The First Person Observer

I admire First Person Observer’s focus. It’s just reporting what happens inside the game like real news. Hard Casual lacks that organizing principle and seems to be all over the place. Is it lampooning games? The industry? You have stories supposedly written by reporters, by industry figures, by random people. Some are like FPO’s in game reporting, others are like industry coverage. Even the name, Hard Casual doesn’t tell you much about what it is trying to do.

Both have some pretty funny headlines, but FPO has much better story text. All sites like this, my own included, deal with the same problem there. The joke tends to be in the headline, and it’s really difficult to maintain the conceit of writing a complete story in that AP style, while making sure there’s new humor throughout.

No you just have no taste.

Fight

It didn’t work out:

Great game.

Yeah! Seriously.

Adree, other people are allowed to like things you don’t, and that doesn’t mean they’re stupid.

It does if they like reality TV.

The First Person Observer isn’t stupid because Adree doesn’t like it, it is stupid because their writing sucks and they can’t carry the joke past the headline. Here, let papa show you kids how it is done:

Child Unimpressed With Aurora Borealis After Whole Day Of Tekken 3

INTERNATIONAL FALLS, MN—A wide-eyed gaze of childlike wonderment over the incomprehensible majesty of creation was not elicited Monday, when 7-year-old Kenny Meier, son of local high-school science teacher Stan Meier, was unmoved by the Aurora Borealis after spending an estimated 12 hours playing Tekken 3.

“I have never forgotten the magic night that my own father, like his father and his father’s father before him, gently woke me, bundled me up in a warm blanket and quietly led me outside to see the Northern Lights for the first time,” said the elder Meier, dejectedly sipping a cup of hot cocoa on the back porch as his uninterested son ran back inside to his Sony PlayStation. “It was a moment I’d always looked forward to sharing with my own son.”

“Well, so much for that dream,” added Meier, heading to the kitchen to pour the boy’s untouched mug of cocoa into the sink.

The shimmering curtain of iridescent light known as Aurora Borealis is fabled in story and song as one of nature’s most beautiful and awe-inspiring phenomena. For Kenny, however, it paled in comparison to Tekken 3’s 3-D graphics and impressive 64-bit motion-capture animation, inspiring him to say, “I’m cold, Dad. Can we go back in now?”

The Northern Lights occur when the Earth’s magnetic field interacts with the “solar wind”—charged particles blowing away from the sun. The resultant luminescent display, visible in most northern latitudes during the winter months, stretches from 40 miles above the Earth’s surface in its lowest fringes to upwards of 600 miles above the Earth.

Though the sheer immensity of the glowing nocturnal spectacle makes it one of the most glorious sights in all of nature, the Aurora Borealis nonetheless fell far short of Tekken 3, Kenny said, due to its lack of interactive combat-mode features, substandard two-dimensional interface and undynamic, non-action-packed graphics.

“The Aurora Borealis, like its Southern Hemisphere counterpart, the Aurora Australis, forms a gently shifting pattern of upward-reaching striations within arcs of light, as different types of atoms produce different colors within the distorted magnetic field,” said University of Helsinki atmospheric scientist Dr. Matti Roine. “Unfortunately, however, it does not render up to 360,000 polygons per second, offer full-frame motion-capture video with 360-degree camera movement, or feature any special combo attacks, such as Windmill Neck Kick, Rolldown Jawbreaker and the devastating Pseudo-Wind Godfist.”

“Yesterday, I figured out you can get Dr. B as a selectable player if you beat him four times in Force Mode,” Kenny said. “And if you pick Ling Xiaoyu 25 times in regular versus mode you can pick a different costume for her. My friend Jeff told me that.”

Tekken 3, which Meier-household sources estimate Kenny plays 30 to 35 hours per week, was created by Namco exclusively for the PlayStation and features 28 different fully rendered combatants, compared to the Northern Lights’ zero. In addition, Tekken 3 allows players to do battle in a wide range of exotic background settings, easily surpassing the aurora, which offers only one choice of background graphic, the relatively unimpressive “Night Mode.”

“I guess it was that first sight of the Aurora Borealis that convinced me to become a science teacher,” said Stan, gazing at the angry face of mutant warrior Yoshimitsu on the cover of one of the many Tekken 3-related video-game magazines, code guides and handbooks scattered about the house. “Yep.”

“It’s cool to be the giant ice bear, 'cause he’s got huge claws. But I like being King, the cat-headed guy, the most,” said Kenny, immersed in his 317th match of the day just minutes after his brief look at the night sky. “The stupid Northern Lights don’t have any non-human warriors at all.”

“Video games sure have gotten a lot cooler since Dad was a kid,” Kenny continued. “Even really stupid old Pong games are better than that boring glowy blur-thing in the sky. Suck-O!”

Kenny then clutched at his throat and made gagging noises to indicate just how sucky the experience had been.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/child-unimpressed-with-aurora-borealis-after-whole,1568/

also, see this:

That was highly depressing satire.

I liked health pack reform. And really, which of these kinds of articles aren’t pretty much done after the initial premise?

Twice as long as it needed to be, but it’s a hard thing to pull off. The Onion is no immune to the problem of having the joke in the headline with maybe one or two funny things added in the text. If you commit to writing a complete story in the style of a real newspaper report it’s hard not to waste space conforming to the conceit and often the original joke can’t sustain more than a couple paragraphs. I think it’s usually better if the headline is funny, but not the actual punchline.

Being on the internet doesn’t help as you don’t have hard limits on word count. That joke didn’t need all the explanation about what the Aurora Borealis is, or what it’s called in the southern hemisphere. That’s set dressing and a buffer between instances where the same joke is going to be repeated.

As has been mentioned, the Onion’s videos tend to be the funniest stuff these days. A lot of that is because television news is so broken to begin with that the form’s tropes are inherently absurd. Cream also rises, so only the best ideas get produced. You get the benefit of a performance from the presenter and actors. You get extra jokes from the B roll, editing and ticker. And the news copy for television has to be much tighter than one of their text articles.

this site isn’t up to par with the onion, but I think its pretty good at getting to the little details of gaming culture. its not bad at all, actually think the writing is as good as some of the stuff the onion has done. did you see the video of fallout3 and are our kids learning about the apocalypse? heheh

http://www.theonion.com/video/are-violent-video-games-adequately-preparing-child,14314/

Imo the onion still is great only because it adheres to the ‘mundane’ aspects of life that are absurd. there is some onion fluff (they are much bigger), but they are still as relevant as they were in the 90’s when i read the weekly print paper from a college dorm. the onion is definitely a ‘gen x midwest’ creation… it has that cynical attitude. but its a breather from the other stuff from like… say national lampoon which was pretentious east coast humor. but thats just my opinion!

There was an interview or something with the Onion staff many years ago where they explained their development process (at least at the time): they all came up with headlines, then sat around a table and went through them all, and chose the ones that the most people laughed at.

They didn’t choose them based on which have the best stories; or which have the best potential to be good stories. Just which made the funniest headlines.

So yeah, not surprising you’d end up with funny headlines and not-necessarily-funny stories.

Unfortunately if you read them for long, they recycle jokes pretty fast.

Mad Magazine probably said it best.

Oh yeah Mad Magazine, because if anyone could judge comedy…

That makes a certain kind of sense on the internet where it’s all about getting clicks and links based on the headline. But it’s a weakness. If that was the only thing that was important they might as well scrape the site and just spit out funny headlines over twitter.

You’d think with the Onion’s reputation as a satirical newspaper they could trust their readers to actually read the articles and not be so dependent on headline punchlines. I wrote for a satirical newsletter in college and looking back at some old issues, the headlines were short and to the point and sometimes funny, but all the real humor happened in the text. The best stories took the article somewhere you wouldn’t expect based on the headline. We had tight word budgets, it was only a single page front and back, but that also meant we could trust people to read the whole thing and find the jokes. It also meant the authentic “journalistication” was the first stuff to be edited out.