I’m experiencing something of a very minor personal mental health crisis so far this year because it’s come to my attention that everything I like really sucks.
It came into extra sharp focus this past week as I have been playing Avowed, the new RPG from semi-renowned game studio Obsidian. The game’s been met with generally positive reviews (81 on OpenCritic, and 81 on Metacritic, and 75-82 on Steam) that highlight the game’s exciting combat, gorgeous world design, inventive world design that encourages exploration, the interesting story, and high quality voice acting, while also noting its shortcomings in some areas when compared to certain classic RPG games.
I’m about 30 hours into Avowed, and I can agree with that consensus, though I do not think the areas where it ‘falls short’ are at all important, so I’d rate the game a little bit higher than the critic average. It’s a solid… 88 out of 100? Not much of a difference. Regardless, the critical consensus and my experience of game so far jive completely. Avowed is a good game!
However, there’s a very vocal contingent of gamers online that seems to believe Avowed is a very terrible game. I have seen people say that it is “absolute dogshit”, and there are numerous videos on YouTube dedicated to tearing the game apart for every perceived flaw, with no attention paid to any ways that the game may be otherwise good. One video I watched featured a narrator shouting almost the entire time, giving the impression that he was completely enraged by Avowed–very reminiscent of Alex Jones.
In online communities where gamers congregate, it seems as though this opinion is held by the majority. It’s not possible to mention that you are enjoying Avowed and not have someone appear to tell you that the game is actually really bad. It is pervasive and unavoidable, and Avowed joins a list of other games that have been on the receiving end of treatment like this from the greater gaming community in the past couple years. If you go to any site that allows user reviews, you will see this pattern repeated: there are a lot of positive reviews from people who are enjoying the game; and an awful lot of negative reviews from people whose experience of the game is so much the opposite that it doesn’t quite make sense.
And that’s where I start to feel my mind fracturing a little bit into pieces. I have played and am playing this game, so I know that it’s fun. There’s also a critical consensus that the game is fun. But then there are user reviews that say, without getting bogged down into too many details, that the exact systems and gameplay that other people enjoy, are actually total and complete garbage. How do you get these two perspectives to line up? Is the combat “fun and dynamic the whole game”, or is it “boring, stale, and one note from the very start”? How can both of these things possibly be true at the same time?
They can’t be, and they’re not. And it’s because one side isn’t gaming in good faith. They are not interested in enjoying a video game for what it is, because their goal is not to promote video games they like and further the craft. Their goal is to disparage a game that they believe has rejected them in some way, and they’ve found a way to weaponize the language of game critique to attack games while trying (and usually failing) to mask what they’re really mad about.
For example, numerous of these very negative takes end up mentioning that they’re upset that the characters are “ugly”, and some of the videos outright state that they’re upset that the female characters do not have ample cleavage and aren’t sexualized enough. They see modestly dressed female characters and they believe that there is a “woke agenda” that is motivating game studios to remove sexualized female characters from video games, which goes back to the Gamergate 1.0 days. But since then, a lot of gamers have learned that you just get called a “gooner” if you seem overly fixated on wanting female characters to be sexy, so they mask it by saying that the “character design” is bad.
You’ll also come across reviews complaining explicitly about the game “forcing an agenda”, which is a reference to the fact that there are “woke” topics in the game, like having a gay character, or a side quest that allows you to fight against a government that has restricted access to birth control and abortion. Never mind that many games throughout history have had gay characters or featured storylines that would strike contemporary audiences as ‘woke.’ Fantasy settings have long been used to explore concepts like sexism and bigotry.
The fact that Avowed, and other games, address these sorts of topics in their stories is received as an “agenda” being pushed on these gamers in yet another way. Not only has the “woke agenda” taken away the always-nearly-nude female fantasy characters from them, it’s also encouraging them to think and possibly care about homosexual, transgendered, and other minority groups when they’d rather live in a world where those kinds of people do not exist. If the negative review doesn’t outright say this explicitly, they mask it by saying that the “writing is bad” or the “dialogue is cringe”.
Avowed is a good game, but there is a culture war going on in gaming right now that closely mirrors what is going on in politics around the world, and it’s all being driven by social media algorithms that purposefully feed people inflammatory content to drive engagement. There are people out there who are paying their bills by building out this sort of misinformation campaign and creating a culture of outrage and vindictiveness around video games. And, sadly, there is a very large audience out there that is susceptible to this kind of content and it has taken a hold over them. The result is a segment of gamers whose entire identity revolves around impassioned hatred of very specific games.
…and holy fuck, it is depressing.
It doesn’t seem like it’s very difficult for me to find or otherwise be exposed to content in which I learn that someone has a very strong dislike of something I personally quite enjoy. In fact, it’s starting to feel like I am immersed in a sea of people who really do not like the things I like, and that no place on the internet is safe from some jerk-wad popping their head up to tell me, “Hey, that thing you like, it fucking sucks and you are a nu-male soyboy beta cuck for liking it!”
It’s not fun. It’s not exciting. It’s actually really disappointing. This behavior makes it difficult to experience a game in a vacuum, because the negative takes immediately put me on the back foot, and instead of being able to view the thing I enjoy solely through the lens of my own personal enjoyment, I begin to think of ways to defend the thing against the nonsensical and usually totally baseless attacks against it.
In some cases, this feels impossible and puts a person into a position that feels strange. How am I supposed to defend a video game from someone who is upset that the female characters aren’t sexy enough? If I was telling someone about a video game I like, I would probably not even mention how attractive I find the characters, but now that there are people out there complaining about it, and I want to defend the game, so I feel like I have to speak up and go, Hey, actually, the characters in the game are pretty attractive! which then raises the question, “Why do you care if the characters are attractive, you 40-year-old creep?”
I don’t! I’m not some fucking loser who is obsessed with how attractive video game characters are! I swear! I wouldn’t even mention it if it wasn’t for that fucking guy over there!
It’s ridiculous that the dialogue around video games has come to this, that the people who love and enjoy video games end up feeling like we have to defend games against outlandish accusations and conspiracy theories. We are put in a position where we feel the need to defend an RPG that has “pick your pronoun” options, a thing which should not require any defense at all, because no one in their right mind would be upset about it, as it is entirely inconsequential to anyone who does not feel any concern about their own pronouns.
You end up feeling like the only sane and logical course of action is to ignore these people, to let them enjoy their negative echo chamber, because fighting against them is too exhausting, too confusing, or too dangerous (depending on how outraged the mob becomes).
But if you are a person who cares, and you feel badly for video game developers who are getting laid off because these hate campaigns can be quite successful at poisoning the gaming community against an otherwise good game, you want to speak up and fight back. There’s also the aforementioned problem that, if you are a fan of games, you likely want to interact with other fans of games (because it is always more fun to enjoy a game as a group), but online spaces for gamers are being taken over by this kind of aggrieved antagonist and every conversation ends up being poisoned by all these sorts of tactics. You can’t escape it, there is no place on the internet dedicated solely to the enjoyment of a thing anymore; subreddits for specific games usually end up being a place where people complain about it more than they celebrate it.
So what can you do, really? If you fight back, you’re essentially just spinning your wheels. You’ll never get through to these gamers whose minds have been poisoned by negative content. You won’t convince a YouTuber whose livelihood depends on creating these hate-driven videos. And you’ll only be painting a target on your back for some internet loser looking to dox you. And if you do nothing, you risk sitting idly by while historic game studios are slowly dismantled by manufactured controversy.
It’s unfortunate, but the anti-woke, anti-liberal, anti-kindness contingent of the internet has amassed a large amount of power, thanks to social media algorithms that promote their rhetoric to those most susceptible to it, leaving people on the other side feeling pretty powerless to fight back against it.
For two solid decades, the internet was a safe haven for weirdos and outcasts to congregate and enjoy things together. Now, it’s an algorithm-driven hellhole—a bar full of angry, bitter people desperate to pick a fight. Worse yet, the bartender is paying them to do it because the fights keep people coming back.
Why would anyone go to that bar?
Why do I?