Videogames Don't Belong on TV

Throughout my months of blogging, I have managed to keep this place fairly clean of videogame chatter. Perhaps I am trying to downplay my nerdiness, or maybe I learned a lesson from seeing other people in society, who enjoy games just like me, look like total losers by presenting themselves as "hardcore gamers." But while I don't buy every single retro Nintendo T-shirt that Hot Topic peddles, I do watch any television show dealing with videogames that I can get my hands on. Recently, my satellite provider picked up G4, which is an entire channel devoted to videogames, and I have been spending some time observing. In the end, I have come to one final observation: videogame shows should not be on television because they are never going to be done right.

For some reason, people that create these shows, which have a wide range of purposes, want them to be as goofy and degrading as possible. They really want to insult their audience, or at least make them feel uncomfortable for watching a journalism show that deals strictly with the gaming industry, or for watching a show in which two guys make fun of every game released. Every single videogame show I've ever watched has had some sort of wacky Gen-X host spouting off retarded catch phrases and acting like a "fanboy." (For the uninformed, a 'fanboy' is a videogame term to describe a person uber-obsessed with something.)

Perhaps this because these producers have lost an understanding about videogames and their target audience. These big wigs seem to think videogames are still for kids... but in actuality, the average age of the casual gamer is 18-21. And the average person 18-21 will think that these hosts are mentally handicapped. It has to be some sort of curse that every show host has to be loud, obnoxious and ridiculous in every sense of the word.

G4 TV, which is a fairly low-budget selective cable channeled owned by Comcast, is probably the worst station on television, next to the Home Shopping Channel and Speed. And while some of the shows could actually have some promise to them, like their biography show, which goes into the history of specific videogame designers, or their news show "Pulse." But these are hampered by poor writing and goofy-ass hosts. The worse shows are "Arena," which is actually an entire show based on watching someone else play videogames, and "G4.com," which is this weird radio television show thing... the three precocious hosts sit at a table with radio mikes and talk about the state of the industry.

You are probably wondering why the heck I even bother watching these shows if they suck so much. I'm wondering the same thing. But when you sit around the house for most of the day, wearing your flannel robe and slippers, you need to watch something. MacGyver can only take me so far, and when I'm too tired to play videogames, I guess I might as well watch others play them. Meanwhile, as I watch this awful channel, I can only hope that some sort of meteor or weather balloon comes crashing down into the studio, killing everyone involved with the channel.

Then I can change the station over to the Speed channel and watch reruns of Speed Racer.