#oneaday Day 820: Disagreement

I hate arguing. In fact, I’d go further than that. I hate disagreeing. I have absolutely no doubt that this particular aspect of my personality is a side-effect of the social anxiety that I suffer from, but it sometimes makes discussions hard to participate in.

I’m fine with expressing my opinion and feel I can argue my viewpoint pretty convincingly in most instances — this blog is filled with numerous examples of that, as longtime readers will doubtless know. It’s in the things that happen after my opinion has been stated that things get a little trickier — namely, if someone comes along with a diametrically-opposed viewpoint and the willingness (and/or ability) to argue until they’re blue in the face about how much I’m wrong and how they’re absolutely right.

Most of the time, these disagreements don’t descend into “you’re an idiot”, but my discomfort with disagreeing makes me sometimes feel like it’s implied. I like to think that I go through life as a fairly likeable sort of chap and take great pains to try not to offend anyone (swearing and masturbating stickmen aside, obviously — I’m referring specifically to personal attacks here) so having someone disagree with me and argue their case in an impassioned manner is a frustrating, disquieting experience that often makes me wish I had kept my mouth shut in the first place.

Part of this is due to the fact that I tend to cycle negative experiences around and around inside my head involuntarily. Even a seemingly innocuous, irrelevant discussion that might have gotten a little bit heated somewhere along the way is enough to keep me awake at night sometimes — and those rare situations where someone is actually genuinely upset by something which has occurred? I can pretty much forget about remaining calm, instead preferring to stare into space, replaying the incident in my mind and wondering what could have happened if things went a little differently.

It can happen before time, too. If I know there’s some form of difficult conversation coming up, I’ll find myself role-playing it in my head, imagining what might happen. Inevitably my mental conversation has the worst possible outcome, usually descending into someone getting yelled at or thumped. This does at least make having the actual conversation pleasantly surprising almost without exception, since no-one ever gets thumped and hardly anyone ever gets yelled at.

I guess part of the frustration over all this is to do with power, or more specifically, a feeling of powerlessness. If you know (or at least believe) that your opinion on something is inherently sensible and others seem to think that you’re speaking gibberish, it’s disheartening — particularly if said opponents of your viewpoint are aggressive and stubborn in their dismissal of what you have to say. It’s particularly disappointing and upsetting when people whom you like and respect fall into this category, too.

Nine times out of ten, the argument just wasn’t worth having in the first place, too. So what I have taken to doing most of the time these days is just stepping back before jumping in to a debate, thinking “will this get heated? Is it worth potentially getting upset over?” and then — only then — making a decision on whether or not to proceed. In some cases, said decision leads to launching a discussion and dealing with the consequences. In others, it leads to walking away — deleting the unsent tweet, closing the comments section, biting my tongue. And in extreme cases, it leads to me feeling like the correct course of action is simply to remove myself from the situation in question and ensure it doesn’t arise again — online, that means unfriending, unfollowing and/or blocking people; offline… well, you just walk away and don’t look back.

Some people are built for arguing. I don’t think I’m one of them.

#oneaday Day 786: On Endings

I’m not going to discuss Mass Effect 3‘s ending here, largely because, as you all know, I have not played the game, nor will I be doing so. I have, however, been reading up on it and I understand that it is SUPER-MILD SPOILER rather bittersweet — or just plain bitter, if you prefer to look at it that way. /SUPER-MILD SPOILER

There’s been a ton of coverage regarding fan outcry over the ending. For the most part, those complaining about the ending (and even, in some cases, petitioning BioWare to change it) have been held up as figures of ridicule, the exemplification of that overused and increasingly meaningless word “entitlement”. Some professional industry commentators have even taken to insulting and verbally abusing people who believe that the ending is “wrong”, with one notable example referring to anyone who had criticised either Mass Effect 3‘s controversial DLC strategy or its ending as “whiny fucking babies”. (That netted an instant total loss of respect and an unfollow from me, incidentally, not that the person in question likely cared.)

Other outlets took a slightly more measured approach to criticising this group, noting that forcing BioWare to change its creative work according to public opinion rather than steadfastly sticking to the ending it chose to write would cause Mass Effect to cease being art and to simply be another product. (I would argue — and have done — that it’s already there, but that’s a whole other issue.) Meanwhile, articles like this one, that offer a well-considered message of support to disenfranchised fans, are rather more rare.

I’m not quite sure where I stand on the debate. From what I understand of the ending, the thing that people are most upset about is the fact that it appears to render most of the decisions made throughout the course of the entire three-game series completely irrelevant. Given that this “decision-making, choose-your-own-adventure then deal with the consequences” nature has been a key selling point for the entire Mass Effect series, I can see why people would be pissed off about it. And if this truly is the case (still haven’t played it, remember) then I’d be inclined to come down on the side of supporting those who are upset at the ending.

On the flip side, I have nothing against a bittersweet ending. In fact, some of my favourite endings over the years have been bittersweet ones. (Spoilers ahead. Highlight the text to read it. Mobile users, copy and paste the white text into a note or something.) Take Conker’s Bad Fur Day, for example, where despite kicking all kinds of ass throughout the course of the game, culminating in an epic battle spoofing Alien, Conker’s girlfriend, whom he has simply been trying to make it home to for the whole game, is still dead. Or Final Fantasy XIII-2 (another game which saw a bit of fan upset regarding the ending, though not to the degree of spawning a petition) where Serah dies in Noel’s arms, having suffered a vision just like all the Yeuls the duo had seen throughout the course of the game — a possibility which the game had set up and repeatedly reminded the player of throughout. Or To The Moon, where the old man dies and it’s still massively upsetting despite the fact you’ve known for the whole game it’s going to happen. Or how about Persona 3 (I haven’t played FES yet so don’t spoil it if I’m wrong here!) where it’s rather strongly implied that the protagonist dies peacefully on the school rooftop surrounded by his friends. Or Persona 4, where after spending a year with people, building up close friendships, solving a series of horrible murders and eventually saving the world, you have to leave them all behind by getting on a train and not looking back. I even loved Fallout 3‘s original ending, where the player character dies a horrible, painful death in a radiation-filled room while saving everyone else. Or… you get the idea by now, surely.

I liked all of those endings. I thought they were effective and, in many cases, quite moving. I think the difference we’re seeing with Mass Effect 3, however, is that the ending is being seen as rather at odds with the way the rest of the game — nay, series — has played out to date, and fans feel that they are being cheated out of the choice of ending that they want, deserve, whatever you want to call it. Of course, there is a very complicated flowchart in a ring binder somewhere in BioWare HQ that maps out all the possibile decisions players might have made over the course of the three Mass Effect games, and attempting to untangle that in order to produce an ending that would satisfy everyone would be absolutely impossible.

Without getting into spoiler territory here, though, I feel it would at least have been possible for there to be one or two alternative ways for the saga to end besides those which are already there — and which are, from what I’ve read, relatively similar in their execution, if not their consequences and eventual outcome. It seems very strange for BioWare to do this given that they’ve been so good at endings in the past — look at the variety of ways Dragon Age: Origins can conclude, for example, whereby the player is pushed towards the final battle of the game, making it seem like a linear run to the finish, but is then thrown a number of massive decision points that significantly affect exactly how the ending goes down. The outcome is the same in each case, but the means by which it is achieved is enormously different — and, more to the point, is dependent on player choice as well as how they have played their character up until that point, factors which Mass Effect fans feel that the trilogy’s conclusion is not taking into account.

Basically, I can see both sides of the argument here, though both sides also have a lot to learn about respectful debate. Many in each camp are making valid points which then have all credibility removed when someone causes things to descend into name-calling and hair-pulling. A debate over something like this should be interesting and exciting, not leaving everyone involved and any onlookers feeling faintly disgusted and ashamed. A game provoking such discussion should be celebrated; instead, this whole episode is proving to be something of an ugly blot on gaming history.

#oneaday Day 782: Is It Worth Complaining?

I had an interesting discussion on Twitter earlier with Peter Skerritt of Armchair Analysis and Craig Bamford of Leveling Criticism. Peter argued that gamers had made their bed with regard to questionable business practices surrounding downloadable content, preorder bonuses and all of the other annoyances which this particular generation of consoles has developed — that since so many people have bought into these schemes over the last few years that it’s now too late to go back, that any sort of “action” is not worth taking, and that anyone feeling the need to speak out about it should understand that doing so will have negligible effect.

Craig, meanwhile, countered that “‘shut up and consume’ is just greasy”, noting that Mass Effect 3‘s controversial day-one DLC “prompted a huge backlash which the company had to expend serious PR resources to fix.”

I’m not going to get back into this specific argument here, but I did want to address some more general points which Peter, Craig and I discussed. Namely, the question of whether or not it’s worth complaining about something.

It’s easy to complain about things on the Internet. Start a blog or a Twitter account. Rail against anything you find personally objectionable. Talk up the people who agree with you and either ignore the people who disagree or get into very loud and public slanging matches with them. “Internet Rage” is its own meme now, though ultimately the concept of “the Internet being angry at something” has arguably done more harm than good to the concept of actual, genuine protest.

The trouble is that there’s an element of bandwagon-jumping. With any kind of disagreement, most people are going to come down on one side of the fence or the other. In the case of Internet arguments, those who are skilled in rhetoric will have very little difficulty in recruiting people for their side, as all it takes, in some cases, is a particularly persuasive YouTube video or an article featuring carefully massaged statistics to get people onside. People are lazy. If you lay an argument out on a plate for them, relatively few of them will have the inclination to go and research things for themselves. ‘Twas ever thus, and we even see this in the professional specialist press to a certain degree.

It loses its effect after a while, though. Words are just words, after all, and as any protestor worth their salt will undoubtedly tell you, actions speak far louder than words.

Or do they? I haven’t bought Mass Effect 3 but do I think EA give a shit about that fact? No, because a healthy number of people have bought Mass Effect 3, and those are the only people that EA care about. Those are the people that say to EA “what you’re doing is acceptable, please do it more.” It’s not just something that happens in video games. It happens with all sorts of shady business practices. The more people just accept something as “that’s the way it is” (houuuuuaaahhh!), the more likely companies are to want to keep pushing the boundaries a little bit further each time, like a toddler trying to figure out exactly how naughty is too naughty, only with millions of dollars instead of plastic things made by Fisher-Price.

Does that invalidate the criticisms that those people who object to it have? Does the fact that, say, EA has no need to take those people’s criticisms into account mean that they should stop speaking out against those things which they find unacceptable or distasteful?

Absolutely not. For if those people stop complaining, then we have no dialogue. We have no discussion, no debate. We simply blindly accept, consume, bend over, take it. You may be happy to blindly accept, consume, bend over, take it. You may believe that there are more important things to worry about in the world than whether or not a software company squeezes an extra $10-$20 out of its most loyal fans. You may believe the lines spun by public relations in an attempt to limit the damage done to a brand’s reputation. But that doesn’t mean that the people who don’t feel the same as you should be silenced. State your case. Come out from your corner fighting. You might change their mind — though given my experience of debates like this, you probably won’t — or you might at least give them an alternative perspective to consider, even if they ultimately end up feeling the same way.

In short, I believe that yes, it is worth complaining. In the video games case, Peter argued that complacency is what has led consumers to the point they are at now, where buying a $60 game is no longer the end point of the relationship between the customer’s wallet and the publisher’s pockets — it’s the beginning. If that’s the case, though, while it may be too late to salvage matters with regards to things like DLC, preorder bonuses, shady sales practices and all manner of other considerations, surely that’s a sign that consumers upset by all this should be more vocal in order to preempt publishers attempting to take advantage of them any further in the future?

Those expressing upset and annoyance at what they see as unfair shifts in business practices are now often accused of being “entitled”. But that’s simply lazy rhetoric. There’s a big difference between being “entitled” (typically used in this context to mean “expecting something for free”) and having very valid concerns about getting value for money or being treated fairly as a consumer. In the Mass Effect 3 case, no-one’s expecting something for free. They want to pay for the game, to support the developer, but they don’t want to be treated like idiots and/or bottomless cash pits in the process. Personally speaking, I don’t think it’s unreasonable or “entitled” to expect a complete product when you hand over your money for it. But, well, we’ve been over that already and I know far too well how futile it is for both sides to try and convince the other of their viewpoint.

The point: complaining or protesting may not have a direct or immediate effect. But it ensures that we continue to discuss, debate and consider things a little more carefully than we would otherwise if there was a complete consensus of opinion. It keeps things interesting, it prevents people from becoming too complacent and it allows people to retain their individuality rather than being treated as an amorphous mass of identical, anonymous “consumers”.

Sounds better than the alternative to me. But then you probably disagree. In which case you’re wrong, you entitled twat.