Saturday, November 29, 2014

#8: Analysis of "A Table For One" by Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw

Poem can be found here (it is recommended you see this before instead of after): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOOuvQMQG0&list=PLAbMhAYRuCUhovB3jwR7XGxCs4MTjpMcT&index=45

As can be seen by other poems by this particular author, Yahtzee likes to use metaphor to make a point on current events. There are obvious parallels between the stories of his poems and recent news in the realm of gaming. He then uses the plot of the poem and reactions of the characters to express his point.

The restaurant represents the Xbox One, which had just been announced by Microsoft at the time. The waiter represents the Kinect, a device that was announced to require an online connection to function, was capable of watching the player when not using the console. The bread menu represents the list of features that were announced with the Xbox One, most notably how the word "television" was used more often than "games" during the announcement. The Xbox One is presented as a multimedia device that can combine all your forms of entertainment into one box, but it is primarily a games machine, and very few games were announced with the Xbox One, as can be seen by the empty menu at the restaurant. There is much more to the poem, but that's all needed to understand the point of the poem.

Now that the symbolism is out of the way, what makes Yahtzee's style noticeable is the way he disguises his metaphors. Even for a person familiar with all that is gaming, it is impossible to tell what metaphor the author is going for until at least half way through the poem. Once the audience realizes the metaphor, his message becomes blatantly clear: Yahtzee feels the Xbox One is a failure of a games machine in the same way a restaurant is a failure if it only serves bread.

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