Can Gamers Make A Difference?

I am becoming increasingly frustrated with developers lately.  I recently saw a video of Paul Barnett, Senior Creative Director for EA BioWare's Mythic division, in which he basically states that, unless you are a game designer, you don't have a right to complain about games.  To be honest, I only managed to watch the first five minutes or so of the roughly one-hour long video, but I had heard enough.  He continues to deride his audience as being idiots, and like the utter morons he describes them to be the audience actually seems to LIKE it.

This is one problem with gamers today: for all of the amazing things we can do, and even have done, gamers frequently turn off their brains when the time comes for critical thought.  When it comes time to think if things can be better, gamers frequently just respond with "it could be worse."  We tend to be working stiffs instead of academics when it comes to games.  It's always about what button to push at the right time and never a question of why push that button to begin with.  But why is that?

Most gamers, like myself, have no drive to create games.  We don't enjoy the process.  I, for one, would rather live in a world without video games than live my life typing out C-script.  We can be incredibly passionate about the games we play, but incredibly passive when it comes to assessing whether or not we're getting what we pay for.  I, for example, have taken a lot of crap from game companies that annoyed me, even bothered me, but still kept on enjoying the games they made because, well, if they didn't make them, they wouldn't exist to enjoy at all.  However, even I have my limits.

As long as I can manage to enjoy a game, I will usually have no problem with paying money for it.  That is, after all, the heart of the concept of capitalism: if something is desirable, then people will pay money for it.  But what happens when the game developer/publisher crosses "the line", that event horizon of pleasure at which the product stops being fun and starts being a chore?  Well, you get things like what is going on between BioWare and the fans of Mass Effect.

To explain, the main reason Mass Effect's fans have been so riled up over the extremely disappointing ending of Mass Effect 3 is a number of reasons, perhaps least of all being the actual "ending" itself, though I have honestly become reluctant to call it even that.  Another big reason fans have been so upset is because of things that were said before the game was released.  The game's director, Casey Hudson, made statements, even within WEEKS of the release date, about the ending that turned out to be objectively untrue, and while statements made by a developer generally cannot be considered "false advertising", some of the statements made on the game's promotional website can.  To cap this all off, the criticisms of the ending were met with some of the worst public relations response in recent memory, much of which amounted to implying to the fans they were just too stupid to understand the ending.  This is where I really draw the line.

It is one thing to claim "artistic integrity" for something you have created.  It is a whole different scenario to throw it all back into your customers' faces as an insult.  While I personally hold the view that games can be art, I am also of the opinion that business remains business.  I have paid hundreds of dollars to BioWare and EA for the Mass Effect series alone.  For someone  like myself, that is a lot of money.  Regardless of their reasons for releasing the game in the state of apparent incompleteness that it has, I am not fond of being treated like an idiot, and I have discovered I am not alone.

Lots of fans got together and found that not only were they not the only people who felt let down, but that, in fact, they were the majority.  A large majority.  That's an enormous amount of upset customers who were led to believe they were buying something very different from what they got.  And for the first time that I've ever seen, they began to organize.

When I was first introduced to holdtheline.com, I was impressed.  The website has an incredible, professional look; it functions very well; and the people I spoke with on their forums were delightfully kind, thoughtful and outspoken individuals one would not normally expect from the stereotypes of gamers we see in the media.  What's more, many of them not only were upset about the outcome with Mass Effect 3 but also shared many of my views on how the industry has been shredding us, the consumers that are its lifeblood, for every red cent it can squeeze out of us.  And, before I knew it, I found myself swept into joining the team working on the newsletter.

I am extremely optimistic about this movement.  For now, it is extremely focused on Mass Effect 3, and to some extent on BioWare, but many among us have expressed interest in broadening out and becoming a group more focused on consumer advocacy for video games.  HTL may well be a force for crafting the future for video games, and I think that, if it can, it would be a much brighter future.  So, for now, I will hold the line, and I hope that perhaps some of you who might read this will too.