Opinions on Gaming culture expressed in Peep Show quotes
Gaming culture, like any entertainment or genre niche, has it’s own quirks and pitfalls, be it bouts of outrage or navigating a social marsh of communities that may accept you easily or brutally crush you in a humiliating exposure of your gameplay shortcomings (one of the many reasons I currently avoid Counter-Strike). As these trends of articulate outrage and social unease are infamous hallmarks of one of my favourite series, Peep Show, I thought several observations on the gaming world can be aptly summarised with statements made across its nine series. So prepare for some relatable awkwardness and perhaps some revealing insight expressed through mediocre comic timing.
‘In business, Jeremy, you learn that every man has his price, and I judge yours to be…£530’
We can start with one element of the gaming industry that is almost ubiquitous in its infamy, exploiting paywalls and meaningless DLC for profit. This issue has become more acute in recent years as season passes and pay-to-win ‘Freemium’ mobile games take larger shares in the market and bigger developers focus more on segmenting content rather than focusing on creating interesting and repeatable gameplay. At this point it seems the industry (with notable exceptions including CD Projekt Red with their free DLC splurge for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt) is seeing how far the consumer can bend before they break. Although with the continuous adoption of pre-order culture and no real pushback from the newly engaged ‘casual’ gaming market, this trend is unlikely to reverse any time soon.
‘How do I feel? Empty? Check. Scared? Check. Alone? Check. Just another ordinary day’
Any horror game done well should illicit the sensation of vulnerable loneliness if it really wants to scare you. It doesn’t matter how terrifying a monster or threatening a human may appear to be if you are brandishing an arsenal of destructive weaponry. Take Doom for example, the demons of Hell may be threatening and beastly, but they become much less so when they are reduced to bloody pieces by a shotgun blast to the face or an armour-clad fist to the abdomen. By contrast, titles like the Dead Space franchise and Resident Evil create a more apt sense of dread through the rationing of weaponry and ammunition to expose players to the elements of horror with little more than a proverbial crutch. At the most extreme end of the scale the crutch itself is removed entirely, with running and hiding the only elements of survival available. This trend towards unarmed survival has reached prominence with the release of titles such as Alien: Isolation, Outlast, and Amnesia leading the charge.
‘ - …We have only one thing to fear and that’s fear itself. It’s a clever saying, isn’t it?
- What about losing all your money? Or shitting yourself in public?…Or Alzheimer’s? Or all these things plus you’re drowning?’
This makes me imagine what a conversation would be like between Activision and From Software. Nowadays most top-tier franchises are derided for engaging in hand-holding and the oversimplification of goal attainment to a point where there is little to no actual challenge and the game serves merely as a distraction or an aesthetic exercise in graphics. Despite these trends, the Dark Souls and , more recently, Bloodborne titles continue to retain their infamous reputation for punishing difficulty, almost complete lack of direction, and nerve-shredding combat. These titles contain elements that most AAA titles seem to have lost, actual consequences. Failure in most modern games often consists only of restarting at a checkpoint or even immediate placement at the point of failure. While frustration is obviously seen as a bad thing, having an almost minuscule challenge removes any form of achievement from accomplishing an objective. In short, without challenge, you might as well watch a film rather than play a game.
‘A little bit of me has died, but you know what? A lot of me doesn’t give a shit.’
Hopefully this is the reaction that anyone has when you finish a particularly good game, or perhaps even an average one. It’s the feeling of not having anything more to do, the story has ended, the enemy vanquished, the sports team successfully managed etc. However, there’s always another title to be picked up or a role to take on, sometimes within the same title. One of the beauties of gaming as a medium is that you can often have optional outcomes to progression or story development. This can be as minor change like choosing between individuals in The Walking Dead, or choosing which country to lead through World War II in Hearts of Iron. You can’t watch a film or read a book from a separate perspective or influence it’s outcome. It is this freedom that draws so many people into the gaming world and retains them for so long, giving rise to the adage ‘I’m not a gamer because I have no life, I am a gamer because I choose to have many’.
