saddlebrown

The reaction to the WarioWare QL being a repurposed clip from UPF was pretty negative, which is just as understandable as the counter that the guys are understaffed and overworked so cut them some slack. Now, I know everybody always goes into a frothing rage anytime someone suggests this, but maybe the solution here is... shorter videos.

I've been a fan since GameSpot and watching the length balloon outward over the last decade has driven me away. The videos aren't better because they're longer; they're worse. There's way more dead air, they have less to say, and it's just boring. On top of that, it means the guys have to do way more work: not just in terms of editing, rendering, uploading, etc, but in coming up with stuff to say. This was a pre-pandemic problem too, but it's only gotten worse since.

But everybody always wants everything to be longer even though it makes the content worse, puts more of a strain on the staff, and makes shit unwatchable for anyone that can't (or simply doesn't want to) block 2+ hours every time they want to watch GB. Can we finally have a real conversation about this? Every time I've suggested this over the years people always say "well you don't have to watch the whole video" which fails to address any of the issues at all and only pushes away more people.

@efesell said:

Yeah, it's like, I don't need every video to be some tightly edited masterpiece. I just miss when they used to put in more effort to craft something special because they were always so good at it. Plus, I don't know, I just find the cycle of "here's a video of us on the couch playing a game for 1-3 hours" for every video and feature now to be kind of boring. For years, I used to watched every single Giant Bomb video. Now I rarely bother to even open the website, sticking instead with the podcasts since they're easier to digest.

Totally fair. It's definitely the trend overall. But yeah, it kinda bums me out. I still love GB but honestly I barely open it anymore because everything they produce is too long and too freeform. There's certainly an audience for that and I don't want to take that away from them, but I really miss when GB was a pioneering site. Like, they literally invented the Quick Look format that every other site ripped off. They popularized serial streaming (just made that term up) with the Endurance Run. They made big waves with that roller coaster idea.

I really hope someday they get back to balancing out their output with more short or edited videos.

Apologies if this has been voiced elsewhere, did a quick search and didn't find anything.

I love GB but it kinda bums me out that this year's GOTY awards have no silly scripted videos to go along with them. I've been chewing through the podcasts like I do every year before I start reading the articles or watching the awards videos, so I'm only getting around now to watching the first couple videos. It was honestly pretty disappointing to find out the videos this year are just the podcast deliberations. No funny themed videos to announce the winners, no sitdown to play the winning game for 20 or 30 minutes afterward, just "hey here's that discussion from the podcast."

I know there's other videos on the site this year, like Hitsmas and Rock Band and whatnot, and I'm excited to get to those when I have time, but again, it's a little disappointing to me that GB's output in the last three or four years has been entirely just "let's sit on the couch and do an unedited stream for a couple hours." What happened to Vinny and Drew's travelogues? Vinny's short-lived idea for briefly mentioning the games they've been playing but don't have time to quick look? Dan and Jeff's hilarious and stupid rollercoaster ride? I know all that stuff takes a lot of time and effort, but isn't that the point of having a much larger staff now and two offices?

I'm not trying to shit on GB here or anything like that. I just miss some of those older, more tightly produced videos. They were always super fun.

@themist997: She liked watching me play The Witness but she said she'd probably get frustrated playing it herself, which is totally fair because even I eventually stopped playing it. In general though, I think that's a great suggestion especially if the person likes puzzles. Super safe environment, slow pace, no crazy reflexes required. In terms of just getting someone familiar with how to navigate in first-person with the dual joystick controls, this is a real winner, I think. I also tried getting her to play Firewatch for the same reason but ultimately she fell off because she lost interest in the story and didn't like the characters all that much. The whole experiment has been a fantastic case study in why games aren't as popular as passive stuff like movies and TV and why a company like Nintendo is probably right to keep hammering away at the barriers to entry. She liked Super Mario 3D World a good bit, for instance.

@lead_dispencer: Funny enough, I did get her to play DX a few months ago. She really liked it but it got too fast for her to keep up with. Requires really deft reflexes and a good sense of how to interpret and follow the correct path. She watched me play it and was basically like "I can't even keep up with where you are anymore. What is even happening?" which is of course one of the things I love most about DX. She did love playing Pac-Man 256 though actually. We played that in multiplayer and it ended up being a much better game for beginners because it's slower, less crazy, has co-op, etc. She also liked that it was by the Crossy Road folks because we both got hooked on that for a solid month or so.

Lot of really good suggestions from everybody in this thread. It's super interesting seeing where people go with this and what games come up the most.

@hellbrendy: Ah, you're right! I kind of wish I hadn't sold my Wii U last year now. I could even build her levels to play to teach her specific stuff. But yeah, I'm definitely hoping one day we'll be able to do stuff like Portal 2 together but I think right now I'm going to take a step back and stop forcing her from one frustrating dual joystick game to another that she's going to spend her entire time fighting with the controls and not enjoying herself, and instead find games that are easy to control and will build a legitimate love for gaming first. Then by the time she picks up another dual joystick game, she'll understand the concepts much better, have better coordination and control, and will actually be motivated on her own rather than a thing she's happy to do for me, you know? Like even now, it's really fun watching how much she loves Bejeweled. She's already put like 13 hours into it in two weeks. Similarly, we both got super addicted to playing Crossy Road together. To me, that's the goal. Games she truly enjoys even on her own.

@voidoid: Oh no worries, LeafGreen is actually the GBA one so it'll emulate really well. I dropped off Pokemon after Silver/Gold so the DS ones aren't even on my radar, honestly. But yeah, it's not going to teach her any of the complicated dual joystick skills or whatever but I figure it might actually be smart to build up to that instead of throwing her from one to another and trying to brute force it until she just doesn't like games at all. I think Pokemon is a game she'll have fun with and it can teach her lots of game concepts and how to "read" the language of games: where to go, what to do, how to figure out how to get there, etc. in a less frustrating format. I just want her to have fun with a game without having to worry about fighting the game just to control it.

Plus, when you think about it, you and I (or least I did) started out as kids with games like Pokemon that weren't a challenge to control and got to build up a knowledge of how games work before manipulating the camera became a thing. I got to cut my teeth on 2D games, then N64 (one joystick and light camera control) before moving on to the PS2 and dual joysticks. Trying to force her to skip those years of prep to play dual joystick stuff was probably overzealous on my part.

@monkeyking1969: Yep, you're totally right about not hovering over her. She definitely has said she feels slightly more stressed if I'm there—not because I'm sitting there telling her what to do, judging her, or anything like that, but simply because she doesn't want to screw up in front of me. So typically I give her the option of "would you like me to hang out with you with you play or do my own thing in the other room?" Sometimes the former, sometimes the latter. If I'm there with her, I'll ask her whether she wants me to offer help or wait for her to ask. Again, sometimes former, sometimes latter. And yeah, in general, I'm only ever recommending games I have a strong conviction she'd enjoy for one reason or another, and almost always because of the topic or theme of the game and not because of how it controls. Like Overcooked we played because it's simple but it's about cooking and it's something we can play together. She likes it but sometimes struggles with how fast-paced it gets.

I've told her that learning to play games is quite literally like learning a language. It's a physical language, sure, but the principles are very similar and a lot of it is intellectual: how to read the environment and cues on where to go or what to do, for instance. First thing she did in Abzu was swim toward the out-of-bounds dark water—which you or I would look at and recognize as such and avoid because we've played Star Fox—so she got turned around twice before learning the rule. As she moved forward, the game hadn't presented her with an objective, so like a lot of non-gamers, she's used to the idea that games are stereotypically about having a clear goal, score or some other metric of success, so she occasionally asked "so what's the point of this game?" and I needed to explain that some games just present you with an experience and it's not about a score or whatever, but reductively, Abzu's goal is "move forward." Sometimes I'll point out where she needs to go and she'll ask me how I knew that instinctively having seen exactly what she's seen, and so I explain to her the visual clues the game gives. I tell her that it's an example of how once you learn the language, it all comes together: the swimming becomes beautiful and freeing rather than a struggle, you understand intuitively where to go next rather than search without a clue, etc.

It's really just fascinating seeing games from the eyes of someone who never grew up with them and doesn't know the language. But anyway, the next game she wants to play is Pokemon LeafGreen, which I think she's really going to love. Or at least I hope so.

@voidoid: I agree. I'm not trying to give her some historical overview of games; I'm just trying to find a logical progression to get her better at the general coordination skills and understanding the "language" of games. For instance, when she was playing Abzu the other night, the first thing she tried to do (after learning the controls) was try to swim into the darker water that you or I would look at and immediately think "OK there's a clear line where the water becomes darker meaning you can't go that way otherwise it'll turn you around, Star Fox-style." I let her do it to learn the rule on her own: she swam into one side, got turned around, swam into the other side, got turned around, then said "so I can't swim into the darker water?" It's not that she's dumb or anything; it's literally just that we take for granted how to read and interpret visual cues like that.

But yeah, she has no interest in retro games. Still, after reading through the comments here, I think the next game I'm going to get her to play (she's totally cool with this) is Pokemon LeafGreen. I asked her a series of questions (do you like red, blue, yellow or green more? Plants, fire, water, lightning? This screenshot or this screenshot?) to determine that LeafGreen is the right one for her. She won't have to worry about dual analog sticks, real-time actions or general coordination, really. She can just move around, have fun collecting cute animals and naming them, etc and play it on her own time without me there (gonna get an emulator for her laptop). That'll introduce her to broader game concepts like XP, leveling, a party, structure, maps, where to go, random battles, etc while giving her a safe control scheme. Plus, a bunch of her friends love Pokemon so they're going to be jazzed she's playing it and encourage her.

What comes after Pokemon though is still up in the air. Really depends on how she takes to it.

@hellbrendy: this seems to be a common theme among some people here but I'm not forcing her to do anything. Occasionally I'll recommend a game to her I think she'll enjoy despite not playing games, like Journey or Abzu. She's generally happy to play them but sometimes the controls are simply too much. Like Flower. I thought that'd be a hit but she found the swimmy controls frustrating to deal with and I can understand that.

Occasionally she says she wishes she could play games well because then we could share the interest or play more multiplayer stuff, so that's a motivator for me to figure out a good progression. She has lots of friends who really like games as well. We started playing Overcooked recently, and she likes that game a lot because you're not manipulating the camera or anything, but then it's an issue of speed.

But basically it just gave me the idea of how do you introduce someone into games in 2017? She likes the idea too and is very curious to hear what people say. Just want to clear that up for anyone who thinks I'm somehow forcing her to abandon Bejeweled and start playing CoD or whatever. Believe me, I know CoD is not the game for her.

My girlfriend didn't grow up playing games and therefore never learned a lot of the skills we take for granted, like how to manipulate two joysticks, face buttons, a D-pad, four shoulder buttons, a touchpad, a gyroscope and clickable analog sticks simultaneously. She loves simple stuff like Bejeweled but gets frustrated playing anything much more complex. She made it through Journey and right now she's playing Abzu, and those both give enough breathing room for someone like her to casually pick things up, but even those require a surprising amount of dexterity when viewed through a non-gamer lens.

So my question is what's the Couch to 5K-style equivalent for games? Like...

Mario???Call of Duty

Edit: just to be clear, I was not seriously suggesting she play Mario, then one other game, then Call of Duty. Just a hyperbole.