#oneaday Day 550: I'm so tired of online

I've had to block two different people on two different platforms today, both for the same reason: showing up uninvited and spewing some sort of borderline-abusive quasi-scolding because they happen to disagree with something rather innocuous that I had said. The details don't really matter — though if you must know, they really were innocuous opinions, firstly on the fact that localisation into English is not "censorship" (which it isn't, and if you're already typing an angry comment, I invite you to stop, take a deep breath, and just leave), and secondly, that it was surprising someone with terrible handwriting and an obvious lack of care in what they were writing could actually spell a rather complicated surname correctly. Hardly the stuff of epic meltdowns, I'm sure you'll agree — although the localisation topic does tend to bring some of the absolute worst people on the Internet out of the woodwork.

I have a zero tolerance policy for rudeness these days. If a complete stranger were to show up at my door and start hurling abuse at me, I would slam the door in their face. And as such, if a complete stranger decides to show up at my digital door online and start hurling abuse, I will gladly slam that door in their face, too. The platforms on which I blocked these two particularly odious individuals today — my other site MoeGamer, and my Bluesky account — both have pretty robust self-moderation tools that allow you to put nasty little piggies out of sight, out of mind, permanently.

My favourite moderation tool in this regard is YouTube's "Hide user from channel" function. YouTube does many, many stupid things, but this little option is a work of genius. Effectively acting as a shadowban, using this function on a user not only makes the comment you used it on disappear from everyone else's screens, including yours, it also prevents any future comments from that person from appearing on any of your videos. However — and here's the good bit — the user in question has no indication that this has happened to them, meaning they can quite happily continue spewing their hateful rhetoric "at you", and you will remain completely oblivious, while they inevitably get more and more frustrated. This is just delightful.

But you know what? I'm tired. It sucks that these mechanisms have to be in place for a quiet life online these days. And I'm increasingly fatigued with the very idea of putting myself out there — for what, exactly? — only to get chucklefucks who are incapable of responding to a post without resorting to The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies crapping up the comments sections.

I don't do anything online with the intention of pissing people off, or even being a little bit provocative. I'm honest about things — I'm honest about the person I am, I'm honest about the things I feel and believe, and I'm honest about the things I enjoy. The thing I am most honest about is that I have absolutely zero desire to argue with anyone online, which is why, as a general rule, on platforms such as my YouTube channel and MoeGamer, I make a specific effort to focus on the good and the positive.

Yes, I rant and rave and complain a fair bit here — I will freely admit that! — but this place is for me. It's my place for self-expression, for self-therapy, for processing my own thoughts, feelings and emotions, and it just happens to be publicly accessible. That does not mean I crave sweaty Internet-poisoned dudes in my mentions arguing with everything I say. I am more than enough sweaty Internet-poisoned dude for myself; I certainly don't need any more.

It might be time for another social media break over the holidays. I've already dialled things back a lot from where I was, which is good. But the holidays promise to be a nice time with family, so I'm looking forward to enjoying the peace and quiet. And that peace and quiet will have to be, at least partly, of my own creation.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 451: Random encounters

Popular Internet wisdom has it that you should never read the comments. And, for the most part, this is fairly sound advice. Because if you do read the comments, there is a significantly greater-than-zero percent chance that you will run into someone like "Steven Woolf" here, a thoroughly disagreeable individual who did me the questionable courtesy of leaving a particularly rancid comment on a five year old MoeGamer article earlier today:

I have never encountered this person before. Their email address was unfamiliar to me. The fact they showed up in the comments of an article from five years ago suggests to me that they stumbled across MoeGamer via random Googling. And the fact they took such umbrage at me using a naughty word to discourage "AI people" from feeling in any way welcome on my site suggests to me that they are, themselves, an "AI person" and thus, by extension, a cunt.

Comments like this are always sort of fascinating, because there was evidently some sort of thought process involved — and one that is alien to me. What was Steven Woolf doing reading a five year old article about a character from an obscure Japanese beat 'em up? The nature of his comment suggests that he wasn't there to celebrate his love of Japanese video games, otherwise he might have, you know, mentioned Japanese video games. Instead, he chose to absolutely, spectacularly lose his shit at a disclaimer halfway down my site's sidebar presented in a 12 pixel high font. Why is that? Could it be because he's a cunt? All signs point to "yes" thus far.

What's even better is that because MoeGamer (and likewise this site) has an "approval" process for new commenters, meaning that his furious, impotent raging at my discouraging of AI cunts from using my site as the basis for any of their lake-boiling bullshit will remain completely invisible to the rest of the world for all time, with the only record of it being a snarky post on Bluesky (which he doesn't appear to be on, and which will be deleted at the end of this week anyway) and this post here, which he will probably never see because it's on a different website and he's almost certainly too stupid to track it down for himself despite 90% of the URL being the same.

And even if he does find it, all he'll really encounter is the simple and indisputably correct assessment that he is, in fact, a cunt.

So well done, Steven Woolf. You gave me something to write about today. You have officially become content, and that's not a fate I would wish on anyone, except you, because you are a cunt.

I hope you're having a better day now you got your little tantrum out of the way. If not, I recommend you go and play some video games or something. I hear Denjin Makai is pretty good?

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#oneaday Day 434: The battle to re-enable comments

A while back, I disabled comments for old posts, because I was getting a few unpleasant people trawling through past posts and being kind of a dick. Now that appears to mostly be a thing of the past, I have, on multiple occasions, attempted to re-enable comments on old posts, only to find myself running into a brick wall.

I tried turning off the "automatically close comments on posts older than [x] days" setting in the WordPress dashboard. I tried turning off the same setting in the Bluehost plugin (which, while I'm no longer using Bluehost, was still active on my site to do stuff like caching and auto-updates). I tried batch processing all my old posts in the WordPress Dashboard and checking "Allow Comments" on them. I tried doing posts individually. Nothing seemed to work — posts older than a month were getting their comments closed, even though I had, seemingly, turned off everything that should be doing that.

I spent a bit of time tinkering in the Dashboard earlier today in an attempt to try and fix this once and for all. And the only thing I found that worked was to set the "close comments older than [x] days" figure in WordPress' settings to 999999 days, or just shy of 2,740 years. A smaller figure would have probably worked, but I wanted to use one that I wouldn't have to update in my lifetime. I will note that changing this setting is what worked despite the "close comments older than [x] days" checkbox being unticked. So apparently something, somewhere, had got its knickers in a twist and was still closing comments after 28 days, even though all the relevant settings on the back end had been set firmly to "no, please do not do that".

So there you go. If you want to go back through my old posts and leave comments on them, you can now do that. The only thing I would say about that is to please remember that this blog has been up and running in one form or another (though not always at this URL) for 17 years, and I am not the same person now that I was when I first started it, nor am I the same person I might have been at the time you take offence at something I wrote at some point in the last 17 years. Times change, attitudes change, opinions change. I don't think I have changed all that much in my core beliefs — I've always been left-leaning and sex-positive with little patience for bullying — but my willingness to wade into the mud of the Internet and actually fight is seriously diminished these days. Today, I just want a quiet life, to be perfectly honest.

If you have wanted to leave a comment on something older than the last 28 days and have found yourself unable to do so — sorry! I have been trying to fix the problem and it wasn't until the above last-ditch "I wonder if this works" attempt actually worked that I've been able to sort it out good and proper!

So yeah. Come say hello in the comments if you feel like it. Or not. I'll be here either way.

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#oneaday Day 359: Commenter policy

I've had a few right weirdoes in the comments section of MoeGamer of late, and they are a prime example of why I adopt a fairly strict moderation policy: anyone who hasn't commented before has to have their first comment approved before any of their comments will appear on the site. If I don't approve that initial comment, the words they hammered into their crusty keyboard will not appear on the site.

I think by far the strangest so far was the one who started off talking about nostalgia, but then started banging on about the "globalist agenda" and how modern video games were all basically in service to this. By "globalist agenda", by the way, this person absolutely meant "the Jews", and as such their comment didn't get anywhere even a little bit close to being published on my site. I did mock it a bit on social media, though.

Today I had a guy who got really uppity about me writing about the Game Boy game The Sword of Hope and thinking that it was actually quite worthwhile and interesting. He absolutely could not fathom the idea of someone from well after a creative work had been published not judging it by the standards of its time. He also almost immediately started banging on about "censorship" due to the combination of my anti-spam filter and my aforementioned comments policy, so he did not get let through either.

I have a fairly flawless sense these days of when someone is going to be a pain in the arse in the comments. There's just a certain way that some people come across in text that lets you know they're a dickhead and probably a racist, and thus I have absolutely no hesitation in banishing them to the shadow realm when they happen to stagger into my comments section.

I do the same on YouTube; for all its faults, YouTube has one of the absolute best moderation tools in existence, which is the "Hide User From Channel" option. For the unfamiliar, what this does is effectively "shadowbanning" the commenter from your channel, so their comments don't appear under your videos and you don't get notifications about them… but to their eyes, they're still able to comment as normal. There's a perverse satisfaction in doing this, because you know some of these absolute cretins will be typing out long, obnoxious diatribes about whatever has offended their delicate sensibilities this week, and no-one will ever see them. Again, I have zero hesitation in doing this; if someone bursts into the comments section and the first thing they do is act like a twat, they're going straight in the sin bin.

Life is too short to deal with dickheads on the Internet. Of course, we'd all rather they didn't exist at all, but at least there are plenty of tools with which we can frustrate and repel them. Make good use of them; it's worth the effort.

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1507: Why I Went Back, and The Fear

I was going to write about something else today, but after Mr Russ Pitts kindly linked to a piece I wrote this time last year in an excellent article regarding online abuse and trolling, I felt I should probably elaborate on some things that have happened since then.

Firstly, despite what I said in that piece, it transpires that I did eventually go back to Twitter. Why? Because, to be frank, I was lonely; I have a lot of friends on that social network, and it was difficult to stay in touch with them via other means. It's also a particularly convenient means of reaching out to people for my current profession.

So I went back. However, I did so under a new username and a new email address — and being much more mindful of what I shared in my 140-character bio.

This is in itself kind of silly, really; I have to effectively "silence" an aspect of my personality based on my previous experience, and cannot be fully open about the things I enjoy or love, because it might attract organised bile and vitriol not just towards me, but towards people close to me, too. Thankfully, on the few occasions I have happened to mention ponies recently, things have passed without incident — I suspect the charmers at the "GNAA" have moved on to new victims by now.

Thinking of all this brings up an important consideration that I don't believe a lot of Internet commenters stop to think about before spraying vitriol over an article they disagree with: the fact that the words you read on the Internet are, for the most part, written by an actual person with a brain, a heart, a soul and, you know, feelings. People disagreeing over various things is a fact of life — the world would be a boring place if everyone felt the same way about everything, as The Lego Movie suggested in a somewhat hamfisted way — but it's the way you go about those disagreements that is important to consider, because arguing your case in the wrong way — or wilfully misreading or misunderstanding something someone has said — can have a severe impact on their mental health.

I've been fairly open on this blog about my own self-esteem issues and occasional feelings of "imposter syndrome" — the feeling that one day, you might be "found out" and have everything taken away from you. I consider myself hugely lucky to have the job I have, working alongside people I have respected enormously for many years — since childhood in at least one case. There are days when I feel like I'm even quite good at what I do — but there are also days when I seriously consider throwing in the towel and going to do something "invisible" with the rest of the drones in the daily workforce.

The difference between those two types of day can often be just a single comment. Just one, regardless of how many otherwise positive or supportive comments you might have that day — one single, unpleasant, negative or abusive comment can completely ruin the day of someone like me.

I'm not saying all games journalists are like me — though from some conversation during the establishment of TakeThis.org, which Russ mentioned in his post, mental health issues of various descriptions are alarmingly widespread in our profession — but it's surely just basic human decency to not, in effect, walk up to someone and start hurling abuse at them. And yet it happens. And not just from inconsiderate gamers angry about the score you gave Titanfall, either; sometimes even people who claim to be fighting for worthy causes can be needlessly aggressive, confrontational or even abusive, too. It's a plague across the whole Internet.

This leads to what I call The Fear, which in turn leads to what Russ talks about in his post: the assumption that "do not engage" is the only way to deal with bullying, abuse or even just plain unreasonable comments. There are days when I write things and I'm genuinely afraid to look at the comment section — it's an irrational fear, I know, but it's what this age of anonymous abuse has wrought.

And what a ridiculous situation that is, when you think about it. People who write for a living — many of whom are considerably more talented than I am — are subject to The Fear on a daily basis. You never can tell what it is that's going to attract the next batch of abuse, or death threats, or defamation, or simple spitefulness. It's a horrible feeling.

And yet we still stick around, for the most part. Why? Because even amid all this, we love what we do, and we love engaging with those people who like to have a reasonable discussion about things without necessarily agreeing on everything — those people who, if we're honest, make up the majority of our feedback. Sometimes we even become friends with those people.

But as I say, it only takes one nasty comment to undo all the good those people do for us. Just one.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could live in a world where we could just love what we do without having to worry about The Fear ever again?

One day, perhaps. But there's a long road ahead before we get there.

1337: The Value of Comments (Or the Lack Thereof)

Grand Theft Auto V's reviews came out today — the game itself is out tomorrow.

Unsurprisingly, comments sections the world over erupted into chaos on each individual site's review (although USgamer's has, as ever, remained largely very polite and articulate, which is a trend I sincerely hope continues).

Of particular concern is Gamespot's review, which gave the game 9/10 while still managing to point out the fact that yes, GTA has some issues with women that it really should have probably gotten over by now. My concern isn't with the review itself, which is an interesting, well-argued read; rather, it's with the 3,192 comments that are beneath it at the time of writing — a figure that is literally increasing by the second right now.

What is the value in that comments section? Leaving aside the loathsome content of a significant proportion of those individual comments, what possible value is there in allowing people to comment on a review at such a rate that it becomes literally impossible to follow a single conversation? What possible value is there in 3,216 (yep, it's gone up in just those few words) comments, many of which contain the same ill-informed, bile-spewing opinions? For that matter, even if they didn't contain said bile, what possible value is there in having 3,230 comments beneath a review? Who is going to read all that shit except, possible, judging by Twitter, for people who have a particular taste for masochism?

It's not just Gamespot's review that's a problem, though it, at the time of writing, appears to feature by far the most objectionable people. Destructoid's Jim Sterling has been complaining about commenters once again lambasting him for rating [game x] one score and [game y] another score when they have nothing to do with each other. He notes that he doesn't believe review scores are the problem there, either.

Perhaps they aren't, either; perhaps the problem is the comments section.

The trouble with proposing something drastic like eradicating all comments sections, however, is that they're occasionally valuable — though increasingly we're in a situation where comments sections are only useful and conducive to meaningful discussion on smaller sites such as USgamer, and personal outlets such as this blog. In the case of large-scale sites like IGN and Gamespot, it seems that all comments sections achieve is to give imbeciles a soapbox to stand on and bellow their idiocy from while simultaneously finding like-minded twats to validate their opinions, culminating in the ridiculous sight of people genuinely clamouring for Gamespot to fire the reviewer Carolyn Petit for giving Grand Theft Auto V 9 out of 10 instead of the 10 that they, the people who have not played it yet, think it deserves.

But what can be done? Should IGN and Gamespot just close their comments sections?

Well… Yes, I think they should. They're clearly not adding any value to the conversation. There's no sense in trying to make it a "dialogue" between the site and the readers when the comments come at such a pace and in such a volume that it's impossible for the original writer to engage in discussion with people who actually want to engage in discussion, and in the meantime the braying idiots just get a megaphone with which to bellow their idiotic shit into the void. Shut 'em all off, I say, and leave the discussion to sites with a community small enough to make online interactions actually meaningful; let the big sites become places from which content is just shared and discussed via social media rather than the wretched scum-pits they seem to be becoming today. It'll put the attention back on the actual writers and the things they're saying — and it will probably significantly benefit said writers' mental health, too, because I know I certainly wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of the torrents of abuse some people have been getting today.

3,512 comments.

Can we reboot the Internet?

[EDIT, June 7, 2023: 22,164 comments. Just in case you were curious.]

1325: Focal Point

I'm sure any writer pals reading this can probably relate, judging from some things I've read recently: it is infinitely easier to focus on negative things than it is about positive ones. And those negative things absolutely dominate your thoughts, almost completely obliterating any good work the positive things might have done.

Let's take an example. Recently, I wrote a lengthy article about "otaku games" — that particularly misunderstood aspect of Japanese gaming where people who don't play them constantly judge them as being nothing more than pervy fanservice. To be fair to their opinion, there often is a fair amount of pervy fanservice in them, but it's pretty rare that is the sole or even the most important part of them. Check out the piece here.

On the whole, response to the post has been very positive. I've been very happy to hear from a lot of fans of Japanese gaming who thanked me for giving a reasoned, rational take on the subject — with input from people who are actually involved in bringing these titles to the West — and for treating both the games and their fans with respect. I've had people tell me it's a wonderful article, compliment me on covering something that other sites don't bother with (or take the more common "This is Bad and Wrong, LOL JAPAN" stance on) and generally express a very genuine-feeling sense of appreciation for something I worked hard on.

So what do I find my brain focusing on? The guy who tweeted at me saying "TLDR" (seriously, that is pretty much one of the most disrespectful things you can say to a writer, especially when they've worked hard on something — try giving some constructive criticism or, even better, actually engaging with the points made in the piece), and the commenter who complained about me "not talking about the game" in my Tales of Xillia review and lambasting me for promoting an "incest simulator" in an article about visual novels. (Said "incest simulator" was Kana Little Sister, an incredibly moving work which I've written about at length in a number of places on the Internet; to refer to it as an "incest simulator" in a distinctly Daily Mail/Jack Thompson-esque way shows an astonishing lack of understanding, my keen awareness of which was what inspired me to write the "otaku games" piece in the first place.)

I wish I didn't feel this way, but it made me feel somewhat better to read this piece over on Hookshot, Inc recently. Here's what was, for me, the most pertinent part:

"Reader feedback is, in many ways, wonderful. It pulls writers down from pedestals and/or ivory towers, and it democratises a whole medium. Every voice is heard, and charlatans are uprooted. A culture of reader-fear has, arguably, been fostered – but ultimately people raise their game, and those much-suspected dirty deals are (by my reckoning) far less likely to occur today than they were five years ago.

"The problem is that all this is incredibly unhealthy for writers with… what you might call an ‘amiably complex psychological disposition’. I’m one of these people (it’s hugely common in my field – and indeed any creative arena) and I couldn’t even count how many of my working days have been ruined by an angry person venting steam beneath a piece I’ve written. The black dog starts barking, and your creative mojo runs away.

"Sure, the trolls are generally a minority – but when your mind has been built to concentrate on negativity rather than happy, happy, joy, joy (and you work at home, on your own) then comments threads are a mental plague pit.

"As a writer – what can you do about this? Well, you can start making your review scores more conservative for a start. Oh, and you can definitely avoid rocking boats that contain angry devotees of certain platforms, genres and franchises. Oh, and how about excising all humour for fear of miscomprehension from angry dullards you’ll never meet?

"OMG HANG ON GUYS OUR COLLECTIVE INSECURITY JUST BROKE GAMES WRITING.

"So basically: say what you want to say, and suck it up. There’s no wrong opinions, only a lot of people who think you should be fired for having a right one."

I was simultaneously surprised, delighted and slightly depressed to read that. I wish it didn't have to be that way, and I wish it was possible to train oneself to be more like, say, Jim Sterling — someone whom I greatly admire for his no-nonsense attitude and at least outward appearance of having thick skin. (For all I know, Sterling might finish his day job and cry himself to sleep over the torrents of abuse he receives on a daily basis, and I wouldn't blame him if that were so — but I somehow doubt that's the case anyway.)

Ah well, as Will Porter writes in that excellent Hookshot piece — seriously, go read it if you have a few minutes — the only real thing we, as writers, can do is say what we want to say and suck it up somehow. If we start sanitising our own opinions, thoughts and even writing styles to appease the lowest common denominator in the comments threads, then the world of writing would be a boring one indeed.

1306: Mark Book

My brain occasionally lapses into childhood when I contemplate looking at comment sections, because, as full of cretins as they sometimes are, comment sections are the modern-day equivalent of the red (sorry, green — red's too aggressive) pen scribblings your teachers would scrawl after your assignments at school.

Imagine if the two scenarios were reversed, though. That'd be weird, wouldn't it? Get your maths homework back with "lol fake and gay" written after it; read a New Statesman article and discover the entire comment section is nothing but people writing variations on "You have the beginnings of a good argument here, but your overuse of the word 'problematic' displays a disappointing lack of creativity that ultimately hurts the piece's credibility. See me to discuss."

Actually, I think in the latter case, that'd probably be preferable, to be honest.

I joke, but I do genuinely feel like I'm being "marked" when I see that there are comments on things that I've posted. In some senses, when you put something up for public perusal — particularly on something with a wider audience than this teeny-tiny personal blog — you are being marked, particularly if you've written something contentious.

A lot of writing on the Web is designed to persuade people of something or other, whether that's that the reader should go and buy Gone Home (you probably should) or that the art in Dragon's Crown is going to bring about the downfall of society as we know it (it's probably not), and as such when someone feels compelled to leave a comment, they're going to be going through your arguments, deciding whether or not they agree with them and then leaving their "judgement" on the piece. If someone agrees with you, it's like getting a nice big tick, a "Good." and a gold star; if someone disagrees with you — particularly if they do so aggressively — it's like not only having a lengthy teacher comment that you hope your parents don't catch a glimpse of, but it's like having that comment publicly read out to the rest of the class.

Except there's one key difference between comments and marks — comments are (theoretically, anyway) a dialogue; marks from your teacher are a one-way thing. (At least they were when I was at school; I wouldn't be at all surprised if modern education invited pupils to "respond" to their teacher's comments and/or "appeal" if they didn't feel they'd been treated fairly.)

That's a pretty big difference. Even if someone gives you a "bad grade" through a negative comment or a complete disagreement/dismissal of your opinion, you can attempt to engage with that person and start a conversation. Sometimes interesting discussions can arise; other times, utterly pointless shouting matches can result, leaving you wishing you'd never written the fucking thing in the first place.

Are comments valuable? There's no easy answer to that question. I don't think they're valuable in all circumstances — it's extremely rare to find a helpful YouTube comment, for example, and comments left on Facebook are 95% pointless, regardless of whether they're left on personal posts or adverts — but at other times they can be the source of thought-provoking discussion and even the fostering of friendships. (Comments on this site have certainly fallen into that latter category, which I'm happy about, and over on USgamer we've mostly enjoyed respectful, well-considered discussion and debate from our commenters so far, which is immensely encouraging to see.)

Would the Internet be a better place without comment sections? Quite possibly; but it would also remove a lot of the ability to converse and engage with things that we take for granted today. So, for better or worse, they're clearly here to stay.

Just remember to give your favourite writers a good mark every now and then!

1271: Don't Read the... You Know

Popular gaming site IGN has decided to crack down on shitty comments. Given that a single IGN article attracts thousands of comments — the post describing the proposed changes currently has 2,309 and it was only posted a few hours ago — this is very much a good thing.

I've never really read IGN all that much. I had a couple of pieces posted there a few years ago — here and here (I was not responsible for the dreadful headline on that one, by the way) — but I've never really felt the need to engage with the community. There's a few good writers there — a couple of whom I know personally — but it's not, on the whole, a site I check regularly. And, by extension, it's not a site I tend to look at the comments form.

My God.

Yeah. They need this crackdown. The comments section is a mess. Just on that one post linked above, there's a surprising amount of negativity ranging from people insulting the writers (and their names… yes, his name is Steve Butts; grow the fuck up) to perpetuating stupid fanboy platform wars. The few positive comments that are there are quickly drowned out or reacted to with further abuse, and the "upvote/downvote" system the site has in place courtesy of popular third-party comment solution Disqus is completely abused; "good quality" comments aren't upvoted, but dumb comments from "popular" posters are. Meanwhile, people advocating reason and praising the site's changes are downvoted. Ridiculous.

I have to question how on Earth it got like that in the first place, and I can only assume it was a matter of complacency — of assuming that problems would sort themselves out after a while. But, since a lot of Internet commenters on sites like IGN are seemingly children and teenagers (or at least act that way), they'll try and push the boundaries. If they encounter no resistance, they'll continue to push further. It's exactly the same as in teaching; if you don't set expectations up front, you are only making life difficult for yourself down the road.

I've been fortunate with this blog that I only get a few commenters, all of whom are very welcome, and pretty much all of whom I'd call friends. Meanwhile, over at my new professional home USgamer, we're already building a strong community of intelligent, articulate commenters who have plenty of value to add to the conversation. The quality of our content and the way in which we have written it — to provoke and inspire discussion — has helped set those initial expectations in place, so hopefully things will continue in a positive direction. I have no doubt we'll have to deal with troublemakers before long — we've already had one charming chap call Kat Bailey a "bitch" for not liking Project X Zone as much as he did, and we swiftly and positively dealt with it — but for now, I'm very much liking the rather mature, erudite community we appear to have attracted for the most part so far.

Internet comments are both a blessing and a curse, as the cliché goes. On the one hand, it's great to be able to have discussions around things that writers have posted on the Web; on the other hand, there's little value in them if they always descend into trolling, name-calling and insulting. Fortunately, a lot of sites seem keen to put a stop to the bullshit; it remains to be seen if, in the long term, anything good will happen.

1186: Don't Hate

There's a curious phenomenon in comments sections around the land. And that phenomenon is that it is seemingly the law that someone, somewhere, must hate everything. Actually, that's badly phrased; I don't mean that one person hates everything — though I'm sure there are people who do — but instead I mean that whatever the thing that has been posted, there will always be at least one person who dislikes it for some reason and is inevitably the sort of person who is very vocal about their dislike of it.

This seems to happen particularly frequently in sectors that already have passionate userbases, or in which the userbases are seen as being a "subculture" and/or outside the "norm" somehow. I'm thinking specifically of the video games and anime sectors here — and before you start on me, for all the massive steps forward these media have made in terms of mainstream acceptance over the last 20-30 years they are still indelibly tarred with the "geek" brush to one degree or another.

Today, I was exploring the RPG Maker community who, by all accounts, appear to be a fairly friendly and helpful bunch for the most part, as I've previously mentioned. I was curiously browsing through some of the other users' projects in progress and came across a few interesting-sounding games. One of the users noted that they had submitted their game to Steam Greenlight, the process whereby a game can end up being sold on Valve's popular PC gaming digital download storefront if it gets enough positive votes from the community.

The game, by all accounts, sounded interesting and unconventional, and something I'd be intrigued to play. It was an "artistic" game, for want of a better word, designed as a means for the author to show what it was like living with depression. The author said upfront on the site that it was a mostly-linear, narrative-centric experience with a lot of text, and made no apologies for this fact. (For people like me, the terms "narrative-centric" and "lot of text" are selling points, not things to be ashamed of!)

Sadly, the Greenlight comments section was less than supportive for various reasons, featuring disparaging remarks for everything from it being "another depression game" (oh, sorry, there have been so many of those) to dismissing it simply because it's an RPG Maker game. I've made my feelings on the latter point quite clear in the past, but they bear repeating: if a tool is available to help someone realise their artistic vision, there's no reason why they shouldn't use it, regardless of how many other people are also using it. And besides, some of my favourite games in recent memory have been RPG Maker titles — Corpse Party, To The Moon, Cherry Tree High Comedy Club… all of them were made in earlier versions of RPG Maker that were considerably less sophisticated than the excellent toolset that is VX Ace.

But I digress. The point is that the comments section was filled with hate for the sake of hate rather than actually constructive feedback. The fact that the game in question (Actual Sunlight, I believe it was called) was "another depression game" and an RPG Maker project had nothing to do with its quality, or its "value" to the Steam community as a whole, and yet these things were used as reasons to reject it, without even bothering to check it out.

In the anime sector, it seems that it's fashionable to hate on whatever the biggest name show is at the time. Most recently, this has been seen with Sword Art Online, which I found to be a rollicking good time with an astonishingly spectacular soundtrack, some memorable characters and an interesting, intriguing and pleasingly mature (for the most part, anyway) storyline. It was a good show, in short; while it perhaps wasn't the most intelligent anime you'll ever see, it was certainly far more than a dumb, formulaic show.

Perhaps not something everyone would want to watch, no, but certainly far better than the overly-negative comments that would appear on J-List's Facebook page any time site owner Peter Payne posted a piece of artwork relating to SAO. (Granted, J-List's Facebook page is a place where any time a picture of a vaguely attractive anime girl is posted, one specific user will always be along within three comments of the start of the thread to helpfully inform everyone that "[he] would fuck her", so it's perhaps not the best place to go for objective criticism, but still; you'd expect a community of Japanophiles such as the followers of J-List's page to be a bit more enthusiastic about the things they supposedly like!)

I honestly don't get why this happens, and it seems to happen a lot. Why waste your time on hate when there is so much stuff out there to get you excited? Wouldn't you rather feel happy and intrigued by something than angry or upset?