Charlie Brooker's How Videogames Changed The World [Channel 4]

Found this really enjoyable, even better than I expected.

I never knew the ghosts had different personalities in pacman!

It was great to see Jeff Minter and Dara O'Briain being interviewed.

Not sure if this was pure coincidence but during one Ad Break,
you had the Robocop Gameboy tune playing, and next thing a Sourthern Comfort ad with the lyrics "And on, And on And on."

it was all very reminiscent of the Ariston commercial!

keithgeo wrote: »

I enjoyed it, though i dont think feckin Angry Birds should have been there, plus Twitter? Really, they must have been sponsored by twitter.

I think the Angry Birds Series had a significant enough impact on the world to be included in the Documentary.

Just looking at Wikipedia and it has almost 2 billion downloads across all the games in the series and all the platforms.

It also had a huge impact on kids, hence all the merchandise it sold.

I'm not saying its a good game or anything, but it is certainly one of the most significant App based games because of its success.


As for Twitter, I honestly couldn't see Charlie's connection between gaming and Twitter.

I might have a look at this later on 4OD. Is it really that bad?

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/charlie-brooker-videogames-changed-the-world/4od

Annoying that it had to be a pointless list. If guess that's the only way to get the thing commissioned though.

There were some nice contributions in there, Jeff Minter in particular.

But it got pretty naff towards the end.

Twitter is a communication tool, if you view it as a game you're possibly a sociopath.

I really enjoyed this documentary. I just like hearing Brooker talk about games, because it's a subject close to his heart and a big part of his past journalistic career. Now, true, it was just an extended version of Gameswipe but at least with new interviews and narration.

Brooker used to write for PC Zone magazine and that's probably where his sardonic writing style first caught on with people. Here's a couple of clips of him 'reviewing' (prank calling) a couple of publishers/developers help lines back in the late 90s...





And some PC Zone magazine scans, look for Brooker's 'Sick Notes' letters to the editor section at the end.

Casey120 wrote: »

I downloaded this in HD last week and enjoyed it up until about 75% when I lost interest .
His other video docu I think was called history of video games and was also pretty enjoyable .

Do you mean Gameswipe? Because if you do, that was pretty enjoyable. If you don't, I need to find that video.

The bad thing about Brooker's videogame documentaries is that, each time he's presenting one, he basically has to spend a huge amount of time, almost all of it nearly, explaining what a videogame is and why they're good.

waveform wrote: »

I reckon he was coming from the angle, that people who use twitter only use it to brag about accomplishments and what they're doing as if it's some sort of game to them,

which is clearly a sweeping generalization imo.

You could take Twitter as a massive MMORPG game where each player attempts to earn the greatest reputation but then again, you could also apply that to nearly every public online community since CBBS went online in '79. Kibo Parry would like a word.....

Achilles wrote: »

I did enjoy the documentary but no mention of The Dreamcast or even Shenmue irked me a little.

Really influential console in many ways, pioneering things like a gamepad screen and proper online gameplay but just not enough market penetration to enter the public consciousness. Since there was so much of the obvious stuff to touch on first, I'd say that's why it got left out.