Why Quality is Essential to the Survival of the Games Industry

Some game developers have been making dramatic shifts in some disturbing directions lately. Instead of pushing out great games that make you feel they are totally worth the money and time to be spent on them, they seem to push games out the door far too soon before they can truly be completed. In other words, it seems like a push toward quantity over quality.

This is a mistake, not only from an artistic perspective, but from a marketing perspective as well. One of the reasons many of these game companies become as successful as they do is because they have made great games. To suddenly turn away from that direction and start churning out half-assed games as quickly as possible with as much for-pay downloadable content as you can get away with not only makes your games weaker, it also generates negative feedback from players. In an age when consumers can communicate rapidly among large groups and spread ideas at lightning speed, negative feedback has become an Achilles' heel in a way not possible before. When someone posts an extremely angry critique of something in a forum, for instance, others will read that and it will strike them far more powerfully than if they had simply played the game themselves. It creates a sort of "emotional magnifying glass", where every idea and opinion becomes amplified by a magnitude relative to the amount of emotion behind the initial comment.

The result of this, of course, is that negative player response becomes extremely negative player response, and when that gets to a certain point, it becomes extremely bad press. Obviously, I'm thinking about BioWare as I write this. As it is, I have stood as a defender of BioWare for years. I have loved their games, and I'm not just using the word as hyperbole. I have worn their merchandise. However, I cannot deny that their games, in recent years, have been declining. I've still loved them, but there have been some details that seemed rushed. And then we have this whole fiasco over the ending of Mass Effect 3... This has been, I believe, the influence EA Games has had over them since they bought the company. Make more games faster, make more money, which has seemed for a long time to be EA's entire business model. But I think it fails to accept some truths that will be a major chink in its armor.

First, EA is not the only gaming conglomerate out there. Activision has been around the block, and suffered its own losses. Activision ultimately had to make some sacrifices to keep their business going. One of the biggest keys to their readjustment came when they merged with Blizzard Entertainment, the developers behind the wildly successful WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo franchises. What makes this merger different, however, is that Activision truly needed Blizzard more than Blizzard needed Activision. As Blizzard makes their own games, and were doing quite successfully for many years, they have maintained a significant amount of independence, and have been free to take as much time as they need to develop a game that meets the quality standards they have set for themselves. The result is that, in spite of the increase in their budget they have gained by being part of a larger company, they have managed to produce games of consistently high quality (your mileage may vary, of course, but the general reception of their games has remained steady).

The obvious key here is that Activision truly NEEDS Blizzard. Activision's falling on hard times meant they needed to restructure, and the result was that they found a willing partner that was already doing quite well on their own but felt they could still benefit from being part of a larger company. EA, on the other hand, brings nothing to the table. Instead, EA manages to avoid developing games at all, while at the same time making enormous sums of money off their subsidiaries. Capitalism is not evil, but there is something to be said for what works and what doesn't work in a capitalist society. For years, EA has gotten away with this business model. Unfortunately for EA, however, you can now begin to see some rather nasty cracks in it. The recent blowback against the ending to Mass Effect 3 is just the largest example of these cracks.

I cannot say for sure that the reason the ending came off so rushed and inadequate was a result of a deadline imposed by EA, but it is my suspicion that this is the case. And it really is just the largest scandal to hit the internet. It can't even be considered the "latest" because even MORE criticism is coming over one of BioWare's other large IP's, Dragon Age, as new information comes to light about the development of Dragon Age III. It's beginning to look like a veritable shitstorm of bad news for BioWare alone, which is just one of EA's subsidiaries.

I have been bothered by EA's practices for years, even going so far as to consider boycotting them, but the fact remains that many of the companies they own still produce games I truly want to play, in spite of their faults. But as the years roll on, I find myself worn thinner and thinner trying to defend my interest in these games. It's getting to a point where even I have to admit that I'm losing trust in BioWare, in particular, which has been a game developer who has consistently held my loyalty.

It is my hope now that EA might soon learn its lesson and back off before it is too late; to allow their subsidiary developers to take the time they need to develop quality products, because EA is, at this point, the video game industry's equivalent of Wall Street. They have grown so big that, if they fail now, a huge portion of the industry will crumble with them the same way banks began to fail after Lehmann Brothers fell apart. I can't ask that people boycott EA, because I don't even believe I could hold myself to that promise, but if you can, try to avoid letting them get away with their "quantity over quality" business practices. It's quickly becoming far more destructive than I think anyone even truly realizes.

How Mass Effect and Jennifer Hale Changed My Life

I intended this blog to be a general place for me to put my thoughts on gaming in general, but so far it seems like all I've talked about is Mass Effect. This is not entirely coincidence, as it's been a big topic in the gaming world this past week, but it's also a big deal for me personally. Mass Effect is more than just a series of games to me. It's more than the universe those games are set in. It's so much bigger, in my mind, than I think most people could even truly believe without having understanding of where I'm coming from.

Hang on, folks. Things are about to get VERY heavy here.

In the Fall of 2009 and Winter of 2010, I was going through an extremely rough period in my life. I am transsexual, and in that period of time I was in the early stages of transitioning from living as a man to living openly as a woman. At the same time, my parents were going through a divorce. As I suffer from a rather severe case of social anxiety disorder, I was not exactly able to work, so I lived at home with my mother. As if to cap this all off with a cherry made of pure black comedy, I was also coming to grips with the fact that my mother was very abusive my entire life.

Wow. After reading over that last bit, I'm actually beginning to realize exactly the scope of how crappy my life was at that point. These aren't things you think about at the time. It's just life, so you kind of forget how good or bad things might be in relative terms.

It was during this period that I found myself extremely bored on a sunny November day (I live in Southern California, so sun is pretty much a constant year round. Go fig). I was eager to play a game that I had wanted for several years. That game was, of course, Dragon Age: Origins. However, DA:O was not to be released until some weeks later, so I found myself in a Best Buy looking for something cheap to kill time. That was when I had an encounter that, thinking back on it, seems silly to imagine as anything more than a ridiculous inevitability.

Some necessary background: I have been a gamer all my life, and I suspect I shall be a gamer until the day I die. In particular, I have been a BioWare fan since I first played Baldur's Gate back in the late 1990's. I'm also a big fan of the fantasy genre, as well as Dungeons & Dragons, which was what ultimately led me to Baldur's Gate in the first place, so it was only natural that I would be highly anticipating DA:O, which was being hailed as a "spiritual successor" to Baldur's Gate. So it was not exactly like I had no reason to be interested in Mass Effect, but I had never thought myself to be as big a fan of sci-fi as of fantasy.

Back to that November day in Best Buy: I saw Mass Effect on the shelf, and being that I was already a fan of BioWare and was in the mood to play a BioWare game, I found myself purchasing Mass Effect for $20. I had no idea at the time that it would be the best $20 I had ever spent.

When I booted up the game on my PC for the first time, I was surprised. For the first time I had ever seen, not only was I allowed to pick the dialogue of my character, but that dialogue was fully voiced. But Commander Shepard's voice was not what I had come to expect from women in video games; her voice was husky, deep, and disciplined in a way a person would expect from a military officer, but also carried the timber that is typically associated with speech patterns in women (forgive me if this goes beyond your understanding, as, being transsexual, I actually had to train my voice, so picked up a level of understanding and analysis of speech patterns between genders that most people just take for granted, and sometimes I don't realize how much more I might know). This was wonderful, in my mind, as I've never considered myself to be the most "feminine" person in the world, in spite of identifying as female while living as male.

The game offered two forms of "morality" that you could play Shepard to align with, Paragon and Renegade. I told myself at the time that it made more sense to try to play primarily Paragon on my first run through the game because it made the most sense to start with. This was a complete lie. The truth was that was what I needed at the time: a paragon; a female role-model who was strong and brave and didn't give in to the temptation to be cruel or rude. A true heroine, as it were.

As I continued to play through Shepard's adventure, I was enthralled. Not only was the story amazingly well-written and the characters likable, but I found Samantha (as I had named her) Shepard to be an amazing character in her own right, a dimension I was left to imagine entirely on my own in previous BioWare games. It became apparent that my own imagination was not, in fact, as thorough as I had previously believed, since in games where my character never spoke, I never became so attached to that character.

Jennifer Hale, the woman who performs the voice of FemShep (as the fan community has lovingly dubbed the female version of Commander Shepard) was not new to me. I had heard her voice before in several games, including as Bastila Shan in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a previous BioWare game. But it was her performance as Commander Shepard that literally inspired me. She could look death in the eye and just say "No." It was exactly the thing I needed to experience - to see as well as hear - at a time in my life when I had no one else to believe in. When my mother came to me and decided she would shame me for not dropping to my knees and praising her for no reason, I asked myself, "What would Shepard do?" And the answer was always to hold onto my own self-respect and stand up; to do what was right, regardless of what was safe.

I know Shepard isn't real. I know that most people don't think of Shepard in the same way I do. For some, Shepard is a man, or a jerk, or a racist. A soldier, an adept, an engineer. But none of that matters to me because, to me, Shepard will always be the woman who stood up and delivered a great, big verbal middle finger to the Reapers, an enemy so impossible and powerful that anyone would have been afraid. Shepard does not exist, but the Reapers do; everyone has seen them. The Reapers are those things we fear. For me, it was my mother, and I did what Shepard would do: I stood up and held onto the courage to speak for myself rather than let my abusive mother define me.

So, yes, my first three posts in this blog may make me out to seem like a one-trick pony, but there's good reason for why so much thought has been devoted to Mass Effect lately. To me, Shepard is an ideal. A strength that comes from courage and not physical ability. I am a stronger person now because of these games, their developers, and Jennifer Hale, whose voice personified the heroine I needed.

I am Commander Shepard, and these are my favorite games in the galaxy.