The work of Charles Dickens frequently illuminated society’s dark side. In A Tale of Two Cities, he examined the French revolution – on its face a noble rebellion against a dispassionate, entitled ruling class – and portrayed in kind the ugliness of the bloodthirsty revolutionaries who manned the guillotines. Dickens wanted readers to understand the complexity of rebellion, and that even those who act for just causes can be capable of as much injustice as the institutions they protest.
Game developers and players could arguably be viewed as revolutionaries in their own right. The cultural mainstream affords little respect to interactive entertainment, leaving games the bastard stepchild to better-understood media such as film and television. The gaming pastime still carries a whiff of shame, even though gamers and developers alike have fought what feels like a long and thankless war for acknowledgment, for freedom from old misconceptions about excessive violence, social maladaptation or that old ‘waste of time’ chestnut. We’ve been activists in a campaign for appreciation, rallying round games-as-art discussions from the pages of professional publications to the more personal battlements of online forums and blog networks.
Or we reject the ‘art’ discussion entirely, militantly standing up for our right to explode heads and couple with onscreen aliens free from judgement. When we aren’t declaring the noble artistry of gaming, we armour ourselves in the Just For Fun argument and punish the fearful and the alienated, exhausted of any implication that games somehow ‘make us’ violent, or make our kids violent, or that they ought to weigh topics of global crisis with any particular seriousness.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – gamers might have suffered for years feeling like second-class citizens, but now they’ve grown extremely invested in ideas of what they are owed from both sides, highly precise about what they deserve, and vocal when they feel they are not receiving it.
You probably know how A Tale Of Two Cities ends up. Dickens’ revolutionaries, who started out with “that glorious vision of doing good,” eventually became “headlong, mad and dangerous.” OK, OK, the comparison between gamers who may have become glutted on entitlement and the right to be unquestioningly justified and bloody revolutionaries whose spilt wine soon turned to spilt blood might be just a touch extreme, but since when do we turn down a chance to be dramatic?
I remember the first time I said the word ‘microtransactions’ to Blizzard. Activision had just merged with Vivendi, and everyone wondered if the infamous Bobby Kotick – every Dickensian parable needs an aristocratic fat cat, right? – was going to completely ruin World Of Warcraft with opportunistic business models. So when some of the company’s leads invited me in to look at Lich King I asked about that. And here were these veteran designers who’d created one of the most widely loved and successful games ever, and my question had them looking scared.
They were scared because if they spoke one word crosswise, if they didn’t phrase it exactly so and I happened to write it down, and gamers read it, there’d be a bloody howl welling up from the streets if gamers thought that maybe a different (and less-favourably viewed even when practical) business model might not be ruled out for WOW at any point in the future ever. Blizzard had given its players years of faithful service, and yet if it couldn’t promise to keep away even a fringe shadow of this one explicit thing, those players would call for heads to roll.
A well-liked hitmaker like Valve isn’t immune, either. The company’s Portal 2 ARG was lighthearted, drove engagement and benefited sales of indie games – an excellent service for a platform holder to offer its constituency. And people were happy to participate – electively, remember! – until all they tangibly got for their troubles was a few extra hours’ jump on Portal 2’s release.
ARGs are fussy marketing campaigns. They aren’t usually easy to like. But what was interesting about Potatogate was that the very players who were so excited to spend time eagerly poring over clues and details, to spend money on the indie titles involved, actually punished the launch they worked so hard to help advance. People liked the first Portal too much, and had become so excited for Portal 2 that there was no way for them to be slaked. Implausibly, that was a bad thing.
And when one of those self-styled ‘experts’ goes on the evening news to blame games for murder sprees and sex crimes, it’s more than fair for gamers to be affronted. But to respond with concussive waves of profane death threats? Is this an appropriate response on behalf of entertainment products?
It’s fun to participate in a cultural revolution, but crazed entitlement shouldn’t be a requirement. Let’s everyone keep our heads on, shall we?
Leigh Alexander is a widely published writer on the business, design and culture of videogames and social media. She blogs at Sexy Videogameland. Read and follow Leigh's other columns on her topic page.