Maybe I’m just not man enough

Rebecca Mayes sings songs to review video games, and I like that.

There’s a hefty portion of the internet dedicated to talking about video games, worrying about them or reviewing them or celebrating them.  Even songs about gaming isn’t particularly novel, since there’ve been rappers and performers in this niche for a while.  Even mainstream musicians are sampling games, though I think more to seem clever than anything.

What makes me smile about Rebecca Mayes is that I doubt very much there’s anyone else who sounds like her in this little space, so even when she’s not all that great, she’s at least different.  Hearing a cute, wee blonde Brit with a sweet voice singing about Bionic Commando (the crappy new gritty one, not the awesome a 1980s one about a guy with a robot arm fighting white-label Nazis) is itself enough of a contrast to make you stop, blink and step outside the “gamer” box a bit.

She has a series of videos available at The Escapist (which I discovered watching the increasingly rage-filled Zero Punctuation), and this one is my favorite (sorry about the embedded ads):

As an extra treat, take a minute to read the comments threads to her videos.  You will find that they’re populated by a number key groups:

  1. Superfans who applaud her merest gesture
  2. Hyper-critics who savage each video for its lack of gravity and nuance
  3. Dispassionate observers who point out that nobody would be talking about her this much if Mayes wasn’t cute, before discussing in depth her appearance
  4. Dispassionate detractors who tell them to shut up, it’s because she’s an artist who is beautiful inside as well, before discussing in depth her appearance
  5. Moderators who desperately try to remind everyone that these are songs about video games on the internet, for God’s sake

I would not attempt to capture the gender politics at play in those conversations, since discussing comment threads in general is like trying to describe Pig Latin to a third-grader — it’s hard to put into words to begin with, before you wonder why it deserves talking about at all. But it’s fun to see people react to an outsider who also a girl but who clearly plays games or at least has access to them — while entirely missing the point of feather-light songs and chintzy videos meant to be smiled at and forgotten about, just like the games they’re reviewing.

Easily worth a listen.

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