On Complaints.

The RPS Hivemind's very own King Jim wrote this week about how Actually, It's Okay To Complain in response to Ben Kuchera's statement on ars technica that In gaming, everything is amazing and no-one is happy.

Jim's statement is very well-reasoned, but it doesn't tally with the kind of complaints I see everywhere. The core of his argument, it seems, is that it's important to say how things could be better, because that serves as a motivation for developers to make things better. That would be fine, if people were complaining about how things could be better. Instead, they're complaining about how things are getting worse, which appears to me to be completely disconnected from reality.

Those who know me might know that I have a special place in my hate for the abuse of the term "dumbing down". The other day, I heard someone call Civilization V "dumbed down". Civ V is different to previous titles in the series, in that it makes you engage more directly with actual strategy than with trying to use the rules of the game to your advantage - it's a strategy game with the emphasis on 'strategy', rather than (like previous Civs) a strategy game with the emphasis on 'game'. Is that really dumbed down? And this is a pattern that exists with a lot of "dumbing down" complaints. There is a certain irony to the school of, "I don't get it, therefore it's dumbed down."

This is related to the gaming community's deep-seated mistrust of "streamlining". To understand streamlining, we have to look at evolution vs. intelligent design. No, really, we do. What a lot of opponents of evolutionary theory don't understand is that evolution works with what it has. To them, evolution doesn't make sense because they see evolution as a process of refinement leading to some pinnacle and constantly improving. Since evolution doesn't do that, they say evolution must be wrong. But no-one ever claimed evolution does that. Evolution selects those random mutations that confer a benefit (or at least, don't confer a detriment) to environmental fitness. But those mutations have to be applied to genetic templates that already exist. Evolution can't backtrack: If it could, we might see much more efficient creatures on Earth today than we actually do. What this has to do with games is that game mechanics have evolved. Despite the fact that games are provably and indisputably intelligently designed (well, indisputably designed, anyway), a lot of the elements that make up games today are the 'genetic' legacy of those games' forebears. We end up with a conglomeration of stuff that's been put together almost accidentally. Streamlining is the 'backtracking' that isn't available to biological evolution, but is available to game design, and it allows us to use our advanced knowledge of user experience, interface design, media psychology and all that good stuff that basically amounts to an increased understanding of the medium (which has experienced a boom thanks to this console generation's relatively long life-cycle, so people aren't hurrying to keep up with the tech and can concentrate on other game stuff) to create a more effective game. But, of course, people complain about that because People Fear Change.

Let's talk about Deus Ex: Unreal Revolution.



DX:UR is a mod for Deus Ex that shows what Deus Ex would have been like if it were more like the recent prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Of course, the complainers have jumped on it as a defence of their complaints about DX:HR by... showing that the mechanics of DX:HR would be terrible in the original. Yes, they would. You know why? Because they were designed for a different freaking game. It's like saying that taking your opponents' pieces would be terrible in Monopoly, therefore Chess is shit. It's like saying Blackjack is an awful game because a royal flush is a losing hand.

And then there are the people who complain about a game when the ink isn't yet dry on the press release announcing the game. The game isn't nearly finished, and it won't be released for ages - the design probably isn't even finalised. I'm all for speculative cynicism, but they work on the assumption that it's going to be shite and go from there (often based on the bizarre tin-foil hat assumption that it's not in a publisher's best interests to release a good game). Well, you know what they say about assumptions, but this creates a dilemma. Of course, I want to read about games in which I am interested, but I also want to play the game without the priming effect of that critical mass of complaints being deleterious to my enjoyment of the game. Complainers are, in a very real sense, detrimental to people enjoying games.

Business practices are another common target for complaints, and the situation here is a bit more nuanced. There are some business practices that deserve complaints, such as the implementation of excessively restrictive DRM when the only people that are bothered by it are legitimate customers and not the pirates the measure is ostensibly meant to dissuade. Or the trend of medium-inappropriate marketing (read: trailers) rather than demos that let you find out if the game's any good. Or the deeply entrenched arcane traditions of retailers that mean games can't be released on the same day and date worldwide. But the tone of those complaints, often involving gruesome metaphors of being anally violated by the big bad corporation, and exhorting the Comrades to Fight The Power and Stick It To The Man is, let's face it, just fucking silly.

Offering a product for sale at a price that involves some kind of currency is not a "shady business practice", and it's not hard to see from where the accusation of a sense of entitlement that is often levelled at gamers comes. When I don't think a game is worth the asking price (for whatever reason), my usual course of action is to, you know, refrain from buying it. I don't generally feel the urge to start a revolution. DLC is very cleverly marketed to make you want it, but all the complaints about it are based on the premise that you need it, which is a false premise. Yes, a lot of it is overpriced and not substantial enough, but you know what? Probably 10% of DLC is worthwhile, just like 10% of everything else.

As an aside, related to asking prices, I want to pick up on something Ben Kuchera said in his article: "Every game is too expensive, although we demand ever-increasing levels of interaction, graphical fidelity, and length." More to the point, inflation means that everything else is priced twice as highly as it was 20 years ago, while games are priced the same if not less. We're effectively paying half as much for games as we did 20 years ago, but apparently that's not good enough.

Maybe Jim's more right than I give him credit for. Maybe the complaints with which I have a problem aren't the most numerous, but are simply the ones I notice the most. I'm not claiming to be unbiased and objective, here, and perhaps I'm just ignoring a multitude of more constructive complaints. But I think the most constructive conclusion we can draw from this is that, like everything else, complaining isn't 'good' or 'bad', but good and bad and everything in-between.