A
nyone who wastes half their
waking life online will be familiar
with the magic of the YouTube
recommendation system. Watch, say,
a military ration unboxing video, and
upon it’s conclusion YouTube will
automatically cue up another, and
another... and before long you’ll know
that Norwegian MREs contain stewed
reindeer, and that it took the US Army
30 years to figure out how to store
pizza slices at room temperature.
Likewise, watch hour after hour
of Alex Jones-style videos and you’ll
soon ‘know’ that the Earth is flat, and
that the sun is made out of ‘metallic
hydrogen’. In an attempt to inhibit this
indoctrinating effect YouTube recently
announced that kooky conspiracy
videos will no longer be automatically
recommended.
This new policy is a turning point for
YouTube, because it’s a tacit admission
that a great deal of the ‘information’ on
the platform simply isn’t true.
There are some striking examples in
the world of gaming, but perhaps the
most noteworthy is the official Star
Citizen YouTube channel. Star Citizen
is a runaway crowd-funding success,
and Chris Roberts and his cohorts
have promised a development process
characterised by unprecedented
openness and honesty. To that end
they have released over 1,200 promo
videos. Videos filled with promises,
explicit and implicit, that have yet to
be fulfilled.
An unfailingly uncritical viewpoint
is to be expected from the game’s
official promotional organ. But to see
such propaganda from supposedly
independent media outlets is a
tad unnerving.
Red Bull Gaming recently published a
13-minute clip about Star Citizen, and it
was pure hagiography. The production
standards were impressive; the
multi-layered electronic music, drone
shots, slick jump cuts, and humorous
interview fragments coalesced into a
hypnotic hype vortex. If this video was
Whenever I talk about a
game,I’mjusttalkingfrom
my heart. It’s how I talk to
the team.
all you had seen of Star Citizen, you
might be left with the impression that
the game was in good hands.
Yet there are many valid questions
that Red Bull’s documentary team
did not ask. After eight years of
development and a quarter of a
billion dollars, why are there still so
many bugs in Star Citizen’s Persistent
Universe? Why do mannequin eyes
blink? Why do space pirates sometimes
appear as tiny floating golf balls?
Why does Roberts Space Industries
build assets with no real game
mechanics to support them? Why
are they selling huge multi-crew
ships when there are no multi-
crew mechanics? Why do they sell
salvage ships when there are no
salvage mechanics? Why do they sell
scanning ships when there are no
scanning mechanics? What about
bounty hunting, data running, and
medical ships? When will their game
mechanics be implemented? Why don’t
missiles work properly? When will
missiles work properly?
RSI published a video in 2013
showing a topless woman being
scanned in quite meticulous detail,
supposedly so they could implement
playable female characters. It’s been
six years, and female characters are
still not playable. Why? Many games
with budgets of less than a quarter
of a billion dollars have been able to
implement this.
This video was not an isolated
incident; shortly thereafter RedIt is the year 2019, and the line between
documentary and advertorial content has
been blurred beyond recognition...
The Two Faces
of Tomorrow
Bull Gaming published a glowing
documentary about Peter Molyneux.
The vid did not mention his crowd-
funding disaster Godus, the malformed
and unfinished spiritual successor to
Populous. Amazingly, it did touch on his
life-long habit of making exaggerations
about his upcoming games:
“Whenever I talk about a game, I’m
just talking from my heart. It’s how
I talk to the team. And that’s what I
think you have to do if you’re gonna
make something. You’ve gotta believe
in your heart it’s gonna be the best it
can possibly be. I think some people
justifiably felt that everything I said
was a promise, especially when I
would do a lot of press. I didn’t really
make that connection until it was far
too late.”
He said all this with a straight face.
He basically claimed that he simply
didn’t understand that you’re not
supposed to lie about the products
you’re selling (aw, shucks!). All this was
intercut with close-ups of his wedding
ring, to subliminally communicate
how committed and trustworthy he is.
Fantastic camera work; hats off to the
creatives at the ‘House of Greenland’
production company.
These Red Bull Gaming videos are
not marked as advertorial, but they sure
feel like it. Did Chris Roberts and Peter
Molyneux pay for this coverage? If so,
how much? Is this a valid use of backer
funds? Is this the sort of infotainment
that Red Bull wants associated with its
brand? And, most important of all, why
would anyone buy Red Bull when you
can buy functionally identical little cans
of energy drink from ALDI for just 99
cents each?
The mistake of promoting one aging
hack game designer could be put down
to misfortune. But two? That begins to
look like carelessness...JAMES COTTEE
is clearly a fan of
Steve1989MREinfo
on YouTube and
frankly you should be
too. Nice!W OPINION: JAM
Well... gotta admit — a lot of us on the PCPP team
have joined the universe. Good life choice...