The computer scene in the earlier days was often dominated by “uber nerds” who would collect lots of hardware and not actually have that much to use for it. My impression was that a lot of games were created for this market in the earlier days.
I love my “uber nerd” friends (“omg my new rig runs Crysis 67 at 3000fps” etc) but the downside to this market is that it encourages the “feature list”. We’ve all seen this – a list of bullet points on the back of a box with goofy names of “systems” (the ultimate blood engine!), gameplay “features” (eviscerate your foes with 70 different finishing moves!) and general masturbation. (9.5 billion polys each with 256 shader layers!) The end result feels like a weird “macho” male stereotype. The downsides of this “macho” illusion spill into misogyny, unnecessarily contentious competition and other silly things.
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Tags: game criticism, game culture, game history
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JRGBruno
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