Bonjour!

I've come to realize that over my years of playing video-games I have become gradually more fussy about the games I play. Any old "good" game will simply not cut if for me anymore, I need a GREAT game to keep me interested. It must have fantastic gameplay or an engrossing story or something that really catches my eye, or else I'll never play it again or even, in the most severe cases, uninstall it out of frustration. I get the feeling that if I become too picky someday somebody is going to slap me about the face and give me a "there are children in Africa who don't have any food!" speech albeit applied to electronics and video-games.

It's actually become rather frustrating just how picky I am. A little while ago I picked up Mirror's Edge, definitely a very average sort of game. It kept my interest for a little bit but after a few hours of playing it I became immensely bored and couldn't continue on leaping from rooftop to rooftop and watching the Esurance-style cutscenes. Some people seem to have enjoyed the game quite a lot....

I wish I could be one of those people!

I know I sound like an obese man blaming his blubber-covered belly on genetic defect instead of his own personality failings but I truly CANNOT help it. Perhaps I played too many fantastic games in a row and my standards were raised too high? I recall fondly the days when I could pick up virtually any decent game and have an absolute blast with it.

Games that are recommended to me by others often fail to meet my unreasonable standards and I usually stop playing them very quickly. Things that other people see as great, I see as rather 'meh' products. Does anybody else have this problem? Am I the only one who is too picky for his own good when it comes to video-games?

Oh woe is me who can only enjoy the finest of games!

Termite

Greetings!

Internet anonymity...what a glorious thing. I can call you all sorts of terrible things, and you would never know how to get back at me! Fortunately, most people have at least an ounce of maturity in them and because of that refrain from taking full advantage of the anonymity that the internet provides. There are some however, who abuse this power, and use it to call people things like...I can't even bring myself to say some of those things. Anyway, you get the point. And of course, this crops up most often in the scary world of online-videogaming. Have you ever played Counter Strike? Halo? Pretty much any other online-multiplayer game? Then I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

And if you are like me and frequently look at game related forums, then you have most likely stumbled upon threads titled things like "Anonymity breeds assholes" or "Why the trolling" with people talking about experiences they've had with trolls and such and such. They talk about how their experiences have been ruined, how angry they are that people must be so immature, and of course the mandatory smart-ass who has to dissect the whole thing and examine why people abuse their anonymity.

Well I'm going to invoke a popular saying on these here interwebs:

















Don't acknowledge them, that just makes it worse. Don't mind them. Mute them. Do whatever, just don't pay attention. Are you going to let some punk with a microphone ruin a perfectly good game of Team Fortress 2? No, you shouldn't, just mute him. And don't start discussions about them either. Don't post your experiences of how some dude ruined your playtime, that will just give them more desire to do it again.

We all know why they do it, it's obvious. The rules of normal life don't apply on the internet. You can swear and not feel the consequences. You can be spam "Boobies" on a server and not have somebody slap you in the face. It's power that they don't have in real life, and they don't posses enough restraint or good reason to not use it. I get it, and if you somehow didn't before, now you get it too.

They are a minority on the internet that are being given too much attention. Who are these people? Teenagers with nothing better to do than ruin everybody's experience. They are attention seekers and assfaces, and the more you acknowledge that they are ruining games and message boards, the more they want to do it.

So I say, enough is enough. There is nothing more to discuss, trolls are idiots who should be ignored. So we should stop acknowledging their existence.

Everybody who agrees, say aye!

Your about to fall asleep at keyboard friend,
Termite

*And yes, by writing a blog about not acknowledging the existence of trolls I realize that I am acknowledging them. This is the last time I will, I swear!*

Howdy!

I've been lurking around the forums a bit, trying to get a feel for what they are like and how they have developed since I was last on them, and I've been pleasantly surprised. They are not so plagued and afflicted with the virus that makes them a cesspool of hate and WAYLT threads. The forums have their issues, but for the most part I am very happy with how they have turned out.

I am not surprised that the Gamespot hate has yet to subside, I have a feeling it never will. If you were to take everything said in the forums as gospel, not only would you be a profoundly disturbed individual, but you would also get the idea that Gamespot is run by the antichrist, and that all of the editors there are minions of Satan. Well, since it's run by CBS it is kind of run by the antichrist, but that's irrelevant. One of the threads still floating about on the forums is the one about Aaron Thomas and some others getting fired from Gamespot. The amount of fanboyish rage that I see on that thread...baffling. I thought we were supposed to dispense with the Gamespot ways and abandon pointless hate! But no, instead of bickering like children over consoles, you are now bickering over websites. Petty things, both of them, and in equal measure might I add. If you do not show a little more maturity than the average Gamespot user, then you cannot bash their community. Gamespot still has its place in the world. It provides more obscure and financial news than GB does or wants to. That's why I still sometimes check out Gamespot for some cold-hard facts.

I've also noticed that people seem to be spelling things better than a retarded monkey, which is always a glorious sight. Many of the forums and message boards that I have seen, I would not wish my worst enemy to have to read. And don't get me started on Youtube....

Also, I'm rather surprised that the post count of the top posters is not quite a lot higher. By now I would have expected it to have broken 10000, but no...it has yet to do so. Obviously once the forum fervor weared off, it was quite a lot harder to post at the same rate as we were early on, but still...

Ah whatever. Good on ya Giant Bomb, I'm glad to see the forums thriving!

Your mentally tired friend,
Termite

Note: This is what happens when I try to make a blog post when I'm tired, I can't come up with anything compelling and end up making a short, boring post. Oh well...might as well post it.

Hello there comrades in gaming!

I've been absent for quite a long time now. I'm going to attribute it to my fickle nature. For the first few weeks after Giant Bomb's explosive appearance on the internet, I was absolutely hooked on the site. Oh the time I spent on those forums...glorious. But alas, all good things are doomed to end. After a short while of being totally into the website, my brain decided that it was time to rain on my parade. My interest waned and waned until I could no longer bear to even glance at another forum thread or game review for that matter. And now, here I am, months later. Why? Good question, for which I have no real answer. I had the thought banging about in the back of my noggin that I should write a blog post pertaining to gaming. And what better place to post my pathetic lamentations, complaints, and statements than here at Giant Bomb!

And so commences to onslaught of poorly written, gaming-related rantings...

Today, I thought I would talk about (Or rather, write about) the "Are games art?" discussion. I know, I know, even the slightest mention of this will probably drive away everybody who would even consider reading this, but it's all that comes to mind right now so I'm going to roll with it. The reason I thought about it was because I saw the feature on Gamespot covering the "debate". Despite being overly brief and rather worthless in my opinion, the feature nevertheless piqued my interest. Are games art? It was a question that I had to give a lot of thought. Here are some of the conclusions I came to after thinking about it for a while:

1: The language that many people use while discussing this is rather misleading.

I say this because the debate isn't about whether or not game is art, it is a debate over whether or not gaming can be classified as one of the "fine-arts". There is no solid definition for art, most all people understand this. Just like there is no clear definition for what music is. Some people go so far as to say that music is simply sound through time. As long as there is a noise, that is music. And art, similarly, has an impractically broad definition in some people's minds. Art can be said to be EVERYTHING. I just smeared some ketchup on the wall, that is art.

People such as Egbert are smart enough to know that they do not have the definitive definition of what consitutes art, there are simply debating whether or not games can be considered one of the fine-arts, alongside painting, sculpture, music, such and such. To say that it is not art seems silly, since the definition of art itself is simply to fuzzy to exclude anything at this point.

2: Painting and sculpture were not considered fine-arts for a very long time, so to say that games can never become a fine-art is just stupid.

Both painting and sculpture were considered crafts, not arts in the past. The only reason it got recognized was when universities started teaching things like advanced perspective and other important techniques to both painters and sculptors, which showed that there was indeed a heavy intellectual aspect to the process of making paintings and sculptures. However, the intellectual aspect was ALWAYS there. One must have inspiration and talent to make a good painting, this was true before and after it was accepted as a fine-art. The true reason that both of those things got accepted was because the painters and sculptors were getting louder and louder in their demands for acceptance. The whole "well, now it has an aspect of learning and thought to it" thing was simply an excuse that the nay-sayers made so that they would not look like fools. They always were art forms! I think we are observing the exact same thing now that people were seeing back then. The elitists at the top of the artistic food chain don't want to be questioned, and they don't want change.

3: Many gamers have a strange notion that quality defines whether or not something qualifies as art.

Well, it doesn't. Unless you subscribe to the theory that the art-form is simply a form for art-potential, and that not all things made within that form can be considered art, all things within an accepted art form are art. Citizen Kane is a movie. A great movie. It is a movie, and film is an art form. Thus, it is art. Hitchcock is a movie. A so-so movie. It is a movie, and film is an art form. Thus, it is art. The quality doesn't matter. No matter how much worse Hitchcock might be, it is still as much a piece of art as Citizen Kane is, fundamentally.

Keeping that in mind, let's examine a typical comment you might see on a discussion about whether or not games are fine-art:

"While not all games are art, like Sonic Unleashed, some are, like Bioshock!"

Both of them are in the same medium. If Bioshock is art, so is Sonic Unleashed. The quality doesn't have any effect on whether or not it is fine-art.

4: Just because video-games are made for entertainment, doesn't make them any less of an art-form.

I'm sure many of you know of deviant art right? That famous website with all of those independent artists? Well, they have lots of very good drawings and paintings. Do you think the painting of Mario and Luigi fighting over Peach while she runs off with Bowser was made for some reason other than entertainment? Are you suggesting that a drawing like that (Which, I'm not trying to put down or anything, I love that kind of stuff) was made in some artistic epiphany and is more than mere lollygagging? Please, spare me this ignorance. Yet, it is a drawing. It is art! Art made purely for entertainment!

As you can see, this argument that things made for entertainment are not art is silly.

5: It only matters to people who like arguing, and lawyers.

I like games. You like games. Am I contemplating whether or not something is art while playing a game? No, of course not. It being art or it not being art, it doesn't make any difference when you are actually playing the game. You are having a good time and that is all that really matters. I'm not trying to back out of the argument, as you can see by my lengthy analysis of some parts of it, but I just want to point out that it doesn't really matter to the average-joe. Who it does effect however, is lawyers. The classification of video-games could prove to be a more important issue in the future, especially with the ever-present threat of anti-game sympathies coming to a head with anti-game legislation in the future. If games are classified as art, it may make them at least slightly impervious to laws which would seek to censor them.

I hope you enjoyed some of those little observations and opinions I have on the whole thing. If you didn't, great. You can leave a comment pointing out any errors in my logic or percieved innacuracies if you wish. What do I personally think? I think video-games are a fine-art, plain and simple.

Until next time,
Termite

*Didn't have time to proofread, will probably do so at a later time. May flesh out some of the statements I made. But for now, please bear with this unorganized mess I call a blog post*

Well, I've finally got around to watching the Dark Knight.

But before that, I'm just going to say for the record that I'm probably going to stop blogging now since I don't get any comments *insert sad face here*. So, let's get this over with.

I was playing a jolly game of Team Fortress 2 when my father steps into the room and says that we should do something today. I agree wholeheartedly and ask if he has any suggestions as to what we could do. He replies that we should finally go out and see the Dark Knight in a theater and I accept. After about 10 minutes more of stabbing people repeatedly in the back, I turned off the amusing distraction and got ready for another slightly more worthwhile distraction. I was however distracted from getting ready for a distraction by what I believe was the final for the 400 meter relay on the television.

After watching that, we took off towards the theater. However this was not a close-by theater. You see, I don't like theaters. I can't stand the idea of them in fact. The countless times where some man of rather higher than normal height would decide to sit in the seat in front of me haunt my memories. Knowing this, we went to a nice theater probably about 20 minutes train ride away from our home ( Not counting the 8 minutes or so it took us to get to the station on our bikes .)

Anyway, back to the point. Near the station there was a nice little cafe that has a wicked pastrami sandwich. It also has Camembert cheese in it, which is always a good thing. Now note that this station isn't in the middle of some vast wasteland, it's actually quite metropolitan and is flanked on all sides by rather unappealing buildings. This particular cafe emitted a very, dare I say, condescending aura which didn't turn me away from it but left me a bit on edge. On top of that the lock in their restroom was very stubborn towards me. The pastrami sandwich however, which both me and my father ate, more than made up for all of the cafe's shortcomings. I left this little cafe feeling like I'd just eaten a meal at the GAP, which isn't quite a good thing but at least you know the food wasn't contaminated.

After that, we bought some cookies from a person of less than fortunate mental circumstances, the money which we spent hopefully going towards some sort of fundraiser. Then we entered the station and bought the holy "Day Pass" type of ticket which allowed us to use any of the subway's, buses or any other public transport provided that it was being run by that particular company. Then we got on the train and made our way to the station that the theater was near.

On the train ride, me and my father exchanged hypothetical situations, all of them in the form of questions. For example, would you like to have cybernetic eyes or cybernetic legs? We went on like this for a while until we reached the station. The station itself is rather nice. We exited the station by using that godlike "Day Pass" tickets that we had and tucked them away in our pockets. We wandered around a bit until we found the theater. We already knew that we were about 45 minutes early for the movie, so we just bought our tickets quickly then wandered into a nearby gamecenter.

Now my father isn't a gamer, but as you should probably know I am. That was pretty much the only reason we ended up there. I sort of gravitated towards it. And guess what I saw? My mortal eyes were barely strong enough to bear the sight of something quite so awe-inspiring. My bones shook, and my neck bowed at the sight of it...

Street Fighter IV Arcade Machine.

I was baffled, dumbstruck, and completely caught off guard. To my horror though, people were playing them. On top of that, I'm not much of a fighting master myself so I would have simply made myself look like a fool. So I opted out of playing it. Also beheld to me was a Half Life 2 arcade game....

What the hell is with that?

I really don't want to know what that game is all about, and I once again opted out of playing it. But this time it was simply because I knew the game couldn't live up to it's IP. Then, before entering the theater me and my dad tried to play a racing game against each-other. We didn't know what the hell we were doing so we ended up both playing against weak AI controlled drivers. Both of us won, unsurprisingly and I was a mere 3 seconds ahead of my father.

Then, we bought our popcorn and drinks and entered the theater. I saw a foreigner enter as well...but I didn't see him after that.

Then we watched the sorry ass previews that they had packed in there. There was a preview for Hancock and one for Ironman and another for some Japanese movie about a blind woman who is also a master of the blade. None of these movies caught my eyes, and served more as something to mock and laugh at.

Then the movie proper began. I'm not going to detail all of my reactions and opinions on individual scenes in the movie, but I will give my opinion on it and try to breakdown what the movie meant to me:

I thought it was better than pretty much any other action movie and then some.

There was however one little tiny thing that kind of pissed me off...the main theme of the movie ( Or at least what I interpret as the main theme ) is the same as the one I was going to put in a novel I was trying to write. So I've been on and off writing the story for this novel I want to write, and it's going pretty well so far. And then BAM, Dark Knight has a chillingly similar theme to it.

The theme I speak of is the Joker's chaotic nature and how he is in a way morally ambiguous. I'm not going to go on a long rant about why the Joker is the way he is, and I'm not going to be angry that the movie had a simmilar idea that I had. That's the extent of my feelings about the movie, or at least all you're going to see.

So we finished watching the movie. We got back on the train and I played some puzzle games on his iPhone. We went to a restaurant near the station that we started from and bumped into some of his students, even one of the waitresses was one he taught. More hypotheticals. He mixed some different sodas to see what it would taste like and it didn't end so well.

We got some stuff for my mom, then went home.

The End

Well I hope you enjoyed that. This will more than likely be my last blog on the site for a while so for the zero people who still read these ramblings I thank you.

Your dude,
Termite