WCG Ultimate Gamer's Australian Debut

While this is old news to anyone in the United States, last night Sci-Fi Sy-Fy Channel's WCG Ultimate Gamer had its debut on Australian television.

Having not heard of the show before yesterday and accidentally catching it at the last minute, I'm still not entirely sure what I felt about it. If you're unfamiliar with the show's concept, it features twelve "top gamers" living in one house Big Brother style, facing challenges each week as they're kicked off one by one. Each show has the contestants first competing in a real life competition inspired by video games, then facing off against each other playing said video game. In the first episode, the inspiration was Rock Band 2, which had the players grouped into bands to learn how to sing and play real instruments before competing with one another on the virtual ones.

While I do give the show some points for not going for the easiest stereotypes, at least for a program marketed towards mainstream "non-gamers," I was disappointed how silly they edited the episode to look with respect to gamers nevertheless. Given that the show itself was sponsored by the World Cyber Games I had hoped for a little bit more elevation, but even while watching it I still felt like I was supposed to be giggling at how seriously each player took their hobby.

From the onset the housemates were competitive and rather hostile towards one another, and the episode even got the requisite anti-social behavior from "KosherHamm," the competition's sports-game-loving jock whose biggest contribution to the show before getting eliminated was complaining about another male contestant's femininity during the band challenge.

Even putting aside concerns about stereotypes, the show itself wasn't all that interesting to me. Certainly they tried their best to make it more exciting, both between the Matrix-esque "isolation room" and Samsung Stadium, but no amount of flashing lights and plasma/LCD screens can make up for the fact that essentially, watching WCG Ultimate Gamer is about as interesting as watching over someone's shoulder as they play a video game. For me, that means not very.

Admittedly, this was only the first episode. I don't know if things improve, even though the show has finished in the US by now. Searching around online it was hard to gauge the popularity it had with other gamers, and I wasn't able to find any metrics for the show's overall ratings to see how it fared with non-gamers as well. (I purposefully haven't read the thread about it on our own forums while I decide whether or not I'm going to keep watching.) While I can give WCG a golf-clap for being involved in a project that seeks to expose "gamer culture" to a wider audience, I wish they could have done it in a way that didn't seem so dumbed down, or like a joke in and of itself. Nevertheless, I concede that I could simply be the grumpy old man that doesn't "get it."

What about those of you in the US who've seen the show come and go? Did you enjoy it or not?