The Internet sent me this on a postcard. "Wish you were here."
Every time I write about games here, I’m grabbing at loose straws. It means I don’t have a specific subject planned for the day and inspiration’s failed to strike. I will it to come to me. I take run ups at the keyboard. “Speak to me, oh muse!” I cry. “Speak to me that I might type words that will appeal to those who’ve stumbled upon my blog while searching for pictures of Charlie Brooker and Konnie Huq doing the sex-nasty!”
And then, when they fail to appear, I give up and say “Sod it. What’s going on in the world of video games?”
Fortunately, yesterday there were loads of things going on the world of video games. I’m going to write about them and then post those grisly sex pictures you’re all here for. Or maybe I’ll write a haiku about them instead. Which will I do? Read on, and find out!
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Yesterday there were a couple of high profile games trailers unleashed upon the Internet and both of them caused a stir in their own way. They stood at opposite ends of the entire gaming spectrum: One was for the latest installment of a long-running franchise beloved of gamers – a series that celebrates the interactivity of the medium and encourages the player to go anywhere and do anything. The other trailer was a for a game so ‘casual’ (for want of a better word), I’m not even sure it was a game. As far as the I can tell, it’s more of a facilitator; it’s a catalyst for sexy swingy fun time.
Yes, We Dare from Ubisoft is not a game – it’s an exercise in cynicism. Or gullibility. Or the hopeful cynicism of a marketing department who believes there are people gullible enough to buy this shit.
The trailer paints the game as a risqué version of the Mario Party series. From what little gameplay it reveals, it might as well be any other collection of Wii minigames, though one which demands every minigame should be played upon the back of a scantily clad woman.
In We Dare, the Wii-mote peripheral truly is peripheral. The trailer shows its players kissing and spanking each other as part of the game; in both cases the Wii remote is a voyeuristic third party, resting on a pair of buttocks or hanging between a couple of writhing tongues. Its extraneous to the saucy fun happening all around it. Maybe it translates the kissing and spanking into player actions on screen, but the poor Wii controller itself doesn’t realise what’s happening to it. The kissing might as well be a strong breeze causing it to sway from its wrist strap. The spanking might as well be an elephant stampede.
It’s all so desperately pointless, and where it’s easy to laugh this kind of thing off in many of the other minigame collections out there, the use of sex in this context is unpleasantly salacious. Gaming has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to sex as it is – in no small part to the two market leaders being militantly prudish one one side and obsessed with schoolgirls’ underpants on the other. We Dare doesn’t introduce sex to the Wii to any degree of maturity – instead it makes the Wii remote function in the same way the Orgazma-Gizmo did in the old Fast Show sketches. It’s just there; it doesn’t do anything. But have a group of models in their lingerie squirming nearby and suddenly you have a video game – or at the very least, a trailer for one.
I’m a died-in-the-wool gamer, and as such I have a sneer permanently embedded on my scrote-like features. Maybe I’m not giving We Dare the benefit of the doubt. Ben Parfitt from MCVuk suggests that We Dare is “not for us” – which begs the question of just who the hell it’s for. Is there an untapped audience out there that’s so desperate for an orgy starter they’ll resort to buying consoles games for such a purpose? Because if there is, why not play Sexy Strip Halo like the rest of us? Headshots equal facials. Teabagging, well, that’s self-explanatory.
Microsoft, you can have that idea for free.
I found the We Dare trailer uncomfortable viewing, and not just because I’m prudish and anti-social. It seemed to go too far in its pandering towards a witless WKD Blue audience. It seemed like a thirteen-year-old’s fantasy of what nineteen-year-olds get up to when they leave home for college. At first I didn’t believe it was a genuine product at all – for much of the trailer I assumed it was an advert for the latest Raving Rabbids game, and that at any moment Rabbids would pour screaming from the Wii’s disc slot to batter the models over the head with the controller. As a gamer I’m not happy with the popularity of such ephemeral excuses for games; as person, I just don’t want to see things advertised using swinging, especially when the product in question is PEGI rated suitable for anyone twelve years old or over.
On the flip-side of the coin is a trailer for a game rated PEGI eighteen for adults. And while I tutted and folded my arms in disapproval during the We Dare trailer, for this one I gibbered with glee like a three-year-old getting the whole birthday cake to himself.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
I’ll admit, I was pathetic. I’ve never been so excited by a trailer in my life. I thrust my hands into the air. I danced to the music. My wife had the misfortune to be on Skype to me while I watched it – I shushed her. I’m lucky I still have a wife, especially considering my half-hearted attempt at grovelling apology. “I’m sorry I shushed you,” I said. “I’m so sorry! But . . . it was SKYRIM!” Then I spent the next half-hour yelling “DRAGONBOOORN!” at birds in the garden.
I called everyone I could and told everyone I know to watch it, just watch the damned trailer. It’ll change your life, I might have said. It’ll cure your every ailment.
I know it’s just a trailer, I know it’s just an advert. Like the We Dare orgy and Dead Island’s Surf Angel, it’s one thing designed purely to sell another thing.
But man, did you see it? It didn’t rely on unrelated CG or dubious sexuality. It relied upon the rousing music from Jeremy Soule, the direction and editing that sweeps us across the fantasy land of Skyrim, that gruffly intoned Max von Sydow voice-over, and the hype of a fan-base who’ve visited The Elder Scrolls series before and know what to expect from this game. Because all these things wouldn’t mean anything if it wasn’t for the fans themselves watching the trailer, seeing all that luscious in-game footage and knowing what it means.
We can visit this world. We can go to these places. We can run through those weirs and paddle in them ‘til our heart’s content. We can stroll through the village with the waterwheel, and climb to that mountaintop city. We can jump off those cliffs to swim in the sea. We can pick mushrooms in that autumnal birch forest, or hunt animals, or kill our foes there. We can pray at that church or, in true Consolevania style, we can take off our boots and hurl them onto the chapel roof.
This is a world where we can do what we like. There will be stories we can choose not to follow, and enemies we choose not to pursue. We can become magicians, thieves, warriors and kings, and we can do it all from the comfort of our living rooms.
I couldn’t help smiling at the trailer because I know all this; I’ve been there before. Not to Skyrim – not for another nine months – but to the worlds featured in Oblivion and Morrowind before it. They’re two of my all-time games. To me, The Elder Scrolls are the very pinnacle of gaming – they’re what gaming’s all about. The exploration, the story-telling, the things I’ve done and the places I’ve seen without leaving my comfy chair. Nothing else gives you that. Nothing else can. A world that reacts to your every action, that doesn’t just exist in your imagination but can be seen right there on the screen in front of you. From dragon-slaying to boot-throwing, it’s astonishing that games have come to this. It’s astonishing that this is what games are.
So why shouldn’t I be enraged by We Dare, which tells you everything gaming is and everything it can be means nothing, that it’s superfluous. We Dare, where your controller isn’t your portal to another dimension but a plastic thing, a sex toy. It’s like using a beloved novel as toilet paper. It’s insulting. I’m insulted.
Anyway, my post is at an end and I promised the misled gawpers who stumbled across my blog a certain something something. Guess what?! I wrote a haiku.
Charlie and Konnie
TV personalities
No nudes in my blog
Now scram, all of youse.
campfireburning 