Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. "And sitting with those blue-jeaned shadows there, that had been there all night, I found myself shivering over chilly drink, half dead of fright." -William Ashbless. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Ok, first off, there was not much of a response to today's topic, aside from one or two very well argued letters I've posted below. Sorry about that, but I have to admit I half expected it to happen. I knew yesterday that the topic might be a bit too dry to get people excited, but wasn't too bothered because I knew I'd have a busy day today, and not be able to get a long column up. So my apologies for that.

On the other hand, I feel like I should put something here for you to read, and good old PBS has given me just what I need to get off on a good rant. Their news series "Frontline" ran a program tonight entitled "The Merchants of Cool", which was all about how teenagers are marketed to. It was an absolutely brilliant watch -if you get a chance to see it as a rerun I strongly recommend doing so (and a lot of channels will likely be replaying it in the wee hours of the morning, so tape it if you can).

The program basically described how the teenage market seems to be divided into three categories. The first consists of trendsetters who the marketers latch on to, copy, and mass market as soon as possible. The second group is the mainstream teenage market itself - the people who follow MTV and Dawson's Creek, and more or less swallow whole whatever's put in front of them. The third group consists of people who strongly resist being marketed to, but are driven to extremes of antisocial behavior to escape the juggernaut, because damn near anything can and will be marketed these days. It's all quite fascinating, because while I always knew marketing people were inhuman scum, I never knew the twisted details of how they worked.

I think that anyone who watches this will inevitably have a very personal, subjective reaction to it - they'll either feel outraged that they were the targets of the process being described, or (as in my case) a combination of smugness and alienation that they were never part of the targeted demographic. Actually, that last reaction probably sums up the reaction of most people reading this column - we as RPG players were never cool (or populous) enough to attract real marketing attention. I know that personally I never felt attracted to the shiny pop (or grunge) MTV mainstream, but at the same time never felt I had to claim some sort of individual identity by being as repulsive and anti-social as possible. Instead, I was merely asocial - I embraced my nerdiness, played my Nintendo games, and interacted with people who fell inside my area of interest... and to hell with the rest of them.

And if you'll forgive the presumption, if that is the case for many of the rest of you, we may have lucked out. As game players, we have our own fairly distinct cultural identity (complete with catch phrases like "All your bases are belong to us", grossly overused within the tribe but unknown to the outside world.) We're not massively anti-social, as a rule, but we are far too nerdy to ever be mass-marketed. And we've got a common interest - games - that's able to push into genuinely new artistic territory without (for the most part) turning into a pop parody of itself. In short, we seem to be blessed, believe it or not.

Ok, I hope the two of you who actually saw that documentary enjoyed my rantings on the subject. For the rest of you, I guess I've got a column to write.

Onward.

There are a couple of half truths there I could quibble with, but by and large you speak the good words. You're also dead on with DQ - it was huge on the SNES and NES, and basically dropped off the face of the earth in the PSX era. Yes, DQ7's sales are very impressive (VERY impressive), but a single game in five years is completely underwhelming when you compare it to the DQ empire of the (S)NES era. Compare that to Square, who ended the SNES era as a popular niche developer and ended the PSX era as one of the most important (if not the most important) developers on the system. True, they seem to have overextended themselves at the moment, but by and large they've done excellent work both in software and in how they've positioned themselves. Now the question is, who will be the Square of the next era, since it may not be Square themselves?

One could also argue that Capcom's success has more to do with quantity than quality. The MML games are admirable, but the mainstream Mega Man and MMX games have become completely generic cookie-cutter filler. Same goes for Street Fighter - what are the up to these days? SF IV Plus EX Alpha? Who cares? Marvel vs. Capcom. vs. SNK... who can tell the difference anymore? Make no mistake, Capcom's made a ton of money and they aren't going anywhere, but in a way Capcom's like the Tom Clancy or Stephen King of the gaming world - overwhelm them with product, even if you don't write so well, and you'll come out ahead.

Strong words, sir. I've already said why I think Enix and Square deserve their respective places, but I will point out that even over here, without DQ, Enix still did pretty well by releasing an ungodly number of titles developed by other companies - Actraiser, anyone? And because of that, and because of how bloody generic most SNES RPGs and adventure games were, nearly everything I played on the system seemed like an Enix game, even when it wasn't.

Square may not have been able to branch out as well as they would have liked, but they were able to release more high profile RPGs in one year over here than most companies did in the system's entire lifetime. FF9 was not a showstopper, but FF7 and 8 were, and the failings of the latter game doesn't take away from the importance of the first two.

And lastly, Nintendo was largely coasting on momentum during the N64 era. Far wiser heads than I have pointed out that the N64 was a system designed for one game: Mario 64. I loved the last two Zeldas, and Ogre Battle 64's an intriguing glimpse into a parallel universe where N64 RPGs were numerous, plentiful, and excellent, but as it is the N64 has a whole bunch of party games, some good work by Rare, a some good 3D translations by Nintendo, and that's pretty much it. And even then they couldn't give us a worthy update of Mario Kart. Things may turn around for them in the Game Cube era, but the N64 was, at best, a draw for the big N.

Nah, I once gave a 10 minute mock lecture on parameter passing by value, by reference, and by pointer. That's nerdy. You may have been inadvertently clever, since statistically speaking, in an 95% female audience there's probably at least 1 RPG player in there. And she'll now remember your name as "that guy who talked about elemental affinities." All you have to do is capitalize on it.

And that was a John Fogerty reference. Kids today, no respect for history...

I'm 99% certain it's on its own disc, so yes, you can sell ZOE to a friend and keep the gooey MGS2 goodness to yourself.

Closing Comments:

For tomorrow, here's a half fluff topic, half segue from the intro: if you could put any band you wanted to in any game you wanted to, what band and what game would you mix and match? Would you have Radiohead make a soundtrack for Persona 3, to strengthen the whole angsty alienation vibe? The Smashing Pumpkins record a few tracks for a new Sonic game? Should Moby make some techno for the new Metroid? Should Brittany Spears and N'Sync do a "Make your own video" game, which would tragically be hacked in such a way to give anyone who played it a massive seizure after 20 minutes? Let me know. Later.

-Chris Jones, knows his evil marketer doppelganger is out there, somewhere...