Jimmy Kimmel Did Nothing Wrong

A notable drawback of simultaneously having both a blog and a life that my free time doesn't always synchronize so terribly well with the most blog-worthy of current events in the world of video games. As a result, a lot of what I'd love to write just doesn't get written; and what does get written, if time-sensitive, is often late. What I'm writing now is an example of the latter.

First, before I begin, let me make clear that I don't have much of an opinion on Jimmy Kimmel or his show. I've never seen an entire episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live. I know Kimmel best as co-host of The Man Show, and that was so long ago that I hardly remember anything except for girls on trampolines in the credits. My point is that I'm unbiased regarding Kimmel himself. I have no reason to dislike him, but I certainly wouldn't call myself a fan.

My only bias is my affinity for video games. And yet, somehow, I'm finding that my opinion on what follows is practically opposite that of the so-called "gaming community" (or, at least, of those who are so utterly convinced that they represent it).

It was at the end of last week that the Jimmy Kimmel Live segment on the recent launch of YouTube Gaming (embedded below) was uploaded to YouTube itself.


The response was far more hilariously impotent rage than should ever be directed at a comedy sketch. It's no surprise that anything critical of YouTube users would get an incredibly high proportion of "dislikes" from YouTube users (and thus the low rating on the video is expected), but there's also something else going on. The "gamers" of YouTube, perhaps out to prove the stereotype that nerds take things too seriously, have all but formally declared war.


"...sincerely the entire gaming community," writes one presumptuous moron after having a big cry. Try again, buddy. I don't like to call myself a "gamer" but I'm still a part of the so-called community which you're pretending to represent, and I think Jimmy Kimmel did nothing wrong.

Frankly, the whole thing is an embarrassment. I was embarrassed for YouTube even before I watched Kimmel cherry-pick the most insane comments he could find for his on-air response to the idiotic controversy. The fact that people are actually mad about a comedy sketch is bad enough. It was a comedy sketch. Moreover, as comedy often does, it made a good point.

And maybe that's why everyone on YouTube is so mad. Do people get this angry when they actually believe they're right? The point of view put forth in Kimmel's segment — that it's so ridiculous for someone to watch live-streaming or pre-recorded video of a game someone else is playing — could be met with any number of counter-arguments. None of them, however, require all the screaming and crying that the YouTube community has done in the name of "gamers" this week. That's just evidence that Kimmel struck a nerve.

Furthermore, while everyone seems to think Kimmel was mocking "gamers" in that first video, he actually did no such thing. He made fun of people who watch people play video games, a group which surely overlaps with "gamers" but not fully. The backlash against Kimmel, therefore, isn't coming from "gamers" as a whole. It isn't coming from the entire community of video game consumers, a significant portion of whom don't even use YouTube on a regular basis and would agree with Kimmel that watching other people play video games all day is ridiculous. Most likely, the backlash against Kimmel's jokes is coming instead from YouTube content creators and their fans. In other words, it's all of the people who watch videos of Minecraft for hours on end, but not all of the people who play Minecraft for hours on end.

For the record: I'm not saying I hate YouTube, or the people who post videos of video games on YouTube, or the people who watch those videos. I'm just saying the YouTube community, collectively, got a little too heated over this situation. People who are upset with Kimmel should try to be a little more understanding of the fact that, to the uninitiated, the idea of going on the internet to watch other people play video games is a little bizarre.

Technically, people watching other people play video games is nothing new, and it's not that unusual when you think about it. People have been doing it since long before this thing called YouTube Gaming was launched, and I'm not just referring Twitch. Watching people play video games wasn't invented on the internet. Most of the times I ever watched my brothers play video games at home, or watched strangers play video games in arcades, I was just waiting for my turn; however, sometimes spectating is genuinely entertaining, depending on the game and how spectacularly the player is either succeeding or failing at it.

On the internet, meanwhile, the act of watching footage of another person playing a game was old news even before streaming caught on. For many years, players have uploaded video walkthroughs, video reviews, machinima, and speedruns as well as other miscellaneous shows of skill. Video game tournaments have, for quite some time, been a spectator sport. I've seen a few speedrunning events (like AGDQ) and some tournaments (like EVO), and sometimes it's fairly entertaining even if I've never played the game in question.

Much of the "gaming" content on YouTube, however, is of the type seen only offline before broadband internet connections made uploading, downloading, and streaming high-quality video a trivial task. This stuff is more akin to watching your brother hog the television than to watching an e-sports tournament. I'm referring, of course, to the countless hours of videos and live streams of essentially random people — some of them minor internet personalities and other not-really-famous people — literally just playing video games — not for educational purposes, not for bragging rights, and not competitively, but just casually — and sometimes providing commentary while doing so. PewDiePie became the biggest thing on YouTube by doing this. Sure, he's an anomaly, but the popularity of this type of content is not limited to one weirdly successful guy.

I won't waste a lot of space explaining why I'm not the biggest fan of this particular genre of video, mostly because Kimmel already did it for me. His segment on YouTube Gaming was, after all, a mockery of this type of content specifically. The sketch clearly wasn't poking fun at instructional video walkthroughs, it almost certainly wasn't about live-streamed video game tournaments, and I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with speedrunning. The joke was based on the absurdity of the idea that someone, rather than just playing a game, would prefer to watch someone else do it. There's no mockery of anything educational or competitive. The casual live stream and the "Let's Play" video, collectively, are the butt of this joke.

This is why it's so weird that "people watch sports" is such a frequently recurring comeback to Kimmel's video. Yes, people do watch sports; and in some contexts, watching video games is no different. But you have to be careful about how you use this analogy.

"Why do people watch sports?" the argument goes. "Anyone could just play sports, right?" I suppose we should note here that some people are disabled and cannot, but for the sake of argument, let's just pretend that everyone could play sports. "So why watch them?" It's because the sports on TV are played by professionals. They're good at it. While (almost) anyone could play sports, not everyone can play them at the professional level, and not everyone can play them so well.

So the sports analogy is great if you want to justify watching someone play a video game at a level of skill you are unlikely ever to reach. Unfortunately, much of the content on YouTube Gaming still doesn't apply.

Are you watching a speedrun? Are you watching a tournament? If you're watching either of these, then the analogy works. You're witnessing an impressive show of skill in a competitive (sometimes professional) environment to which you likely do not have access, and this is much like televised sports.

Are you watching some "funny" guy make weird noises and silly faces while playing some meme-game like Five Nights at Freddy's? Are you watching a scantily clad individual pose lewdly while some game is paused and minimized to the corner of the screen (and donations from viewers too afraid to find a proper porn stream are going through the roof)? If you're watching either of these, then no, that's not the same as watching televised sports at all. You could argue that it's entertaining for any number of reasons, but the sports analogy is no good.

Saying people watch videos for educational purposes works much better as a catch-all excuse for YouTube Gaming's entire existence. Technically, it only applies to actual video walkthroughs and other instructional content, but theoretically, any video of someone playing a game might happen to show the correct solution to your in-game problem. The average "Let's Play" series would make an incredibly inefficient walkthrough, but pretending it's educational is a lot less ridiculous than pretending it's anything like a sport.

Less convoluted justifications for watching "Let's Play" videos, and live streams of people playing video games, are these:

• I can't afford to buy every game, so I want to watch a guy play this game so I can see what it's like without relying on carefully edited trailers which are sure to make the game look better than it is in reality.
• The guy playing this game is just entertaining, and his reactions and commentary on this game are doubly entertaining because I like this video game too.
• Video games are basically movies now, full of visual spectacle and humor and drama, and if this kind of stuff happens to be the main appeal of a particular game whose budget was spent on aesthetics at the expense of entertaining gameplay, then I might as well watch the game rather than play it.
• You can't tell me what to do! I do what I want!

In any case, do you really need an excuse for your personal habits or a good counter-argument to the implications of some comedy sketch? (Hint: No.) The winning move was to laugh it off and move on, but YouTube's community lost hard by getting mad about it. More accurate analogies and more eloquently written objections to Kimmel's joke would not have saved them.

In summary: YouTube comments are still the butthole of the internet.

The Problem with Trading Card Games

Scrolls, the upcoming collectible-card-based strategy game from Minecraft developer Mojang, enters its open beta phase today. Essentially, this means you can buy the not-quite-finished game for less than its full price and start playing early while they work out the bugs and make improvements. Some part of me wants to partake in this, because the game looks pretty interesting (and because we all know how playing Minecraft quickly became the most popular thing since breathing), but the rest of me doesn't want to touch this game with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. It looks fun, but I'm conflicted.

Collectible card games are an interesting thing. I want to love them, because I think they're so cool in theory. I wanted to love Magic: The Gathering, the original trading card game published by Wizards of the Coast back in 1993. The concept of such a card game is ingenious, both for its unique gameplay and — let's be honest — for its potential to rake in huge wads of cash for the owners.

Over the past 20 years, new sets of Magic cards have been released on a regular basis, and the total number of different cards seems to have surpassed 13,000, yet the game still remains accessible to newcomers. New rules are introduced all the time, and the balance is tweaked with each new expansion, but the earliest cards can still be used (outside of certain tournaments) together with the ones printed today. The number of possible combinations in a 60-card deck isn't even worth counting.

The ability of each player to create his or her own customized deck of cards, drawing from a collection unlike that of any opponent, is what makes this type of game so fun to play. Unfortunately, this makes the gameplay inherently imbalanced, unless we consider the start of the collection process to be the true beginning of any given match (and that's a stretch). Even then, a game like Magic too often requires continual monetary investment if you want to remain competitive, and this feature (while I'd like to call it a flaw) is by design. I played Magic for a brief period of time, several years ago, and my cards might have been only half-decent back then, but they're total garbage now. More powerful cards and better gameplay mechanics are created with each expansion to keep players spending their money. Of course.

There's also a certain threshold of monetary investment required in order to become competitive in the first place, and that threshold is probably going to scale in proportion to the size of your opponent's paycheck. Things might be balanced within a group if everyone involved cares enough to go on eBay to buy selectively the individual cards they need for one of a few strategies deemed viable at the expert level, but this isn't always affordable. Meanwhile, for more casual play in which most cards are obtained from random packs, the guy who wins most often is going to be the guy who spent the most money on his collection. The three pillars of succeeding in Magic: The Gathering are building a good deck, making the right in-game decisions, and (perhaps most importantly) owning better cards than the other guy (which is where the "collectible" aspect comes in).

When a video game affords even the smallest advantage to a player who spends extra money (e.g., through micro-transactions), we call it "pay-to-win" (even if this isn't literally true) and we hate it because it feels so wrong. It is wrong, because the delicate balance of the game in question is either compromised or completely destroyed. Being at a disadvantage sucks, and if you give in and buy your way to the top then the challenge is gone and the game quickly becomes pointless. (In the most extreme cases, you've essentially just paid to see the words "you win" on your screen, so congratulations on doing that.)

A lesser form of pay-to-win merely allows players to spend some extra money to skip past a seemingly endless grind, as is the case in many so-called "free-to-play" games. This doesn't necessarily destroy the game's balance of power (because the advantages being bought can also be earned through dozens of hours of play), but it does highlight the major flaws already present in the game. If a person wants to pay more money simply to get less gameplay, the game probably sucks (and the person playing it probably hasn't realized there's nothing left to do if you're not grinding).

In the video game world, all of this is positively awful, but most collectible card games are pay-to-win by nature. Sure, they're fun to play if you're up against someone whose skill level and deck quality are in the same league as yours, but if you play against a guy whose collection of cards is twice as big (and twice as expensive) then it's completely unfair.

When I first heard of Magic: The Gathering Online prior to its release in 2002, I thought it might be a little more fair (and affordable) than its tabletop equivalent. I assumed (or at least hoped) that each player would be given access to the same pool of cards, or perhaps that better cards might be unlocked by winning matches, or something. At the very least, I naively believed that players wouldn't have to buy all of their virtual cards at the same price as physical ones because... well, you know, because they're not real cards. Unfortunately, Magic: The Gathering Online is identical to the original card game except that the cards aren't made of card stock and ink.

Duels of the Planeswalkers looks like a nice alternative, even with its relatively small number of cards, until you realize that you can't even build your own deck. This is no surprise, though, since Wizards of the Coast doesn't want this game to be a viable alternative. Duels of the Planeswalkers is meant to draw in new players and get them hooked, so they become frustrated by the lack of deck-building options and graduate to buying packs of cards, be they physical or digital. The virtual cards in Magic: The Gathering Online, despite being virtual, have monetary value because Wizards of the Coast doesn't let you do whatever you want with them. Artificial scarcity makes them seem as rare as the physical cards printed in limited runs on actual paper.

Digital game distributor Steam recently unveiled its own trading card meta-game, which is still in beta, and it's proving to be a nice example of how such artificial scarcity can make something desirable even if it has no real value, no purpose, and no practical function.

Players with access to the beta test can earn virtual trading cards for their Steam Community accounts by logging play time in certain Steam games. These currently include Borderlands 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Don't Starve, Half-Life 2, and Portal 2, as well as the free-to-play games Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 (but only if you spend money on them). You can get up to four cards per game just by playing, while eight cards from a single game comprise a complete set. The fact that you can only earn half of any set on your own means that trading (or buying from other players) is a necessity.

Once you get a complete set, those eight cards can be turned into a badge and some other items. The badge is good for nothing at all, while the other goodies that come with it are mostly vanity items, like emoticons and points to "level up" your Steam Community account. (There's also a chance of getting a coupon, but my experience with Steam coupons is that the discounts they offer are less impressive than the ones you see during a typical sale.) The whole thing seems pretty dumb, but you can already see cards for sale on the Steam marketplace, and that doesn't usually happen unless people are buying. There's also a demand for those vanity items. Apparently, some users even made a profit by buying lots of cards and then selling the goodies that come with each badge.

In general, things that were specifically made to be collected usually don't have a lot of real value to collectors. However, if you turn that collection process into a game — even if it's a stupid one — people go nuts. If people are willing to spend real money on virtual trading cards just so they can earn virtual badges and virtual emoticons and level up their Steam accounts for virtual bragging rights, it should be no surprise if the same people are willing to spend money on virtual trading cards that give them an actual advantage in an online game. I can't really blame Wizards of the Coast for taking advantage of this kind of behavior. But when the game is a competitive one, I just don't like the idea of buying victories, even if it's done in an indirect and convoluted way.

A true trading card game, even if its entirely virtual, is going to have some level of imbalance. If each player draws cards from a unique collection, it's never going to be completely fair. All of this might be okay, however, if everything were unlockable through in-game actions and accomplishments. Naturally, I was hopeful when I first saw Scrolls; the official website tells us items at the in-game store can be bought with the gold earned by playing matches, and this presumably includes new cards (called "scrolls" because it sounds so much cooler). However, a "small selection" of items can also be bought with "shards" — a so-called "secondary currency" which you can buy with your real-life credit card.

So how significant is this "small selection" of in-game items? How much of an advantage can you gain by immediately purchasing everything that shards can buy? I can only assume the advantage is pretty significant; otherwise there would be no point. The real question is of whether a person who paid $10 more than you (and doesn't deserve the advantage) is distinguishable from someone who played 20 hours longer than you (and earned the advantage). As long as it's possible to unlock everything that matters through gameplay alone, and as long as doing so is feasible (i.e., not a 500-hour grind), there's some hope for this game.

Mojang has claimed that Scrolls won't become a pay-to-win game despite its purchasable items, but developers say a lot of things before their games are released. The only reason to believe them is that the game does in fact have an initial cost — in other words, it's not "free-to-play" so the developers don't need to rely on in-game purchases to turn a profit.

The cost of access to the open beta is $20, which isn't so bad when you consider the average cost of a modern video game, which tends to be around $50 or $60 regardless of quality. (While this high cost applies mostly to console games, high-profile PC releases tend to follow the same model with some notable exceptions. Runic Games, for example, earned some praise for selling Torchlight II at $20, which gave the action role-playing game a significant advantage over its controversial $60 competitor Diablo III.) Assuming that Scrolls turns out to be a decent game, this discounted price for early access is a pretty good deal.

Unfortunately for Mojang, I've been trained by Steam sales and Humble Bundle events to refrain from buying anything unless or until it's dirt cheap. With some patience and good timing, I could buy a handful of older games for the same $20 and I'd be sure to enjoy at least one of them. It doesn't take long for the price of a game to drop, and this is especially true of PC games now that developers are realizing they need to compete with piracy instead of trying in vain to stamp it out. As a result, people who play PC games — or the "PC gaming community" for those of you who can say such a thing with a straight face — have come to expect their games to be inexpensive. $20 is a good deal, but it's not great.

I certainly don't mean to imply, of course, that we should all wait a few years to pick up Mojang's new release. After all, we don't even know if it will ever be subjected to such brutal price-slashing. Furthermore, Scrolls is a multiplayer game which might only be fun for as long as the number of players remains high, so the time to buy is now, if you want it. The problem is that the game is a risky investment and my spending limit for such a risk is so low.

That limit — the point below which a risky investment becomes a risk worth taking and any potential buyer's remorse becomes bearable — is different for everyone. For me, it's about $5. That might seem like a ridiculously small figure, but it's what I paid for BioShock a few years ago. It's what I paid for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. It's also what I paid for the first two Max Payne games combined. I almost bought Metro 2033 for $5, but I waited and got it for even less. I got Killing Floor for $5, a few years ago, and I've put more hours into that game than anything else I can remember. None of these games were new when I bought them, but I still enjoyed each of them at least as much as any $20 game I ever bought.

None of this is really a complaint about Scrolls or the open beta price tag in particular. But I might be more willing to spend four times what I paid for Killing Floor if I actually knew Scrolls would be a worthwhile purchase. Isn't there some way of trying out a game before its release without paying $20 for access to a beta version? Oh, yes, a free demo certainly would be nice. Maybe we'll get one of those later on... but we probably won't.

"I'm Not a Gamer"

If you've watched TV in the past month, you might have noticed some odd Nintendo 3DS commercials.

In each one, a celebrity talks about a video game and then says, "I'm not a gamer; with my 3DS, I'm a _____." (The blank, of course, is filled with some other title relating to a hobby, career, or activity.) The goal here is obviously to sidestep any negative connotations associated with the word "gamer" and, more importantly, to attract those potential customers who don't call themselves gamers but who might enjoy a casual game once in a while. They want everyone to know that 3DS games are not just for video game enthusiasts; they're for everyone. It's also pretty clear that they're marketing to girls.

Both of these things are fine.

Do I like the commercials? Well, not really. Celebrity endorsements are meaningless to me, even when I like the celebrity, and in these cases, I can't say that I do. (Prior to looking them up for the sake of writing this post, I had never heard of Gabrielle Douglas, Dianna Agron, or Sarah Hyland. I'm sorry, but I don't care about the Olympics or gymnastics in general, and I don't watch Glee or Modern Family.) On top of that, the games they're advertising look pretty stupid. Even so, I appreciate what they're trying to do.

Not everyone does, though. The commercials have, predictably enough, provoked a minor backlash from those who are somehow offended by Nintendo's supposed abandonment of the word "gamer" and all those who self-identify as such. Browse the YouTube comments if you need an example. Why, they ask, does Nintendo think "gamer" is a dirty word? Why are they intentionally targeting everyone except gamers with their game-related ads? And if these girls are playing video games, aren't they gamers too? Why deny it? Why go out of their way to deny it?

The people behind these seemingly reasonable complaints are forgetting that "gamer" still is a dirty word to nearly everybody who isn't one. Even though we've seen, in recent years, a peculiar movement to redefine "gamer" such that the label applies to everyone who ever enjoyed a video game, most of us haven't forgotten that the original definition was considerably less inclusive. You don't become a "gamer" at the very moment you buy a handheld Nintendo console, and this is for the same reason that I don't call myself a "biker" just because I own a bike.

If you're correctly using the word "gamer" to describe yourself, it means you see video games as a legitimate hobby — you take them seriously, you spend a lot of time on them, and playing them is a part of who you are. It's easy to see why this could be alienating to someone who, for example, might just want a 3DS for the casual puzzle games and the kid-friendly platformers, or someone who likes to play iPhone games on a long bus ride but doesn't know (or care to know) the difference between an Xbox and a GameCube. This person isn't likely to buy anything marketed specifically to gamers, and Nintendo had only good intentions in their attempt to distance their product from such troublesome vocabulary. Did they have to do it explicitly? Probably not. But they successfully sent the intended message — that you don't have to be a "gamer" to play a Nintendo game.

It's easy to argue that everyone who plays games is a gamer but, if you don't take "gaming" seriously, what's the purpose of the label? I know how to bake cookies, but I don't mention in my Facebook profile that I'm a baker. Likewise, you don't need to call yourself a gamer just because you've played Angry Birds on your smartphone. Oh, you have an Xbox? I'm not impressed. Not even playing Call of Duty: Black Ops makes you a gamer. Not even Minecraft. And it's not even a matter of contrasting these (almost sickeningly) mainstream games with material which some might find to be a little more sophisticated. It's about devotion to a hobby. If you have as much passion for games as a devoted, IMDb-addicted movie buff has for movies, you can call yourself a gamer without sounding like a complete douchebag.

Personally, I don't even like using the word outside of discussions of the word itself, and I don't identify myself as a gamer despite the fact that I've been maintaining a gaming blog for nearly five months. In my own opinion, the word just sounds completely idiotic. The word "game" never needed to become a verb.

Unfortunately, this idiotic word is becoming absurdly overused by people who play only one or two games casually but nevertheless attempt to adopt the label so they can be part of some non-existent "nerd culture." There's another term which, by the way, doesn't need to exist. I'm not sure exactly when people decided that "nerd" was the new "cool" but it needs to stop. The so-called nerd/geek culture is composed almost entirely of fake nerds and fake geeks — a bunch of hipsters who choose to identify as nerds and geeks just because they want to be different, and they go on and on about how proud they are of their nerdiness and geekiness but they don't actually have any nerdy or geeky interests aside from their manufactured nerd/geek pride and a vague interest in "science" (which, to them, probably means spaceships and dinosaurs).

A nerd is, in as few words as I can manage, a person with relatively obscure interests that take precedence over the desire for social acceptance. It's not something you can become by dressing a certain way. It's not a label you can adopt by choice. Playing a video game or reading a book or watching a science-fiction movie does not make you a nerd. Wearing glasses does not make you a nerd. Doing your homework and getting good grades does not make you a nerd. If you've ever written or spoken aloud the phrase "I'm such a nerd," you're almost certainly not a nerd. If you're popular, you might have been a nerd many years ago, but you're not one now. If you ever made fun of the nerdy kid in high school, you're not a nerd. Likewise, if you ever made fun of the gamer kid in high school, you are not and never will be a gamer. So please stop saying you are.

To get back on topic for a moment before I wrap this up, I'd like to point out that Nintendo shouldn't be trying to market to hardcore gamers anymore, anyway. It's pretty obvious that Nintendo has built up a reputation as a creator of family-friendly consoles and a publisher of kid-friendly or otherwise casual games. Perhaps they've done this at the expense of the hardcore audience, and maybe that was a mistake, but right now I think they're better off trying to maintain the audience they have, rather than attempting to steal hardcore gamers away from Xbox and Playstation. If this means advertising the 3DS as a console for non-gamers, so be it. The people who were somehow offended by these "I'm not a gamer" commercials probably weren't Nintendo fans anyway.