Bored Gamers: Jim Devereaux on entertaining against the clock
Time to deliver
There’s one aspect of gaming that really doesn’t work well with television – and that’s time. I don’t know about you, but when I sit down to play most games, I’m giving myself at least half an hour, often as much as four or five hours, to really sink my teeth into my latest purchase.
The problem with TV however, is that you can’t just roll cameras, start playing, keep going for as long as you fancy and then cut. Bored Gamers is an hour-long programme, which in television terms means it’s four 11-minute segments strung together across three advert breaks.
We break down the key elements
Add to that the pacey style we’ve adopted for the show and you’ve usually got just four or five minutes to showcase a game. Which begs the question: how do you do justice to a game in just five minutes?
There are two main strategies we have adopted so far to deal with this time constraint. First, we try to break down all the key elements of a game and present them as an elaborate set of bullet points while interjecting a bit of personal (often silly) commentary so that we don’t come across as if we’re reading out a promotional sheet.
The second strategy, when there’s simply too much content to adopt the previous method, is the against-the-clock challenge, which we used for our Gamescom coverage. This is essentially about taking what you’ve got and deciding whether to make a serious or humorous statement in relation to it.
It’s by no means a conclusive judgment, as a funny comment over a snippet of gameplay doesn’t mean we think the game is either purely comedic or not to be taken seriously, but it’s an artistic decision to make the segment entertaining – which is the overall point of the TV show.
Within the sheltered confines of my home, I can indulge my games as much or as little as I like, as my personal experience is of no consequence to anyone else. However, when I’m presenting the same games on television, the most important thing is not gameplay, story, graphics, sound, control mechanics or bonus content. It’s being as entertaining as possible while we attempt to do justice to a game in just four or five minutes. That may not sound ideal to a hard-core player, but that’s the nature of the beast baby…
Bored Gamers is an hour-long weekly show on all things gaming. Tune in to see it on Latest TV at 9pm every Friday night.
