The Malstrom Show

After seeing some of those annoying videos in the email post below, it seems as if all these ‘video game’ shows, including E-Sports, are trying to imitate another medium. It is like they took another formula and just slapped it onto gaming. No one has treated gaming as ‘unique’.

How would a video game show be? It is so unimaginative that the only answer is to watch other players compete in multiplayer games.

Video games are excellent business theater. If you don’t like the market leader, don’t worry, that will change.

Video games are also great legal theater. There is so much patent law involved. And this means that video games are good technology theater too.

Let’s pretend there was a ‘Malstrom Show’.

Above: Everyone would want to watch the ‘Malstrom Show’. And no matter how many episodes are watched, the audience will be clamoring for more.

Video games haven’t been shown off with the ‘Constructicon’ mantra: “Video games superior; all other media, inferior.” Video games are not a game show. And they aren’t a sport. They are not Poker. They are unique.

But how are they unique? It is popular vanity to believe the masses of Humanity thrive on stupidity. The truth is that there is far more intelligence out there than can be used. At one time, I was working with poor urban kids in Houston, many who were high school drop outs, yet I was constantly surprised by how smart they were. The ‘stupidity’ we see out there in the world is more caused by people’s lack of control over their emotions, not a lack of their intelligence. Most people feel they are ‘smarter’ than their job.

Video games are a great way to use up this excess intelligence. This is one reason why I suspect children find video games so life consuming. Schools and college are worthless in terms of exciting and exercising the mind. But we are finding these kids growing up and they are still playing video games. Why? Because they find them interesting. Just as kids are bored in school, adults are bored in their jobs.

One of the reasons why I express this view of the gamer is because of the way how the gaming market works… or rather how it doesn’t work. Gamers are savvy customers. They will not allow themselves to be manipulated. Atari tried and look what happened to them. I wonder if gamers all share a similar personality trait where we are attracted to gaming because it allows us to utilize our under-appreciated minds.

So instead of having a video game TV show try to ‘dumb things down’ as is their usual formula, why not try the opposite? Have the game show treat the viewer like Stephen Hawking.

When you look at other media that gamers tend to like, you see a similar parallel. Many gamers like and appreciate science fiction, for example. If you ever sat back and listened to Star Trek: The Next Generation from a distance, you would hear the dialogue and all is so… cerebral. And you have gamers who love in depth history books and other very nerdy things.

Gamers tend to be a cerebral bunch. So why not do E-Sports and TV shows based on that level? Gamers have to have a different personality or else they would melt in with the usual sports fans or reality tv show audience.

As an aside, I’ve been doing this website for around five years now. The more cerebral the content gets, the stronger is the positive reaction. For example, gamers should not respond to disruption and Blue Ocean Strategy which are business books written for business executives. Yet, people ate it up. In every other media, you’d get a strange reaction of “Business text? That is not what the audience wants to hear!” But the audience does want to hear that. I have learned that gamers, being cerebral, are hungry for thought.

But let’s turn it around. Instead of trying to attract gamers, what repels gamers? It would be treating them like idiots and talking to them like idiots.

(Anyway, I was joking about the ‘Malstrom Show’. That will never happen. But I do enjoy seeing the new reader shout at his monitor about how ‘insane’ this Malstrom fella is… hehe… “Who the hell does this guy think he is? Now he is talking about his own TV show!”)