article didn't really say anything?
Its not got any depth to it at all, just basically acknowledges it exists in a field of entertainment where things like Call of Duty are no longer deemed "uncool".
ReplyDeleteI remember when I used to actually make money at Counter Strike and was a geek for it. Now I am banned from playing with half my friends because "I make the game too un-fun for them". Funny how it works out.
World of Warcraft was a horrible and great thing at the same time. Its hard for me to dislike it because I'll never be as good at a game as I was at that. But I also put in unheralded hours to get good at it, and stay good at it. Same with RTCW and CS.
MMO's will always have that geek/nerd stature attached to them. Same with Magic the Gathering, which is probably the most intellectual game outside of say, Chess, I have seen (and also one of the more lucrative games). But yeah the south park episode was pretty damn funny. I didn't care, I was making thousands of pounds playing the game at that time lol. I was the fat dude picking on the kids (I wasn't really, I was like a defender of justice, righter of wrongs, doo'er of, erm doing things)
The article was a bit like hitchhikers guide, deeming the game "mostly harmless" with zero real content. And because of that it will get browsed over.
Oh just for fun, look up "Jon Finkle Gizmodo" if you have a spare 30 minutes. Its amazing to see the gaming community rally behind a single guy (who gets ripped to shreds in the article when he went on a blind date with the author).