Not the best host...
Charlie Brooker was rather annoying in this, and often distracted from the topic with his pointless and, most often times, unsuccessful satire. Inteesting nonetheless.
---
---
It seemed like it was written by researchers, rather than people who've been playing since the inception of videogames. Brooker didn't come across as a fan at all - just making tenuous links between gaming and society.
The reality is, until recent years, gaming has been done in private and had no impact on society ('society' is a myth, BTW). If gaming had such a big impact on the outside world how come there's hardly any TVs shows dedicated to it and how come it never crops up in questions on quiz shows?
The ZX Spectrum dominated for a decade (1980s), yet Brooker barely mentioned it and ignorantly claimed it was outclassed by the C64, which was totally untrue! The Spectrum's processor seemed faster to me (I had both a Speccy & a C64) and had much higher resolution graphics. The C64 only had better sound and the colour brown as improvements (with twice as large pixels!) - gameplay, the important thing, was inferior.
'Target: Renegade' when released on the Spectrum (48/128k) was the greatest game ever made, yet only the overrated 'Manic Miner' got a mention - 'Jet Set Willy' was better, but was still overrated and impossible! I missed the start of this program, so they'd obviously really rushed through the Atari 2600 era too! The real revolution in game quality, after the Spectrum, came with the Atari ST and Amiga A1200 - I don't think these were even mentioned. Come to think of it, all the machines and consoles were barely mentioned - this program was more about how individual games "changed the world" and, unfortunately, this basic conceit is false - people go off to play games alone - in general, that is all - hardly Earth-changing.
In the same way that ignorant people conclude that Mozart is the greatest composer ever, without actually listening to music, this team of writers have clearly just hand-picked games that they can conclude have changed society.
Claiming that the Wii and Kinect have impacted on lives is a preposterous exaggeration! Most people tried the sensor games once and quickly gave up or went back to gamepads - Wii & Kinect were money-making gimmicks and have little to do with pure gaming.
Concluding that Twitter is, in essence, a videogame highlights their ignorance. Twitter is actually all about egotism and the modern obsession with celebrity and aspiring to become one.
The show was all about trying to make imagined connections between games and 'society' and didn't have enough facts and anecdotes about classic games.
Where was Dominic Diamond? Too funny and would've outshone the morbid Brooker? Where were the game developers, other than where they were forced to talk about other people's games?
In a way, this program felt like it had nothing to do with videogames, at least to people who have been playing since the beginning.