A Short Note to Ponder

Apparently the current Retail WoW raid is named Manaforge Omega, which to this Classic Doctor Who fan raises a big question: is it pronounced "oh-MA-gah" like the Greek letter or "OH-ma-gah" like the enemy Timelord in Doctor Who's The Three Doctors?

Courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Cheeriest Spooky Theme Around

I've been hunting down Halloween music for giving out candy tonight, and one piece that keeps coming up in my searches and on the local stations is Charles Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette.

Gounod wrote it to make fun of a critic of his --and by all accounts the critic instantly realized the piece was about him-- but it wasn't particularly "Halloween-y" back then.

Then along came Alfred Hitchcock.

Were it not for ol' Alfred using Funeral March of a Marionette as his theme music for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, we probably wouldn't even have this piece in the Halloween lexicon. 

Still, I wonder just how many kids nowadays have ever seen an episode of the series from The Master of Suspense; it's not nearly as iconic as The Twilight Zone, which has marathons on some cable channels around the Christmas and New Year's holidays, or The Outer Limits, which was revived and had another run from the mid-90s to early 2000s.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

A Drop in the Bucket

Something that frequently gets overlooked is that --relatively speaking-- non-mobile video games are still something that not a lot of people play. 

Sure, video games may make more money than movies and music do combined*, but when you look at sales of the games themselves, you realize that a lot of money globally comes from not that many people. 

I was curious about how many copies of Madden 2024 were sold, and I discovered that it was around 5 million or so. To put that in perspective, EA sold Madden 2024 to roughly the entire population of Alabama. That may seem like a lot, but when you remember the population of the US --the prime target of Madden, given it's American Football-- is 333 million, you realize that's kind of a drop in the bucket. And when you realize that the average viewership of CBS' comedy Young Sheldon is 8 million viewers, you get a better comparison between passive viewing and active playing. 

MMOs are even more of a niche market, given that the largest MMO out there, World of Warcraft, pulls in somewhere between 4 to 8 million or so subscribers** globally. Yes, only at best 0.1% of the world's population play WoW. 

So, when people talk about how WoW was a phenomenon, it's all relative. More than twice as many people bought the Spice Girls' Spice than the best numbers World of Warcraft posted in the last 8 years.

And we don't want to compare WoW to the number of people who have cable and/or satellite television subscriptions, do we?

***

So why bring this up?

I was reminded of this because I frequently interact with people at work and at other places who aren't gamers of any sort, and they have --at best-- only the vaguest idea about what might be going on in the gaming industry. They may know that game companies are making a ton of money because it improves their retirement accounts, but beyond that they are left in the dark.

When people find out I'm a gamer, I usually get a "Oh, like Madden?" question directed my way.*** 

If I respond with an "Actually, I play WoW," I get "those" looks. 

The "you're a weirdo" looks. The ones that I used to get when people found out I play Dungeons and Dragons.**** I have no idea what it'd be like if I said League of Legends or Fortnite --since I play neither of those-- but I'd imagine there'd be similar reactions. 

The irony is that people in my WoW friend group aren't all aware of the industry beyond WoW itself. When I mentioned Baldur's Gate 3, only one person in the chat said "Yeah, I play that too!" There were a couple "can't afford that right now" and a few "Huh? What game is that?" reactions.

Usually right about now someone will point out those profit numbers and how many people tend to watch the League championships. That's nice and all, but League still has a ways to go to match the viewership of the 2023 Major League Baseball World Series, and that World Series was the least watched Series in television history.

By comparison, 300 million people
worldwide watched Joe Frazier beat
Muhammad Ali in 1971.
From Sports Illustrated.

It's kind of strange how boxing doesn't have the cultural cachet that it used to have, but I honestly believe that the pursuit of profit and moving boxing from something you could see on television to a strictly pay-per-view environment hurt the long term health of the sport. If you don't have eyeballs watching your product, it'll fade from public consciousness.*****

So, video games are this financial juggernaut, but that's largely on the backs of mobile games and live service games, where you constantly feed money to the beast.

But the long term cultural impact? Well, that remains to be seen.

My perspective as a gamer is that gaming is having a large cultural impact, but that's because I'm inside the ecosystem. However, my work and life take me outside the ecosystem, and for that reason alone I remain skeptical. We may no longer be in a world where a single cultural event dominates over all others --such as the final episode of M*A*S*H or the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller-- but that doesn't mean that gaming is lost in the noise.

I think that we gamers just need to realize that we're not as culturally important as we think we are.

*As of 2022 via a Forbes article which I won't link to because it's behind a "stop using your adblocker" wall.

**Courtesy of the leaked graphic about WoW subscriptions.

***If they don't at first think that I go out to gambling casinos, that is.

****That's gotten better over the years, but you still have to read the room before you declare your full frontal nerdity to people.

*****And before somebody pipes up with the violence inherent in boxing, the popularity of MMA and UFC belies that. Those latter two can be easily found on television without pay-per-view.

"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!"

When I was a kid, I used to get sick.

A lot.

As in, "holy crap how are you still alive?" a lot.

I don't believe in the "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger" nonsense, because I've lived through a winter that had me catch bronchitis, the flu (twice), strep throat, scarlet fever, and pneumonia. That was just ONE WINTER, that of my First Grade. Eventually, my doctor told my parents that if I caught one more thing it would likely kill me, so they pulled me from school and made an arrangement with my teacher for me to complete my First Grade schoolwork at home.

I, uh, was not a very attentive student at that time, and although I lived in fear of my father, I could get away with goofing off with my mother.*

But for a hyperactive kid, being cooped up is like a death sentence. You can't go outside, you can't run around**, and you can't make any noise. I did love reading, but there's only so much schoolwork type of reading you can do before you start to go crazy.

What kept me sane? My imagination.

There were three shows on television that captivated my attention --two series, one movie-- and I'd spend hours dreaming about them: Batman, Speed Racer, and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

***

The first, the 1960s live action Batman television series, was what I lived for on Saturday nights at 7:30 PM. Even my aunts and uncle were cued to that I loved that show, so when we'd visit my mom's family*** they made sure that the television was tuned to Adam West and Burt Ward. My mom had a pair of button down cardigan sweaters, one blue and one yellow, so my brother and I would wear them as capes, mimicking Batman (me, because I was the oldest dammit) and Robin (my brother). 

Oh, I did. Believe me, I did.

 

In an era before The Dark Knight (the comic book), Adam West's semi-comic version of Batman was what I knew, and I loved his wit and his gadgets and ability to see through the villain of the week's plans. It seems so odd to me now that Batman struck such a chord with me, given that superheroes as a genre today aren't really my bag, given I'm kind of sick and tired of all the superhero movies out these days.

***

The second, Speed Racer, was more of a forbidden fruit for me than anything else. 

Oh, not in the way you'd expect, mind you. My parents were fine with the early anime show. It was that Speed Racer was pulled from the local airwaves because it was "too violent". 

I wish I were making it up, but there it is. 

I mean, I've seen Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, and all of the old Popeye cartoons, and they were all vastly more violent than Speed Racer. But since Speed Racer involved car crashes, it was supposedly far more violent than those others. Parental complaints led to Speed getting pulled off our local independent station, and there was nothing I could do about that. 

And oh yeah, somebody bitched about the word "demon" in the theme song. Yes, my hometown is right on the northern edge of the Bible Belt. Does it show?

But while it was on, I loved that show. I loved the Mach 5 so much that 5 became my favorite number. Add to that Speed's propensity to getting into trouble with the "bad guys" that always led to confrontations on the race track****, yeah I was hooked. I had no idea what anime was --I believe both Speed Racer and the few years later import Star Blazers were lumped into the name "Japanimation" back then-- but in an era before the dominance of NASCAR in the US, motorsports were dominated by the Indy 500 and Le Mans, and Speed tapped into that popularity with a car so far out that it was more James Bond than Mazerati.

***

I saved the best for last, and I referenced it in a comment I made over on Bhagpuss' Inventory Full: The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Since I was sick a lot, some of my earliest memories were of me being propped up on the couch where I could watch television when I was recovering. We only had one television at the time, and it was a black and white one*****, but it was my window into the world. 

In those days, before Rupert Murdoch launched FOX as a fourth network, most localities in the US had at least one independent television station. Those stations were typically filled with old shows in syndication, cartoons in the afternoon that they could put on cheaply, and old movies. Tons and tons of old movies.

Like, oh, the 1938 Errol Flynn classic mentioned above.

Channel 19, before it became one of the first FOX stations back in the mid-80s, would have movies at 1 PM daily (ending at 3 PM in time for cartoons), and would have an average of three movies on during the weekends during the days. And it always seemed that whenever I was sick, The Adventures of Robin Hood was sure to be on in one of those slots. If you want adventure, patriotism, strong female characters (for the era), and more than a bit of swashbuckling adventure, Robin, Lady Marian, Little John, and the Merry Men were hard to beat. And for a kid watching the swordplay and archery in an era before D&D or the SCA exploded onto the scene, it was more than you could ever hope for.

You can't have a good movie without good
villains. Before I knew him as Sherlock
Holmes, Basil Rathbone (center) was
Sir Guy of Gisbourne. (From the DVD.)

It was little surprise, I suppose, that several years later when I was introduced to Lord of the Rings and D&D that I just hopped on board that train and haven't looked back.

***

It's not hyperbole to say that those early influences helped pave the way for my love of gaming. A love of adventure, heroism, and the medieval period are pretty much a straight line from those early influences to RPGs to video game RPGs and finally to MMOs. It probably also provides a background why I play the way I play; I don't explicitly think it, but my deference to letting others have loot first and helping others rather than asking for help could be easily traced from Batman and Robin Hood to today. From my perspective, it's just being a decent player, but for others it could easily be seen as being a 'goody-two-shoes' and 'overly chivalrous'. But you can't please everyone, I suppose.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there are some influences from my later childhood that I need to reconnect with as well....

*How times changed. When the mini-Reds were old enough for school, I was much more easy-going than my wife was. I swore I would not be my father, and I refused to engage in strict discipline. Thankfully, the mini-Reds turned out okay, but I was basically the "Good Cop" to my wife's "Bad Cop".

**We lived in an apartment that Spring while our house was being built, and the family below us had a newborn. So my brother and I weren't allowed to run around the apartment at all. Or bang on the metal container that held our Lincoln Logs like a drum.

***She was the oldest of six, so only she and her closest sibling in age were married. Her second sibling was still 3+ years away from her wedding.

****And that the mysterious Racer X was in fact Speed's older brother, there were definitely overtones that as a kid you never realized weren't in cartoons before.

*****We didn't buy our first color television until 1979. I remember that day well, because we bought the set at Sears, brought it home with the box in the trunk of my parents' 1972 Chevy Nova with the trunk lid tied down with twine, and when my dad turned on the TV for the first time, there was Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk in his full green skinned glory.