Tag: cynicism

#oneaday Day 969: Hate Speech

The Wii U is too much money for last-gen technology. The iPhone 5 doesn’t offer anything new. Kamiya-san should just die if he doesn’t bring Bayonetta 2 to Xbox 360 and PS3. Terraria coming to consoles is a slap in the face for PC owners.

These are all genuine opinions I have heard voiced in the last few days by people of varying degrees of intelligence and coherence. Every time I hear something along these lines, it just makes me a bit sad. In general, despite regularly ranting and raving about all and sundry on these very pages, I try to remain as positive a person as I can when it comes to technology, games and the like. I find new things interesting and exciting rather than something to be cynically derided; I also take the firm belief that if something doesn’t appeal to you, that’s fine, but there might be other people for whom it does hold an appeal and you have no right whatsoever to piss on their bonfire.

There are obvious exceptions to the rule above — if something is a shitty experience for everyone, then yes, it should be derided. But none of the things I mentioned above are shitty experiences, and certainly don’t deserve the negative responses they have received from some quarters. In some cases we don’t even know enough about the experience in order to declare it shitty or not.

The Wii U in particular is an interesting case. The console isn’t even out yet and people are already quick to predict its failure for various reasons; quick to criticise features that may change, or that no-one has seen as yet. It’s almost as if people want it to fail after the astronomical success that the Wii enjoyed early in its lifespan. Bewildering.

The iPhone 5 has a similar problem. Nothing Apple could have announced would have made everyone happy. And sure, Apple have a real arrogance problem, getting people whipped up into a frenzy over cable connectors. But the fact is, the iPhone is still a fucking amazing piece of technology that we take for granted every day. There are plenty of people out there who haven’t got one yet. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could have the best possible version of this awesome gizmo if they do decide to take the plunge? Well hey, look at that, they can.

And then there’s the anger about Bayonetta 2 being a Wii U exclusive. (Yes, someone actually did tweet a death threat at Kamiya-san earlier.) Bayonetta was an awesome game that not enough people played. Meanwhile, absolutely fucking everyone bitched about the Wii not having enough third-party support. So a prominent (if underappreciated) third party pledges support to its successor and everyone complains. (Well, apart from open-minded Bayonetta fans, most of whom seem to be more than happy to consider purchasing a Wii U purely to punch more angels in the face. Actual tweet from someone who is not me: “So Bayonetta 2 is going to cost me around £300. Let’s face it, for the sequel to the best action game ever made it’s probably worth it.” I concur.)

Finally, there’s the Terraria issue. This is perhaps some of the most obnoxious behaviour I’ve ever seen from the gamer community. Take a look. Essentially, the “problem” was that the Terraria developer, who abandoned work on the (already feature-complete) game in February of this year to spend some time with his new child (what a bastard!), had been teasing “something big” to the Terraria community. Said “big thing” turned out to be an impending console release of Terraria for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network (pleasecometoVitapleasecometoVitapleasecometoVita) — great news, right? A much bigger audience gets to play an awesome and underappreciated game!

NO! say the PC players of Terraria. YOU BETRAYED US WITH YOUR BASTARDISH DESIRE TO MAKE MONEY AND NOT GIVE US MORE FREE STUFF. What the f—

I… blargh. Seriously. Shut the fuck up and just enjoy life more. And get off my lawn while you’re at it.

#oneaday, Day 40: Technology is Exciting!

It’s been a funny few weeks for the games industry, what with spats between high-profile journalists such as Leigh Alexander and Jim Sterling; the whole Penny Arcade “dickwolves debacle”; and, yesterday, Fox News making the astonishing claim that Bulletstorm directly encourages rape.

This sort of thing is oddly symptomatic of the modern industry, though. We take technology for granted so much these days that new, exciting things are met not with the excitement that they deserve, but with cynicism, caution and, at times, outright hostility. This is arguably wise, given that technology generally isn’t cheap, particularly for early adopters. But sometimes I miss the days of wide-eyed wonderment at a new gizmo that does something no-one else has ever done before.

Case in point: Sony and Nintendo’s upcoming handhelds, the NGP and 3DS, respectively. Both are pretty impressive pieces of kit—the 3DS for offering glasses-free 3D glasses (which may or may not prove difficult to appreciate for those who actually wear glasses) and the NGP for being a veritable behemoth of pocket-sized power. Both will make a significant dent in your cashflow should you choose to adopt them, but both are incredibly exciting pieces of technology.

So then, why do the industry press feel the need to publish articles like this? This is perhaps a bad example, because PocketGamer did, in fact, also publish a counter-article about why you will buy an NGP. But this is by no means an isolated incident; game sites are filled with list articles like this offering you “reasons to sell your Wii”, “reasons not to buy an [x]”, “reasons why the [y] is rubbish” (I’m paraphrasing, obviously). It’s a curious offshoot of fanboyism that some game sites seem to be voluntarily perpetuating—presumably because it encourages “discussion”. Discussion means hits. Hits mean ad revenue. That’s what it’s all about for many of these sites these days, after all.

Sometimes I think there’s a market for a site that treats things with the kind of wild-eyed enthusiasm that we as kids and teens in the 90s used to show for every new and exciting thing. Remember when Starfox/Starwing came out and it looked like games we’d been playing on home computers for years but everyone still loved it because it hadn’t been done on a console before? Remember when the Atari Lynx had hardware sprite scaling? Remember when you were gobsmacked about how many layers of parallax scrolling Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga had? Yeah. That. I want that back.

Perhaps it’s symptomatic of the fact that technology advances have slowed somewhat since those days. An oft-quoted line with every new generation of gaming technology is “it’s difficult to imagine how graphics could possibly get any better than this”, or “[x developer] claims they’re using 100% of the [y console]’s power”. But then someone does something cool. It might not be as huge a leap as that between, say, the SNES and the PS1. But it’s still an improvement, and something that I, personally, feel is still worth getting excited about.

For so-called “enthusiast press”, sometimes we’re not very enthusiastic.

[Thanks to @Alex_Connolly for inspiring today’s comic.]