Last night, as I was having trouble falling asleep, I started watching videos by one of my favorite YouTube comedy duos, the Game Grumps. Among other things, the Game Grumps are a Let’s Play channel, which just means that they play video games on the video and talk about them. As is often the case, I found myself gravitating towards a subset of their videos put together by a fan, loosely entitled “Game Grumps Play Bad Games”. These are videos where the video game they play turns out to be - intentionally or otherwise - terrible. Poorly programmed, poorly spelled, weirdly drawn, whatever it might be or all of the above. And I found myself wondering, not for the first time, why it was that I like this genre of entertainment, what I will call Other People Noticing That Things Suck. One of my favorite shows, both when I was a kid and now, is Mystery Science Theater, which is sort of the “Tonight Show” of Watching Things That Suck; the big daddy, the one that started the modern era of this sort of entertainment. And I love it.

But it’s not mean spirited. That’s important. I’ve watched people who try to emulate MST, but do it too aggressively. Game Grumps, MST, VideoGameDunkey - what they share in common is that you know that deep down, they are actually big fans of the genre of work they are skewering. They make fun out of a gentle sense of love and affection. At some level, I think I have a Kantian fear that what I’m doing here isn’t really very nice; that I’m having fun at other people’s expense. So being kind about it is important, to make sure it isn’t mean spirited. The point isn’t to make the creators of these things feel bad; I think the point is to make us feel better by reminding us that other people - sometimes even people who are supposed to know what they’re doing - mess up too.