Weird Fake Gaming Shorts

 

A couple of years ago there was a video put out by a group(?) going by the name of Badabun.  To my understanding Badabun are a shitty content farm type of channel that produces low grade insipid crap for 6-13 year olds, not the kind of thing worth looking up.  This video consisted of a guy sitting in front of a camera pretending to play Super Mario Bros on the NES while a TAS speedrun video played in a window next to him. He was claiming to have beaten the game in under 5 minutes which is certainly a feat that has been done by a great many people it seems but the fakery of this video was so obvious that it was laughable.  A number of other creators made their own videos clowning on this guy for being a dipshit, we had a good chuckle and we moved on.

Fast forward to current day however, in a new age of short form content and these fake gaming videos have become pretty widespread.  Not only that but the number of people now falling for it seems to have grown a great deal and it's making any faith I might have had in the general audiences in gaming spaces has now been well and truly crushed.  The short that inspired me to make this post was a guy playing a Super Mario World romhack where the footage he was using was so obviously either TAS or spliced that you would think a child would recognize the fakery but the comments section was filled with things like "omg this guy is the greatest mario player ever" with only a couple of comments calling out the obvious fakeness that went mostly ignored.  What made it even worse is that he had included a webcam feed at the bottom of the video showing his hands and the controller to add legitimacy to the video but even just glancing at it you could see it wasn't matching up.  Despite the guy in question putting the fact that it's fake blatently on screen for all to see, I guess most people's mindset is that "oh there's a controller feed there so it must be legit" and then go no further than that.

I've also noticed that this has been a massive problem for short form content regarding rhythm games.  There's a very simple rhythm game called A Dance of Fire and Ice that is just CRAWLING with hundreds of fake videos of people getting all perfects on meme songs like Rush E or really cringeworthy songs about that cocksocket, Mr Beast.  A lot of rhythm games come with autoplay features so you can see and maybe study the chart a while if you are struggling but these guys are taking autoplay footage, slapping on some footage of them mashing the keyboard like a child playing with a word processor for the first time and then uploading.  The fakery here is even more obvious that the Mario videos as well because just listening to the clacks of the keyboard while watching the gameplay clearly shows they aren't hitting those notes and yet at the end of the short they have a no miss all perfect clear AND EVEN THEN the comments are filled with praise by idiots.

The big question I have is just "why?", why go through all that effort to get a couple of thousand views on the most ass type of content that can be made on a platform like YouTube.  Even if you suck at rhythm games, let's say, and then you did a series of videos where you documented yourself practicing to full combo the hardest song in whatever game it was, I think that would be infinitely more appealing to more people.  People love seeing a shitty underdog struggle and train and then do a thing.  Uploading fake videos to get a couple of thousand fews so you can make a few bucks in ad rev is actually fucking pathetic.

I guess the solution is to stop watching YouTube shorts, I dunno why I bother anyway.  For some reason I click that shit every so often and I just end up mad or disappointed.  But either way, my bad habits with shitty short form media aside, fuck these users, put some effort into your fucking hobby