Us vs. Them

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I have been blogging about entitlement a few times before. Gamers feeling like they are entitled to content, feeling like they have the right to behave a certain way. We certainly saw a lot of that attitude in the last few weeks after Facebook announced it had bought up Oculus.

The outcry from gamers (many of whom never supported the original Oculus Kickstarter in the first place) was out of any proportion and even involved death threats to one of the Oculus founders. This is where we are at right now, in the 21st century, with widespread internet access and no ramifications for behavior at all.

People can hide behind their anonymity (take my own case, this blog as an example), and write/say what they want, with little to no consequences. People can make death threats and harass others via services like Twitter and won’t even get their accounts closed down, let alone face criminal charges. Prosecution is extremely rare and from what i gather it’s mostly terrorism which seems to be taken seriously. I guess this might change if a game developer  or their family actually will come to harm.

But it should not have to come to that. Why should people like Luckey and others be exposed to this hatred in the first place? What kind of action warrants such hatred, directed not only at the developer alone, but also their family, friends and even pets.

What is it that makes gamers so fanatical over an entertainment product? what is it that makes them blow up so massively that they threaten someone they have never met before, someone who works hard to produce more entertainment, with rape and murder? I honestly believe that it is this sense of entitlement which has been growing among all human beings over the last 20 to 30 years. I would argue that my parents never really felt entitled to anything. They worked hard for everything they got and i would guess most people born in the 70s and early 80s would say the same about their parents.

I was born in the 70s. By the 90s i already felt entitled, at least to some things. I felt entitled enough to consume some entertainment for free, copying video tapes (a friend of mine had all Star Trek episodes on original tapes and i copied them). By the end of the 90s it was Napster and free music download. Throughout, on my C64 and later on PCs i was playing pirated games, expecting games to be free, feeling entitled.

Now think about kids being born in the late 90s and early 2000s – bombarded with entertainment and marketing. Is it any wonder the current generation of gamers in the mid to late teens, and even early 20s, feels a personal slight when a developer does something they don’t agree with? Change the sniper rifle slightly and the gamer crowd goes nuts.

I honestly have no idea on how to fix it. Perhaps we can’t fix it. Perhaps it’s a runaway train. Consumers presented with too much choice, developers constantly trying to make everyone happy, in order to get the sales needed, instead of delivering games they want to deliver. I am not sure we can change this internet experience without consequences. Thanks to sites like Imgur, twitter, facebook and similar, it is easier than ever to spread a rumor, with no need to back it up with facts. Facts no longer matter, telling “your side” of the story no longer matters. What matters is information, “news”, regardless if they are true or not, spreading like a wildfire, generating hits, links and thus revenue. It’s much better to get 10.000 hits on a rant that  does not contain a single shred of evidence, than 10 views on a properly researched article.

So what can we developers do? Well first of all i think we developers can treat each other with respect and tolerance. Because that is actually rarely the case it seems. A bit of friendly banter and competition is natural and actually good, it keeps us on our toes and can spurn us on. But over the last few years i think this banter and competition has slipped down right along with the behavior of our gamers.

Gamesindustry.biz was (and to a degree still is) a good source of industry news, interviews and opinion pieces. But ever since the site opened up a comment section for each article, i feel the site has degraded. There are some guidelines in place and open hostility is not tolerated, but what the comment section shows is very much an ego centric attitude and open hostility to all that is “other”. There is very little tolerance for views which are different, for developers who happen to follow a different path.

Nothing illustrates this better than an article on F2P i think.  The very first comment reads:

“because you cannot have the same fun for 50 dollar in a f2p game. the same amount of fun (=same kind of round game experience) usually costs 500-5000 dollar in f2p games and these games have a less good quality in compare to AAA games. “

Grammatical and spelling errors aside, it is the absoluteness of the comment that strikes me. “cannot have”, “500-5000 dollar in f2p”, “have less good quality” – absolute statements, not really allowing for exceptions, let alone a different view. The person behind this comment lives in the extremes. That person does not consider the literally hundreds of AAA games that turn out to be rubbish, but where the player has no refund available (and there was no demo). It does not consider the hundreds of F2P titles where players can get hundreds of hours of fun in return for not a single cent spent.

In short: narrow minded. A lot of developers these days seem to be so absorbed by what they do and what they believe in, that they simply do not care about what other people think. They don’t even consider that another view might be possible, that something can be seen from different angles.

Not everyone is like that of course, and gamesindustry.biz is not all bad (also i am just using it as an example, the likes of gamasutra etc. are exactly the same). There are some moderate voices out there, preaching and practicing tolerance, understanding that game development, like the market it tries to reach, must be diverse and that there is room to for pretty much every game we can think of.

So you don’t like F2P? That’s totally fine! Nobody forces you to like the concept or even play a single F2P game! F2P games will not kill off AAA games development. All sorts of games, developed in all sorts of ways, for all sorts of platforms and with all sorts of monetization models, can quite happily co-exist.

As an industry we are reaching a wider market than ever before. In 2006 people were laughing at F2P. Today F2P has brought people into the gamer fold that would never in their life would have bought a console, let alone a boxed AAA game. As with everything else in life: how can diversity be a bad thing? How can more choice, more options, more diverse content, be a bad thing?

So what’s the moral of this post? I don’t know. I really don’t. Personally i am just fed up with this Us vs. Them attitude between a lot of developers, in particular developers who create along the lines of more modern monetization and design ideas, compared to more traditional developers. I am fed up with developers not respecting each other’s opinion and work. I am fed up with people feeling like their opinion matters above all others. And i am fed up with gamers thinking they own developers or have the right to threaten and harass them, just because they spent some money on an entertainment product.

Perhaps if developers start working together, respect each other and support each other, we can present a unified industry and ensure those we produce games for can’t act the way they do now.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.