The Desperate Tim Rogers Tries to Stay Afloat on Kotaku

You know, most intelligent people probably guess that with Tim's columns getting way less viewcounts than Lisa Foiles's, or hell, even Leigh Alexander's, we were going to see some pandering.  The column last month about MMOs might have been pandering, I'm not sure.  Tim doesn't really seem to know how to pander, considering that the central MMO of that column was Final Fantasy XI, an game that I think even All Points Bulletin players felt sorry for even as their experience imploded in hilarious mismanagement.  I didn't read the entire column, and what I don't read I don't really remember, except that Tim had a Strange Opinion about the MMO experience and tried to relate it to something else.  I'm sure Tim was physically pained writing a column about it all the same, considering his hatred of the masses and slow-paced loot grinding games in general (his review of Diablo II on one of his many unimportant sites was apoplectic at the whole slot-machine aspect of the game).

But whatever.  Tim had a month to recover, watch as Lisa Foiles' newest column (which was basically her stealing that women's heroine stereotype flowchart from Jezebel (which they stole from another blog, to be fair) and going "video game heroines are strange!") rise to EIGHTY THOUSAND HITS, and plan a new idea!  Then as he actually admits in so many words he realized his ideas are horrible (in his own words, his column this month wasn't psychedelic enough, which implies that the limits of Tim's mindscaping has been pressing his hands against his eyes real hard) and no one really pays attention to his columns except to say "oh so long."  A real change was needed  So this time, he was going to go Web 2.0, making mental air quotes while preparing his date his some japanese girl who mentioned liking Lucky Star.

Yes, he's taking questions from the audience using Twitter about video games.  No, his answers are not limited to 160 characters.

The first thing I noticed in the column was a pretty sad attempt to validate himself as an important gaming person:

• He mentions that he has 1600 twitter followers.  To this, I sort of want to pat Tim on the head, as I'm pretty sure that if I opened up a twitter account that was me posting tridaily hollywood actresses I wanted to play metal slug with, I could get 2000 followers within a month with a minimum of whoring.
• His first question is a wackily pedantic question from Bryan Lee O'Malley.  Who is that?  It's the guy who wrote the pretty good Volumes 1-3 of "Scott Pilgrim," then went on to write the absolutely miserable Volumes 4-6 of "Scott Pilgrim."  In Tim's defense, he claims that this was the first question he got FOR REAL, though whether he's lying or not, the only sure truth is that I feel alot better about not actually buying any of the Scott Pilgrim books.
• The whole "oh I'm such a bad writer in an ironic way" I talked about in blogs past is out in full force.

To be fair to Tim, none of the questions asked him are any good. I literally can't tell whether a good number of them are the most sycophantic queries ever, or pure sarcasm (not that this would have any effect on Tim's answer).  POUR EXAMPLUH:

 

 

Note that half of the questions and answers significantly involved the whole sticky friction thing.  That column was Tim's big break, and I'm not sure if Tim really understands that the whole of his Kotaku fanbase seems to be around the DISCOVERED CONCEPT that sometimes a game slows down in order to  heighten enjoyment.  It's something akin a writer who attempts to create great works of genius, and is primarily known by 90% of his fans for being the originator of a fairly clever fart limerick. 

Of course, it's not like Tim is pounding out works of genius.  Here's him talking about Vanquish, a 4-hour third person shooter that was noticed for like five minutes because some guys who worked on Resident Evil 4 or 5 left Capcom to work on it:

I'm talking about American football. Nearly no one outside of America knows what American football is, or, at least, they don't know enough about it to be able to spot its nuances in other works of media.

Gears of War is simultaneously a game of inches and a game about linebacker-sized dudes Going For It on fourth and sixty-five. The "stop and pop" cover-based game mechanic stresses defense over offense. The medium-term goal of Gears of War is to clear every enemy in the area. The short-term goal is usually to clear every enemy you can clear from your current position. Your current position is either the only place you can be without dying at this very moment or a place you've already been. Gears of War is about "painting" the battlefield with safety. You stop, you pop, you earn a better grasp on more strategic position, you move forward.

Vanquish, on the other hand, is more soccer than football. It's almost as though the game designers understood how integral football was to Gears of War, and decided that, in order to make a "Japanese" — or, well, "Not Completely American" — third person shooter, they could possibly start with soccer.

Soccer, like wearing skinny jeans, is a sport that is more or less about ball placement. A skilled player can put the ball anywhere on the field, from any time, from any position.

Well, the one place a typical player can't put the ball simply through a little application of will is, of course, the inside of the goal. That's the tricky part. Scoring a goal in soccer is a momentous occasion. In American football, you can score a goal by soldiering forward and not messing up. In soccer, you're going to end up face-to-face with a goalkeeper — essentially, a rival with a terrain advantage. You couldn't make it harder to score a goal in soccer if you put the goal on top of a hill.

 So, ball placement: soccer is about choosing where to put the ball at any given moment. When choosing where to put the ball, the player has to consider the position of his other teammates and their formation, and his rivals and their position. Soccer is about positioning the ball with a little preemptive thought about the path each play will take. As your rivals out-think and out-maneuver you, play after play and plan after plan fall abandoned by the wayside, scrapped in favor of new tactics.

Vanquish is like soccer in that the player controls both the athlete and the ball. At any time during any given firefight, the player can use a dash ability to sprint, near-invincible, to and from any position on the battlefield from or to any other position.

In short, from anywhere on the battlefield, you can put the hero anywhere.

I hope you didn't read that.  Here's what we can glean from this passage:

• Tim knows literally less about football than Klosterman.

• He is sort of right about Gears of Wars being a series of "plays," but holy shit I don't know where he's coming from with Vanquish.  I've only watched the game, but the main feature is an easy to use propulsion system on your hero's man-sized mecha suit that allows him to jet around the battlefield.  It's a neat little idea, but that has nothing to do with soccer, which is just as strictly play and team-based as American football.  The notion of a superstar being able to control a chaotic, closed-in field is closer to lacrosse or hockey, but of course, those aren't cool sports, right?

• Mario is like bowling because friction friction friction. 

Here's some other snippets, bolded for the "come on what man don't do this" parts:

It most certainly could be. In fact, the creator has even called it that in so many words.
When I talked to Gran Turismo director Kazunori Yamauchi in 2009, he said that the game is, in fact, a role-playing game. The player obtains licenses, earning access to new circuits and cars. He earns money by winning races. He spends money to purchase cars.

Cars are like weapons — they can only accentuate the player's innate abilities. Unlike in a standard role-playing game, where the character gains power and ability by simply playing ceaselessly and persistently, in Gran Turismo the up-leveling happens inside the player's brain as he unlocks new brain-places and connects gaps between previously existing patches of wisdom.

Surmounting a challenge in Gran Turismo requires knowledge of yourself, the challenge, and the tool — the car — you use. You have to learn each car's personality in about as much detail as you get familiar with the life and back-story of a character in an RPG.

In 2004, Yamauchi told me that, during his years as a young gamer, he much preferred Choplifter to Super Mario Bros., because he could imagine it was him inside that helicopter.  Maybe Choplifter is a role-playing game, too.

"Role-playing game" is a loose term. It doesn't just mean dungeons, dragons, menus, and monsters. It can mean a game where you have to invest a little bit of your own brain in the name of pretending what's happening in the world of the game is "real" or "important".

Sports games and role-playing games have more in common than you might ever think at first. Shingo "Sea Bass" Takatsuka, director of the Winning Eleven soccer series, told me that he considers the Winning Eleven series "role-playing games". He says that, outside basic knowledge of game controls, attack plans, and the basic rules of soccer, the key to playing the game well is understanding the personalities and playing styles of individual players. Players' abilities are represented by a few convenient integers, though outside of that, players with similar ability ratings might be capable of doing completely different things. Mastering the game requires understanding who can do what, and how.

I feel like I've hinted at this in a previous column: I want to make a game that makes someone feel the way they feel when they look at their chat client's buddy list and see a little pencil icon by your name. They sit there, wondering what you're about to say. And then, maybe, you never say anything. Maybe you went to bed after typing a letter — maybe "a", maybe "k" — into a chat message and then not pressing enter. That's cooler than "poking" someone on Facebook. 

(I WISH I COULD MAKE THIS EVEN BOLDER)

There are others questions with face-slapping moments, but you've got the idea at this point, right?   I've tried to exhaustively summarize Tim Roger's columns before, but it's just impossible.  Not because I'm mad or anything, but they're just so underwhelming to read, despite angry nerd views to the contrary.  It's like going to a restaurant that some friends worship, and others go on chowhound or eopinions to write nasty hateful reviews about and gleefully show them to you, and you just get a watery soup and a waiter out of a Tom Petty song.

I don't want to bring up icypalm (ho ho) again after all of his naifs pumped up my blog statistics, but while I hate his columns...actually, that's the thing.  His writing is pretty terrible, but at least there's a sort of adventurous, gleeful misanthropic vibe to them that makes it fun to hate them.  Tim Roger's writing, especially his stuff on Kotaku, is impenetrable dreck dumbed down for a site audience that really wants to know more about two feet tall ceramic sculptures of Tifa.  Now he's clearly given up any sort of rock-star gaming journalist aspect and pandering for subscribers on fucking Twitter.  What's next, a blog on 1up so he can compete with Jeremy Parish on who is the bigger early-2000s gamer has-been?  I can't care about this shit anymore, and neither should you (at least until he starts getting catty towards women or something).

NEXT TIME.   TALKING ABOUT PERSONA 2: INNOCENT SIN