Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation, Fully Ramblomatic)

I know thaaaaaaat, just suspicious about the capitalization.

I disagree. He's using the wrong parralels again. Lets look, once again, at sports. People do describe themselves as sports fans. Not just general sports, as football fans, as rugby fans, as all of that. To a much greater degree than any gamer (say what you will, no-ones ever died in a gaming riot).

People do describe themselves as music fans. Headbangers, gangstas, pop idols. People do describe themselves by the musioc they listen to, and can make life decisions based on this.

There is literally not a single paragraph in the article I can agree with. I rather think he wanted to plug his bar and wrote the rest around that as padding or I'd need to start another pointless rant.

"Bar"?

The Mana Bar?

Oh. Huh. That is a thing which exists.

Did not know about that.

...meh, if I ever want to travel across the globe to go to a video-game themed bar, I'll wait for the Olympus.

They have the mana themed energy drink. That I am told tastes like gutter water.

Not exactly, although it is basically all the worst aspects of Mountain Dew's taste turned Up To Eleven.

Meh. I can get Mana Potion and Life Potion at the game store a mile from my apartment.

Now, if they had Potion Drink, which I hear is kind of hard to get...

Then again, I'm more inclined to just wash out an empty bottle of red wine vinegar, which has that distinct potion-bottle shape. If I could flush out the taste of vinegar from the glass, it'd make a sweet drinking bottle for stuff.

edited 31st Aug '10 9:38:05 PM by Enlong

People do describe themselves as sports fans.

But he isn't on about people like that. He's on about people who use it as their identity, rather than people who happen to be a fan on top of everything else they do. It's why he brought up that 'girl gamer' shit - it's never used in the context of a girl that happens to play games, it's almost always used as a platform to point out how special an individual is(n't).

You clearly haven't seen some of the sports fans I have.

Which doesn't change anything. It's quite obvious Yahtzee would have been equally disparaging towards any fan that hardcore. In this case, 'gamer' is hardly - if ever - used in the casual sense.

So gaming isn't allowed to have those sorts of diehard fans while other mediums are? What?

Nobody's saying that, stop arguing against it. Ugh.

I kinda agree with him, that gaming would be better off if it was just consiered something everyone does a bit, like everyone watches movies and everyone listens to some music.

Though personally I'mm willing to let the gamer culture live too. Subcultures exist, why not one for them.

The problem is perspective. If you are deeply immersed in a fan culture you don't see its fringes anymore. There are enough people for which gaming is only a small part of their lives but you either don't notice them because they don't make a big deal out of it. Or they are downright considered "inferior" by the fanatics, see Yahtzee's rants against casual gamers.

Everything has a culture of casuals on one side and fans on the other. And those fans have a certain image to the non-initiated. Music and audiophiles (lunatics who spend thousands to achieve quality improvements only a bat could hear), cooking and gourmets (arrogant Serious Business jag-offs), reading and bibliophiles (not a single inch of free space left in their home), movies and movie buffs (fat couch potatoes), sports and sports fans (constantly dunk frat boys), reading tvtropes and tropers (touhou-obsessed anime freaks) etc.

There is nothing wrong with people defining themselves by the thing they practice for the majority of their free time. Humans are social animals, they build collectives around what they like. Thus a certain sub-culture isn't really an expression of elitism (except for some people, one of which is Yahtzee ironically) so much but an expression of what they like in their hobby and the solidarity with people who feel the same.

Gaming isn't different and why should it?

edited 1st Sep '10 6:37:49 AM by Ana

Maybe Yahtzee just saw this ad

And wanted to make sure nothing like it ever happened again.

So I guess Duke Nukem Forever was voted as his best review then or something? http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1968-Viewers-Choice-Duke-Nukem-Forever

A good choice IMO.

Every time I read a ZP comments section, a little bit of me dies inside.

I felt the latest review was a bit whiny, especially at Transformers fans (I'm not a fan. I like Bayformers, put down that pitchfork, but my only experience other than that is with Armada and vaguely remembered Beast Wars episodes).

Personally, for the beginnign of the review,, I was more or less shouting "yes, someone agrees with me on that franchise!" Right down to the Eatern European cartoons!

I haven't encountered the Transformers Fan Dumb for the most part, so YAY IGNORANCE

To me, sounds like a rental if my eyes don't hurt at trying to pick out friend and foe.

Plus, it's kind of funny how smug he sounds, as if Transformers fans have never heard the series described as a toy commercial.

It's more about how indignant the fanbase gets when it's brought up.

You mean the same fanbase that made the tfwiki? I don't think he has actually interacted with many of them...

Which doesn't mean that I didn't find the video funny, but you know.

Outside of the TF Wiki, the TF community is known for being incredibly up itself about how 'serious' the hobby is.