The (sometimes dangerous) power of the video game community

That's a really well written article. It's a difficult line and I would like to see gamers insist on good behaviour from their peers when interacting with devs. I think social media has developed faster than online etiquette, and people will say and do things online that they wouldn't dare (or possibly want) to say in person because consequences are minimal and anonymity creates a feeling of safety. Certainly I've had more rape and death threats online than in person (sadly I've had both). I think also people don't think what they say online is as impactful, but honestly it's just as terrifying online as in real life.

I don't want to see a situation where games are made-by-numbers to the loudest shouts on social media and I don't think it's appropriate for social media to impact the hiring and firing of individuals. The idea that anything a dev could say online could leave them fired by mob mentality will leave them saying nothing of interest. That's not to say some tweets etc aren't firable. Of course they could be. But there needs to be some kind of accepted guide to online behaviour for both devs and fans so that the fan-dev interaction doesn't collapse in on itself. I think one of the reasons BSN works is that all opinions are allowed but there are clear rules of conduct to abide by and clear consequences to breaking them. The interactions between fans and devs lacks any kind of structure, it'a multi-platfom free for all.

Someone needs to email the author of that article that anything with any semblance of power is automatically potentially dangerous. Including the media and the video game media. Stupid title seguing into a painfully generic and sometimes confused article ... about outrage mobs, hardly a video game problem but a problem with communities in general, and ignoring that the media (including video game media) often feeds outrage mobs for clicks.

It's a somewhat well written but quite biased article. For example, EA's Battlefront 2 lootbox disaster was not a "fumble", i.e. a clumsy and potentially funny accident, it was an outright intentional greedy reach for the customer's wallet and they got called out for it.

It also generalizes the "gaming community" into a single entity, while in reality different games have very different fan bases. League of Legend's fan base for example has a reputation for being a troll and asshole container, while other games have communities that are downright pleasant and helpful.

And finally some dev studios are open and honest with their players, others less so. There might be a connection somewhere.

BioWare closed their official forums, kinda flying in the face of this.

I find the entire article just off a click, and missing some obvious problems with their thesis.

I read this as a farce piece, frankly.

I did mention that toxicity has been a problem in general. I’ve seen multiple twitter outrages as a testament to that. Gaming as well as politics and everything else needs to call out the bad seeds within its community.

Refresh my memory, what is puddlegate?

What the media does is blame the community for the actions of a few. It started with "all of Gamergate are abusive", an argument designed to shift the focus away from themselves, went to "all gamers who don't condemn gamergate are abusive" and has now settled down to "the videogame community as a whole is abusive". Remember the article a few years ago from Gamasutra? "Gamers are over. Don't market your games to gamers, gamers are over"? Remember that one, and the bitchslap reply they got from Slate "The gaming press declares that gamers are dead. But they are the ones who are becoming obsolete*." 

The gaming media have repeatedly shown they can't accurately critique those who threaten devs, considering many within the gaming press accused the guy asking Price a question of harassment, like they've got their own version of the english dictionary or something. The gaming media is too close to the devs, and therefore whatever emotions are felt by the devs, which are sometimes irrational, are filtered straight through the gaming press to the community. And here the gaming press aren't journalists, they're just a mouthpiece.

So any critique by them is worthless, because people are increasingly just not paying attention. And they're not paying attention because the media have shown time and time again they are unable to be unbiased. The Gaming Media keep churning out negative clickbait attacking the community, and the community keeps turning away from them.

* www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/09/gamergate_explodes_gaming_journalists_declare_the_gamers_are_over_but_they.html

To be fair...about half of said "outrage" over that, is the joke. Because it so perfectly conforms to the stereotype of a "gamer".  

I don't know about others, but if parties agree on delivery and no delivery is made - this is normally breach of contract and no excuses.

"Listening to your audience is vital, but there is such a thing as listening too hard. It can be overwhelming for studios when an empowered audience clamours for a feature to be added or removed en masse, particularly when said audience doesn’t necessarily know what’s best for the game they’re criticizing."

Yep I fully agree with this quotes, I remember when people claim that right now the Bioware games have no consequences to their choices. But the problem is many who asked for more consequences do not get the sacrifices it represents in terms of story and works and lot of them would complain if BW acted otherwise because they do not know how it would turn out. They want to think that they can have only the positives of story consequences and none of the negatives, what they would need is a creator and developper perspective to understand this.

When you look at ME 2, people praised the suicide mission as any of your squadmates can die if you did not make them loyal or make a bad decision and therefore it gaves weight to the choice. Now for mass effect 2, animating those deaths is not a problem because you just need to replace the characters with another but the animation is mostly the same, you record a few lines for each of them and it's done. For ME 2 to kill our companion the cost is very low and you get your emotions of sadness and tension.

The problem comes when ME 3 is there, every companion from ME 2 can never be vital to the story because the story needs to be able to go along without them. This one of the reason why liara t'soni was so much important in the third ME, because she is the only companion in previous games that is certain to be there no matter the choice and therefore will accompany our shepard even if we previously screw up.

Now every companion that is potentially dead needs to have a character replacement that are far away from getting the same emotions from the players. This is what happened with grunt, he had a generic replacement during the rachni mission in ME 3, same with jack for the grissom mission. But most of all with the krogan arc and Mordin.

When you play ME 3 and try to get krogan support, the arc is clearly written with mordin in mind. The player knows him so there is no need to introduce him and can go straight to the development. We also know about his work on the genophage and therefore when we debate about the fate of the krogan or when he sacrifices his life, it's much more powerful. BUT since mordin can die in ME 2, they have to create an entirely different new characters called padok viks and while he is not bad, the scenes with him are nowhere near as great as mordin due to the fact that there is no need for reintroduction and we share an experience with him in the previous game.

But all of those replacement came with problems for one word that many people forgot : ressources. You see that is one of the thing people never think about. Every lines of dialogues, cutscenes, story changes all of that requires ressources and the developper does not have an infinite amount. Writing padok viks, animating his new cutscenes, getting a new voice actor etc. NONE OF THAT IS FREE, it requires both money, time, and programmers focus. And if the people at BW are working on padok viks, they cannot use those ressources elesewhere, it's one of the thing people don't think about because they only have their customer perspective.

No characters that could die previously can have a role that is a necessity for the main storyline, that's why both ashley and kaidan are relegated to the latter half of ME 3, the team only as ressources for one companion that survive virmire. So therefore they cannot fully flesh out ashley or Kaidan, instead of having a characters that has tons of development, you get two that have half of the time dedicated to them.

It also sometimes takes away the potential they could have gotten. You look at DAI and kieran (morrigan's son). At the end of DAO, morrigan can have a child with a warden that saves his life when he will slay the archdemon and then morrigan will get the god's soul.

A child with the power of an ancient god, there would be quite a story to get with this beginning. The problem since in DAO, you can also decides to not have the child with morrigan and die at the battle fo denerim, in some timeline kieran does not exist. Which means that future DA games have to deal with the fact that the old god soul might have been destroyed there.

Therefore Kieran can never receive full attention from the developper, he can only be a side character from now on because if he does not exist, there still needs to be a main storyline for the next game. HE can never be the center of a huge main quest, the writer can never fully exploit his potential because DAO gave us the choice. Sure at the end of DAO you got massive consequences and emotions for your choice and it gives you immediate replayability, but it made sure that many storyline could never be written because of that (in this case a child that is a vessel for an old god).

In the end, this is what I remember when people criticize Bioware for not giving consequences to their choices. Many of them want all the positive sides without the negative, they want to have the immediate emotions of a companion death but they complain when the companion have less focus in the sequels. They praises ME 2 suicide mission without seeing what a nightmare it would be for the creative team behind ME 3 and the moment a character can die, you gotta deal with the fact that he won't have the importance you want him to have in future instalments.

Now all of that said, I was furious with ME 3 original ending and pushed for BW to give us something better and thought we deserve more than a 3 color ending, and as of now I am satisfied with what we get. I am not saying we can never criticized the choices and consequences in BW games, what I am saying is that lots of people online do not exactly consider everything that they ask to a developper, ironically many do not measure the consequences of their demands.

you do realize that half a year is really small time when talking game development right?

The article was fairly slanted in the pro gaming industry side, though I do try to appreciate it attempting to bring a different perspective in. I find that gaming journalism often suffers from the same issues that cable news and most mainstream media outlets have, and that's deference to authority in order to garner access. People like to be first to the story, and sometimes relying so heavily on game developers for information can often lead to thought bubbles. To an extreme, it can basically lead to some gaming outlets spewing the very same talking points that developers, publishers, or individuals within the industry tout. Trying to put all gamers into a box and saying they're all the same is quite disingenuous.

As for my opinions on the article, I do think that bad practice deserves criticism (within reason). A loss in sales and bad press can flat out titanic a title; maybe even a whole franchise or studio. There are just some marketing and gameplay decisions that have to be checked (lootboxes, false advertising, lack of communication regarding bugs/glitches, etc). I do think social media can lead to echo chambers among certain parts of the gaming community (as with any non-gaming community), and that some of these communities can be very vocal.

If I had to provide a more honest criticism of parts of the gaming community, I'd say I'm more concerned about the influence these certain communities have on a developers artistic freedom. While a dev does have certain audiences they primarily appeal to, that doesn't mean it has to only be one audience. Gaming embodies large swathes of players. Something more recent that I've been seeing is the circling of the bandwagons when it comes to developers who mostly publish single-player games. While I appreciate that the community has afforded these devs with a renewed sense of accomplishment and confidence in making single-player focused titles, I also feel that parts of the gaming (especially the vocal ones) are also putting these developers into a small and heavily restrictive box. Everyone wants to shower these developers with praise for making single-player titles, but I imagine if these same devs decided to make a multiplayer focused game, these same communities would say the developer has moved on to the dark side. Honestly, I don't know why multiplayer gaming has become synonymous as a gaming devil, and that single-player games were somehow on the brink of extinction till CDPR showed up.

Something else I see is the out-and-out cynicism that's been much of what's popular these days on YouTube. There's this new fervor among certain gamers who like to see the villain or hero in every game, and will continue to cling on to the absolute worst aspects of a game; which they may not of even played. The echoing of player sentiments seen on social media cites for clicks and likes has become a big thing now, and some of these same individuals try to pass off their opinions as well researched. Hell, it doesn't even have to be centered around a game that's released. Some games that were soon to be released caught a lot of flak. God of War saw a lot of criticism when it was first revealed. People called it a Last of Us clone, and said the series had strayed so far from its roots, that the franchise was basically done for. Flash forward to today, and people are talking about how its an easy contender for GotY. Same thing goes for games like Call of Duty. If ever there's a trailer put out for it, it immediately gets disliked to all hell by people jumping on the hate train just to feel good about themselves. And of course, you see the exact same thing now with Anthem. That type of bad press can circulate and potentially kill a games potential before it even starts.

I just wish certain parts of the gaming community would be more objective, rather than work up a storm so much that they're basically just throwing feces at the wall to garner attention. Outside of that, I think parts the gaming industry need to get their collective shit together and understand that producing a great product is what sows good will. You do that, and the profits will come.