YouTube Words – Game Grumps: Language and Mario Games

These are the Game Grumps

We’ve seen how they use language on their shows.

We’ve seen how negative they can be with each other in competition.

Now we explore how their language while playing a game using their word profile focusing on Super Mario *.

More specifically, how positive they can be while playing a game.

Because they do like playing Mario games and because they’re fun, they aren’t typically too negative on them.

But there can be frustrating moments when playing a Mario games.

And sometimes that frustration turns into magic for the viewers.

Or we just get sad at what we’re watching.

Good thing I typically listen, instead.

Mario, Mario, on the wall.

Mario games, if you have a Nintendo you probably have one. Shining examples in each generation of how not to sacrifice fun over all else while still building on unique level design and well-paced learning to keep a game easy to pick up and understand.

The Grumps have played a lot of Mario games in Game Grumps. Not all of them have gone so well. Many of them don’t age well and most have moments where frustration is almost inevitable, leading to some very hot-tempered episodes. Luckily with all of this dialogue on our hands, we might be able to find out which are which.

The first thing we can look at is the Word Profile of The Grumps during each game. The Word Profile is the word frequency of each word within the whole script and can be very telling of who is talking and what topics were generally discussed. But to get a word profile that is somewhat compelling, we need to strip out those pesky common words that are heavily used, but are also used as common grammar connections. I, you, the, is, it, I’m, my..

We also took away the words that didn’t add to the emotional semantics of the profile. What’s striking about this picture? The usage of “bullshit” for one, or sporadic frequency of the word “Asshole” for another. Keep in mind this graph is only of the top2% most used uncommon sentimental words, but still shows a small bit of the trouble that was had.

Mario 3d World is a good frontrunner, but also keep in mind that this and Super Mario World had both Arin and Dan playing, so the profile is of both of them. Most if not all other ones are of Arin playing.

Here’s a closer look. They like to say damnit, asshole and fucker a lot when Arin’s playing. Don’t we all.

Which is the fairest one of all.

Probably more telling is the sentiment on each episode as the episodes keep plugging away.

Again the Sentiment is the emotion quantifier that a word elicits. Positive Sentiment for positive emotions, Negative Sentiment for negative emotions.

For the most part, the Sentiment for Mario games are positive. There are only a few moments in Mario Sunshine around episode 42, Mario 64 around episode 42 and 52, and at various points throughout Mario 3d World.

I’ll grant you that these moments are the ones where they are the most frustrated, but they are ones where there are moments of panic. Oh, and Mario 64 episode 56 where there’s just a great to be had on the rainbow carpet ride.

Changing what we’re counting from all Sentimental words to all Negative Sentimental Words, i.e. all mean or frustrated triggers, the episodes that I mentioned become a bit more pronounced.

The only issue is that Arin uses fucks like ums in a toastmaster entrant so it can skew the curve a bit when Arin gets chatty rather than Dan.

If we think about it this way, if Arin uses Fuck and Shit with general consistency, then taking out his average fuck-count can help show either Arin’s talkative episodes or his most frustrated episodes. Not a bad metric to find, but definitely not the same as everyone else’s profile. Or he’s using fuck more consistently because of the higher base-line aggravation.

Damnit Arin, stop ruining shit for people.

…

Oh, they also use a lot of positive words when talking about Mario games, too. But Mario will do that to you. It’ll also rage quit at some point, but that’s hard to tell with how the Grumps talk.

GameIntrospection

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