Watch People Play Games on UK TV

Last weekend, the UK network Bravo – unrelated to the U.S. channel, BTW – launched something called “Game Face,” tilted toward casual gamers, presumably ones with wads of disposable income.

Former MTV boss Peter Einstein is behind the show, and he thinks he knows why video game shows “have failed in the past.”

From what we’ve seen in the past a lot of the focus has been more outside of the games, with presenter reviews, stats, interviews with creators and only a bit about the games themselves – as one assumed that you only ‘play’ games you can’t ‘watch’ them.

So, wait a sec. This means we’re going to be watching people play games? Casual games? Sounds like it.

By taking the rich production values of many games today, using the story line or game objective, [production company] Ginx creates a TV production from a TV viewers point of view. We feel this concept provides a fun, entertaining TV event which is appealing mostly to the casual gamer.

Has anyone gotten a look at this yet? Is this really what’s going on? Like, a documentary of one man’s struggle to master Boom Blox?

Update: UK reader The A Drain says he’s seen the show and files this report:

I managed to catch the first episode of this entirely by accident while browsing channels having breakfast the other day.

It’s the same old drivel other shows are, but without as much talking. A 20-something girl bounces around the screen making sexual allusions for 5 minutes, then you get a 5 minute clip of a game, no commentary, simply game footage that’s all.

Then you get two ‘reviews’ if you can call them that, in which a random dude voices over uninterrupted game footage, they reviewed both Ghostbusters (failing to mention that it’s PS3 only for now in Europe, and called it multiplatform) and Red Faction Guerrilla. Essentially, they took a typical casual standpoint while doing the review, they gave no review score, avoided any and all technical aspects, and spent roughly 10 minutes saying “It’s great you can smash stuff wiv a hammer!/Trap ghosts!”