Sunday 20 November 2011

Sorry, Charlie, It’s A Man’s Game In The Virtual Army!

Charlie Brooker wimps out in spectacular style:
Anyway, I'd got about a quarter of the way into it and was "doing" a level based in Sierra Leone that required a bit of stealth and sneaking around. You spend most of the game accompanied by various computer-controlled characters, and I was walking behind one of these, a crotchety moustachioed soldier who's supposed to be my friend, when he suddenly goes "shhhh" because he's heard a guard coming.

So we both stop in our tracks, and moustache man snatches the guard, pins him against the wall, and stabs him right through the throat with a hunting knife, killing him instantly. Then the body hits the floor, moustache man says "OK, come on", and we continue sneaking into the compound. Or rather, we were supposed to. But I stopped after a few steps and walked back to where he'd killed the guard. I just stared at the blood on the wall. And I thought, "I don't want to be friends with the man who did that."
Newsflash, Chuck - you're playing a game.

And, god forbid that this were real life, and the world's fate rested in your soft, lily-white hands, I think you'd man up pretty quickly, or get shot...
I don't particularly mind the level of violence in computer games, partly because it's absurd, and partly because I'm hopelessly desensitised. What I do object to is the dick-swinging machismo that infests games like this.
Good try, but you do realise you are very, very unlikely to score with these women no matter what you write, don't you?

15 comments:

An elf in WoW said...

Liberals playing games? I am outraged. But wait... all liberals play games with people's hopes and ambitions and toy with their livelihoods.

So no change there then.

The Grateful Undead said...

As Orwell pointed out, the reason people like Captain Sneery can sleep safely at nights is because big, rough, tough men are prepared to unpleasant things to protect his lilywhite ass.
True then, true now.

Furor Teutonicus said...

XX And I thought, "I don't want to be friends with the man who did that. XX

Tell this bastard what, lets see just how many of this sort of friend he would like doing a one man street patrol around the bars and clubs of Kiel docklands at closing time when the fleet is in. (And THEY are suppossed to be "on the same side!).


(YES, I realise he is all upset over a GAME. But the principal....)

Gibby Haynes said...

Millions of people who went out and made this the biggest launch day selling game ever disagree with you, asshole. I guess that's why you write in the Gurdian, and not a serious newspaper.

Shaun Pilkington said...

Charlie is married to Konnie Huq so he does alright, I'd say.

He's also one of the formative games journalists the UK produced, long before his Grauniad column or TV like Dead Set.

Just sayin'

Greencoat said...

Have you peered at Brooker's byline mugshot?

He looks as though he's half-way through shitting a triangular brick.

A regular leftie lemon-sucker if ever I saw one.

Clarissa said...

Are we to assume then that dear old Charlie would have preferred it if the guard had slit the throat of him and his companion?

God help anyone who finds themselves themselves partnered up with Charlie when the next unpleasantness rolls round.

blueknight said...

Charlie Brooker, never retreated, although he has back spaced a couple of times .....

JuliaM said...

"I guess that's why you write in the Gurdian, and not a serious newspaper."

Ouch! ;)

"He's also one of the formative games journalists the UK produced..."

Then he perhaps should have shrugged off his sneering Guardian-acquired prejudices and come up with a proper game review?

As several commenters point out, he's been churning this sort of by-the-numbers crap for years now...

And btw, nice to see you in the comments again ;)

"God help anyone who finds themselves themselves partnered up with Charlie when the next unpleasantness rolls round."

Given where he works, he might have useful experience when that zombie apocalypse rolls around, though...

"Charlie Brooker, never retreated, although he has back spaced a couple of times ....."

SNORK!

andy said...

Christ,what a total fanny.its a GAME you tool,nobody`s actually dying.
But that said would he dare voice such thoughts to our veterans who have had to do this kind of stuff for real to allow lefty twats like this to make their liberal whines?.
A WW2 Royal Marine once told me that of all the service he`d seen in the war the one thing that really haunted him was the time he did actually have to kill a sentry with a knife.
His mate grabbed and bearhugged the guy from behind while he put the knife in.

bnzss said...

I know it's fashionable for conservatives to bash a liberal like Charlie Brooker, but I can't help but feel most of you have kind of missed the point of what he's saying, here. Here is a list of things Charlie Brooker is not doing in that column:

1) The Grateful Undead: he's not sneering at actual, for real, soldiers.
2) Furor Teutonicus: he's upset about the laziness of central characters in many games (and, yes, he does have a point), he's not talking about soldiers (redux of point 1, but it needs to be reiterated for you lot I think).
3) he's not, Gibby Haynes, suggesting it's a bad game, merely that the characters are often rubbish.
4) for the umpteenth time, Clarissa, he isn't talking about actual soldiers.

Here's the thing, right. It'd help if you lot read the article before knee-jerking a response to someone who is a pretty standard Guardian lefty (i.e. normal hate material on conservative blogs). Brooker is essentially correct. These games do feature characters who have such an absurd amount of apparent e-testosterone running through their pixelated systems that it is very difficult to empathise with the character and therefore get swept along with the storyline. Some games manage this just fine, of course - think Zelda, Half Life, and occasionally games in the GTA series - but sometimes the characterisation fails woefully and the ambience disappears, losing the game's extra dimension.

The ironic thing is that at least 3 of the commenters have missed the point entirely. Gaming is, of course, a leisure activity and non-serious in its entirety. So Brooker was just saying that since he is not a soldier and has no interest in being one, he doesn't want to, and has difficulty with, sympathise with some gung-ho Arnie-style 80s shit action film hero.

Of course, mindless criticism is something conservatives do rather well.

bnzss said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
JuliaM said...

" Brooker is essentially correct. These games do feature characters who have such an absurd amount of apparent e-testosterone running through their pixelated systems that it is very difficult to empathise with the character and therefore get swept along with the storyline. "

And yet, look at the sales figures. Clearly, they do sell and people do like them.

And complaining that the characters are over-egged and unrealistic is rather like picking holes in the science on 'Star Trek' or the impossible situations that Jason Bourne emerges from, unscathed.

It's entertainment, not real life...

"So Brooker was just saying that since he is not a soldier and has no interest in being one, he doesn't want to, and has difficulty with, sympathise with some gung-ho Arnie-style 80s shit action film hero."

Then why play the game and write the review in the first place? Because the 'Guardian' paid him to?

JuliaM said...

"Of course, mindless criticism is something conservatives do rather well."

And what the left seem to do so well is mindless, by-the-numbers sneering at what they see as 'the common people's pursuits'. Like football. And videogames.

bnzss said...

I should think he writes reviews on video games because he is (or certainly was) a video games journalist with a wealth of knowledge, and he's consistently chastised the first-person shooter genre for having terrible storylines and lacking atmosphere. As MW3 is one of the more popular games, it is probably his duty to review it and to criticise its weak points in the context of its peers. Sure, people buy it, but that doesn't make it a good game. I daresay in the same way that Labour got voted in 3 times since 1997 but were not necessarily very good...

I'd recommend watching his Gameswipe episode. You'll note how he doesn't care about the perceived violence and the gore, or the consistent skewering of social norms by the likes of GTA. He merely points out that the plots of games can be fantastic but often the designers are lazy and appeal to the lowest common denominator. Graham Linehan says a similar thing, and they (and I) think it's a wasted opportunity. So...he's not really wrong in what he says, but it's got nothing whatsoever to do with his political alignment or his views on real soldiers. Come on.