It is of my opinion, and let’s be clear that it is an opinion only, that forums for video games on the internet have actually surpassed music forums for the cutting-edge of commentary from people who appear to have a near fatal fetish for cranial intrusive activities. And I somehow missed the metamorphosis, now standing agape in the wake and wanting to rip the hands off of my supposed peers.

It’s not that I would claim that by default playing video games ever was an excuse to claim intellect per se but it did at least show you had had an ability to think. It used to anyway and I have just stumbled upon a possibility for the sudden influx of people who use too many explanation marks when not simply posting opinions with the bluntness you’d only comfortably associate with people who know what the fuck they are talking about. You know, actual professors.

Games are starting to become more and more about reaction and twitch; From what I can tell of the shambling ranks that are Halo 3 monomaniacs you could pit a typical hooting needler wielding chimp against a person in the midst of a mouth-foaming epileptic fit with a controller strapped into their vibrating hands and any observer to the on-screen action would be hard pressed to tell you which is the broken one without actually seeing him suddenly drop out his chair, dead. And current evidence is such that I would far prefer to try to extract informed opinions from the clammy motionless one.

What I mean here is that too many people now are simply reacting.

Reacting in games is causing people to react with words to topics they are as unqualified to comment on as the virtual guns they use. Every visit I have made in the last few months to a gaming centric website such as 1UP has left me with a fine combination of well presented information and outright fuckwittery, the latter being provided by the “community” and it is always the same problem, reaction lacking any sort of cognition.

The latest installment that left me grinding my teeth was surrounding the group of publisher Gamecock’s employees that invaded the stage at Spike TV’s Game Awards, and we’ll ignore the fact these specific awards mean nothing to the actual game industry for now. After they specifically interrupted the game of the year award being presented to 2k for their title BioShock Gamecock co-founder Mike Wilson issued a public apology to 2k because he felt that despite the facade that was the Spike Awards 2k genuinely deserve recognition. Now to me that is fine, that’s fair news and a decent topic for conversation, unless you plan to include the fucking Horde. And they did, they as usual ask the opinions of the 1UP users. I’ll simply quote one.

If it was the last one they would want to disrupt, then why did they do it? (And not to mountain dew award) Like I would believe them…

Although that may come off to a normal person (one of which is not writing this) as being harmless as it is useless it’s the last line that I am finding the most common example of commentary now plastering the internet like talentless graffiti on the side of a passing inner-city train. It has a totally self centric basis that offers the reader nothing of value or any reason to even respond, “Like I would believe them….“. Well I also have a self serving demand of that person! Who the fuck are you? Are you a big name around these parts? Is it hard having to give approval to all these big issues? Are you capable of putting something into a context?

Am I really expecting too much of people when wanting to see some sort of justification for commentary? Discourse is a wonderful thing and it works only when the input has some weight to it. It really is shockingly easy to type a few more words before pressing the submit button, and with those words you could explain why you even need to believe them. Does this lack of trust mean that you would avoid games from said publisher? That might matter in some small way just because when a company loses the trust of consumers it impacts the industry. Perhaps you were actually Ken Levine and then “Like I would believe them” would send a message that you, one of the people the apology was addressed to rejected it because it was clear to you that their actions were no accident.

But no, it’s just some guy who Gamecock apparently need to impress. I’m glad I don’t need to.

Usually I’d point my out-stretched accusing finger directly at myself as a prime example of the world problems, yet in this case I feel that even this rambling flock of words has managed to become it’s own justification, there is a sort of context and several fragments of reason, it even has a conclusion at the end. I know that it’s there because I have actually already written it.

Music had always been a breeding ground for mindless argument because it essentially revolves around what you feel about the music, past a certain technical aspect. But video games are subject to different issues, when an album is put out there are no patches to come later, no bugs to be fixed because it was impossible to predict in the studio how the impact of thirty thousand people listening at the same time might slow the audio down. There are no people finding exploitable flaws in the music and using them to make the music play wrong for other people until the artist puts out a new song with those problems fixed, yet this is how people are dealing with video games.

Games are complex and take a lot of people a great deal of time to put together, problems are guaranteed. It is not possible to predict the behavior of network code under the stress of one hundred thousand people attaching to servers until it actually happens, which is post release. You then analyse the problems, propose fixes, create patches and then test them as hard as possible before putting them out. A patch put out with haste may actually make things worse or even do damage to the machine. And you would think this simple premise was something that people so involved with technology might accept and understand. They often do not.

The Call of Duty 4 forum, especially the Playstation 3 area is a painful example of how ignorant people are capable of being while still acting like a god damn expert. Let me post you another steaming example.

when are people gonna absorb into their heads. 360 is not true hd it is upconverted. This should explain.

360 game format is dvd-9 not hd

He just claimed that the media in which data is contained limits the resolution of the processed data and I wish that was out of context, or a joke. Or even that he had just been hit in the fucking head previous to typing, but it is a genuine post by a genuine mental defective. The danger is that there are intelligent people who need information and will sometimes trust those who sound like they are informed on the subject, the result could one day be devastating. Imagine the lethality of a shotgun was in question and the most convincing person there was that bloke. And with this level of brilliance there are also people there who are talking about suing Infinity Ward because their game has bugs with online play, not even a month after it hit retail. Not only do they fail to understand minor functions of the industry they suck on, they are equally lost for information on legitimate reasons to sue. I only wish they would forget how to process oxygen.

I’m bored of this crap now so let’s finish.

It would be nice if people had less influence on the internet in general. An awful lot of people have nothing to say yet somehow manage to put nothing into words anyway, perhaps it is not just a coincidence that words on the internet have no physical weight but those in a book do. Unfortunately it’s not so easy to burn the internet.