GameIntrospection

These are the Game Grumps

We talked about how many mean things they say in the last post

They play a lot of games, and at roughly 10-15 minutes an episode they’ve put out a lot of episodes per game.

They don’t typically talk about the game and at 10-15 minutes of non-commentary, they’ve said a lot of things on the show.

Not all of those things are nice things.

And depending on the show, you’re probably not hearing something nice being said.

But they do say a lot of nice things, too.

They aren’t always shit-talking.

They’ve said too many words…

3 episodes a day, 10 minutes an episode, 3100-ish episodes out so far. 64+ days worth of dialogue. The Game Grumps channel and the people on it have said a lot over the past 3+ years. (Still a gross under-estimate since there are plenty of 12, 15, 30 minute episodes as well…) With all of the talking that goes on, it makes it easy to get an impression of the people on it and how they interact with a game and with each other.

The Grumps have played a lot of games and they play a lot of a game. They typically only play a lot of a game if they enjoy some aspect of it. Why wouldn’t they? Would you want to play a game for 6+ hours when you aren’t having any fun playing the game or getting any sort of entertainment from the game?

But Grump series are sometimes weird. Just because they’re having fun with a game doesn’t mean that they’re saying good things during the show. The sentiment they use doesn’t reflect the game because they’re not typically talking about the game itself. Hence the positive sentiment in Sonic Boom, though a lot it does tend to be ironic and sarcastic rather than real positive sentiment.

A refresher, positive sentiment represents words describing positive emotion and negative sentiment words with negative emotions.

And like we saw in yesterday’s post, they tend not to use uncommon words to describe positive affect.

Taking away most common words leaves the games that they play on the floor with 50 shades of red. They talk SO much shit during an episode, and they’re vivid and dramatic in their description. But only for the disgusting and obscene, not really for the pleasurable. Shock and Awe humor. They get a lot of practice at it.

In fact, there are only a handful of games where the Sentiment is positive without the common words that they typically use.

… And now we got to hear them all.

In those 60+ days of talking, they’ve said a lot in each series.

But that doesn’t mean that they talked a lot in these series.

Actually, Steam Train episodes can be on the higher end of active dialogue going on (12/top 30) over the 10-out-of-30 from Game Grumps, but not significantly higher. Many of the series in the Top 30 are typically long-but-short-lived games which makes it easy for the high active dialogue pace but probably not sustainable. More so if we remember the Grump are on an output of 3 episodes a day. I thought it was a neat aside.

They do use a lot of colorful language to help elicit emotion when speaking, but depending on which group of people are playing (determined by the brand) it can really focus the amount of mean words to a laser in their dialogue.

Almost 60% of Sentimental Words, words with emotion, are negative for Only If. 55% for Gang Beasts and Naruto: Ninja Storm 3. So many games with so much negativity in them.

Well, that makes sense. Most of the games on the top-30 games with the worst sentimental dialogue shows that they were played on more competitive brands, i.e. Game Grumps VS, Steam Rolled, and Steam Train. They really do like to harass and belittle each other, with all the love behind it as a tight-knit Boston bawl-bustin’ family has.

Comparing their negative words to all the words said in a game, it still shows a high percentage of negative words, but it’s closer to 6% that any given word will be negative rather than a ~60% chance of an emotional word would be negative.

But you want the Grumps to start quoting kindness, you need to pull them out of the competitive environment. Nearly half of the top-30 list of games comes from Game Grumps proper, and most of the other games are single player or games where they can wax nostalgia all over the screen.

Bad things aren’t the most likely things to come out of their mouths, but you can never rule it out.

Past Grump Words Posts:

Youtube Words Game Grumps: Language Use

Twitter: @Gintrospection

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