This is the beginning of the giving season. One of my favorite giving events happens to benefit the Child’s Play Charity. A Video Game comedy troop from Canada called LoadingReadyRun are, for the third year, enduring their fundraiser Desert Bus for Hope. Torturing themselves by playing Desert Bus, the most painfully boring games created, for as long as the donations keep buying up the hours of play. The ingenious part is the live broadcast of themselves enduring the game, keeping their sanity from being whittled down by responding to a chat room and drafting up donation challenges that end in torture for one of the crew. Last year one of the crew was forced to watch Twilight three times in a row due to three hundred dollar donations. I request that you to go, watch and then donate to these crazy folk to allow them to continue “hating themselves for the children”.
Well we are back, this cast is covering what I am calling the FML syndrome. This is the effect that certain games have to rope you into playing the game to detraction. Where the only thing that makes you stop playing is realizing that the dawn is only brighting up your room.
This morning’s reading of video game blogs discovered quite an interesting article by Matthew Kaplan from GameCritics.com . The article brings up how the elderly are currently portrayed in video games and touches on their minority status in protagonist roles, beyond the cliché role of the grumpy old man (using Bill from L4D in their example). In this article they ask: are we going to see more elderly heroes? The main gaming population, the kids that grew up playing the NES and Atari, are now in their thirties. Back when I was a kid I remember many games where the protaganist was a child: games like “Kid Icarus”, “The Boy and His Blob”, “Nemo’s Adventures in Dreamland”, or “Zombie’s Ate My Neighbors” and “Earthbound”. In my memory the child protagonist was a rather dominate choice of playable character, though the reasoning behind this could be simply that was the targeted demographic for video games of the time. But with the aging of the gaming population, as the article brings up, will we see larger use of elderly protagonists? Where this issue really gets me interested is in how you can create a game that has such a protagonist, coming up a game premise that would allow for, explain, and encourage the use of an elderly protagonist.
But, I digress. Kaplan’s article presents the issues far more succinctly and is defiantly worth reading. So, what are you still doing here?