Big Picture Mode
Industry issues given the widescreen treatment
Who the fuck is Nathan Brown, asks Nathan Brown
Afew weeks before Christmas, I briefly set NeoGAF on fire. It was the week before the PlayStation Experience. The big Street Fighter V announcement had leaked, and the Internet was hungry for more. That afternoon, I was on the phone when an embargoed email arrived from Sega announcing the localisation of Yakuza 5, a game in a series I adore and which I had just about given up hope of ever playing in English. I even bought a copy during a trip to Japan, resolving that this would be the game for which I would finally learn Japanese. Six months later it is, obviously, still sealed.
So I was pretty happy, to the point that I cut myself off mid-sentence and whooped. I explained apologetically to the PR on the phone – as best I could – and finished the conversation. When I put the phone down, I tweeted about what had just happened.
I’ve got a few hundred followers. I work for a prominent publication, but I’m not a prominent person, and while I’m sure most of those few hundred thought they’d be getting the inside skinny on this industry, I mostly tweet about football, music and things that annoy me on the commute. I now realise that the Yakuza 5 tweet was a rare example of me doing what my followers expect, rather than wittering about jungle podcasts and the odd pillock in a Nissan.
It blew up. Relatively, anyway. A hundredodd retweets, some new followers and about a thousand posts of feverish speculation on NeoGAF. What could it be, they pondered?
Crash Bandicoot, apparently. Several others said it was Shenmue. Someone even thought it was a new Mark Of Kri, for heaven’s sake.
Something had to be done, but I don’t have a GAF account, and it can take months for admins to approve new signups. I tweeted again: “Hi GAF. Calm down.” It didn’t work. I explained it was exciting to me personally, that’s all. Some turned against me. I still have, for posterity, a Safari tab on my phone showing the post that asks, “WHO THE FUCK IS NATHAN BROWN?”
The only reason anyone paid the blindest bit of attention is that I was subverting the PR cycle. If Sega had tweeted a coded hint about a PSX reveal, no one would have cared. But someone on the inside saying something they shouldn’t? Now you’re talking. Game PR has become so bland that anyone who so much as smells like they’re about to contravene it gets some attention.
That goes beyond games, though. In the UK at the moment, the two most prominent political voices are a hard-right xenophobic buffoon and a nihilistically revolutionary standup comedian. Both of them have become caricatures of themselves, really, but because mainstream politicians have become so terrified of causing any offence for fear it might cost them an election, the slightest whiff of unguarded opinion has everyone – from white van to news desk to parliament – falling over themselves to listen to, report, repeat and debate what they have to say.
At least my 15 minutes of notoriety were an accident. There are those who understand this phenomenon and seek to exploit it – and no, I’m not talking about SEO experts. Look at Lizard Squad, the hacking group that took down PSN and, briefly, Xbox Live over the Christmas break. Yes, there was a simple motivation to cause trouble on a day when these wags knew countless kids, young and old, would be setting up their new consoles. But the timing was also calculated for maximum exposure. Editors in the specialist and mainstream press knew readers would be searching and checking their favourite sites to find out why they couldn’t set up their new console, so reported on it. Lizard Squad, meanwhile, told followers to retweet specific messages if they wanted PSN back online, or to stay down forever. When I checked on Christmas Day, its account had 55,000 followers. A few days later, that figure had grown to over a quarter of a million.
The problem, then, is one of oxygen. What I’m saying, I think, is that we should all stop clicking on shit. It’s easier said than done, of course. We’ve all been suckered in by a dumb headline, but it’s easy to forget how much currency there is in the things we idly click on, the shows we have on in the background and in the things we retweet. In this massively connected age, every action, however granular, carries real, often troubling weight. With a bit more thought, we can keep racists off our TV screens, hackers out of our multiplayer networks, and me only tweeting about mid-to-late-’90s dance music. At least one of those has got to be worth the effort.
Game PR is so bland that anyone who so much as smells like they’re about to contravene it gets attention