With recent big game releases, it’s become obvious that a game is either a resounding success, or complete shit. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground.
Kingdom Come Deliverance II is a ambitious masterpiece, and Avowed is lazy slop. 93% of Steam users recommend KCD2, vs 77% for Avowed.
And maybe this has been an issue for a long time, fed by the need to get viewer numbers on articles and videos, leading to more polarized opinions that give people a reason to pick a side, even if they’re never going to play the game.
But as regular people, gamers, Lemmy posters, why are we doing the same? How is it serving us? Are we all influencers in waiting, hoping to up our updoot count and build a following of… dozens?
More than 2/3rds of players of Dragon Age Veilguard recommend the game on Steam. And yet reading the comments here and other places, you’d think that 90% of people who tried the game found it to be, not just bad, but absolute trash, with a small number of people chiming in that they actually enjoyed it.
And game studios are reacting much the same way, and are quick to start layoffs, or shut down all together.
But hey, we don’t owe those corporations anything. But, as a community, do we owe it to each other to foster more honest correspondence?
I don’t think this is a gaming problem.
It is a discourse problem.
People engage in absolutes. They either love a thing or hate a thing. There’s no nuance.
And it must be made to cater for them, there’s no expectation that it will contain choices they don’t approve of.
And this stance, this modern relationship with the world permeates everything, especially forms of media.
You see it in films and books… Fans and stans and folk trying to take it down. There is no nuance or middle ground.
People don’t accept that, perhaps, something isn’t just “not for them”. That’s why you get grown men complaining about the direction of children’s shows they used to watch.
And this is compounded with social media where polarisation, blunt takes and contradiction are the primary drivers of engagement.
Audience error.
Don’t forget the vocal minority problem. The subset of people who comment on things is much smaller than the set of people who consume them. And while the threshold of effort for making comment is low, it isn’t zero, so people who hold more extreme views are going to be more prevalent in the selection because the people with moderate views aren’t going to have the motivation to spend 20 minutes explaining the nuanced position they have, while the ‘love’ and ‘hate’ camps will gladly spend 10 seconds on posting their simplistic view.
Add on the way modern systems work, focusing on likes, upvotes, etc. and you get short form responses getting greater engagement purely because they don’t take as long to read. It’s always easier to get traction with a short, maybe amusing, rehash of a common opinion than with a long dissertation on niche, complex views.
That cycles back in at the top to create a visibility bias so the people making the next round of commentary/content see the wave of love/hate and try to ride it. The result is a feedback loop with a terrible signal to noise ratio.
It’s absolutely not just a gaming problem. Movie reviews are getting more and more bandwagon-y. Only a few reviewers post in the first day or two, and everyone else says “okay, they hated it, now I have to hate it too or I’m going to lose credibility”. I think it’s the inevitable outcome of having less famous reviewers, a NYT columnist can post what they feel, but a small blog can fall into obscurity if they have one contrarian review.
The only part that’s unique to gaming is that gamers are the most toxic community in the internet.
I wish this wasn’t as true as it is.