Flipping through the channels last night, I stumbled across the very excellent documentary Word Wars on Discovery Times. Directly inspired by Stefan Fatsis' also-excellent book Word Freak, both will appeal to anyone interested in games.
Watching the movie got me thinking about two things. First off, why haven't there been any movies like this made about various videogame subcultures? Any decent filmmaker could take a video camera to QuakeCon, PAX, heck, even their local DDR Machine, and find plenty of quirky characters that would make for some great stories. Or are these movies already out there and I'm just unaware of them (if so, please tell me about them?
My second thought: why are videogames usually held wholly apart from other games in the specialized press coverage? Why can't the same magazine cover videogames and board games, or tabletop role-playing games, or collectible card games? Surely the overlap in interest among readers is high, and an expertise in evaluating one type of game should transfer easily enough to another. Is there something unique about videogames that warrants their seperation? I'm seriously interested in your answers to these questions, so drop me an e-mail or use the comments link below. I'm going up to Philadelphia for the weekend and I'd love to see an overflowing comments thread when I get back.
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I think videogames are held separate from pen & paper and card games mostly because there are just too many of them to bother putting in the same magazine. It would be interesting to try a combination magazine, though; there are probably tons of people out there that don't know Warhammer 40000 is a table-top war game.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the overlap is that high, actually. I think the main reason that video games are separated from pencil and paper games is because video games are arguably more "mainstream". Sadly, I think the average video gamer has not played a table-top RPG, though s/he may have heard of them.
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