Gamespot – I'm Not Doctor Who

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Calin the other day. Calin is someone I’ve known for quite a while, have shared lots of interesting and enjoyable gaming stories with over the years — mainly through the Squadron of Shame — and even managed to meet face-to-face on one occasion at PAX East in 2010, an event which, as a whole, I regard as the last great thing in my life before everything came crumbling down shortly afterwards. (I have since largely rebuilt my existence, but there’s still some work to do after that chaos.)

Anyway, the point is: Calin is, if you must put a label on such things, a “gamer”. And yet he confessed to me that he’s not entirely comfortable admitting that any more, for fear of being lumped in with what he regards as “gamers”. His definition of gamers, it transpires, are those who are the most vocal on the Internet, and often the worst examples of the gaming community. They who shout loudest get the most attention and all that.

This is, of course, a gross generalisation about the entire community of people who enjoy computer and video games, and I said as much in our conversation. The IGN and Gamespot comments sections are not representative of the entirety of humanity who enjoy computer and video games, in other words; there are plenty of other people out there who don’t rage and swear at one another, who don’t tell writers to kill themselves over reviews they disagree with, who don’t act like spoiled children when things that they, personally, aren’t interested in show up.

And yet I can understand Calin’s position somewhat. As I noted above, those who shout loudest get the most attention, and it’s entirely natural to start believing “gamers” as a whole are the scum of the Earth if the representatives of the community you seem to hear the most from are the ones who are acting like complete tools.

In vaguely related news, earlier today I observed a Twitter exchange between the members of Witch Beam, developers of the excellent upcoming arcade-style shoot ’em up for PC, PS4, Vita and Wii U, Assault Android Cactus. They were feeling disheartened by a tweet from a member of the Gamespot community who made some disparaging remarks about Sony “only” having titles like Assault Android Cactus — smaller-scale, lower-budget but no less interesting or enjoyable games — to show at E3, while Microsoft was promising that its Xbox One-centric E3 presentation would focus on games, presumably triple-A by implication. I commented to them that it’s not worth worrying about the opinion of people who believe that triple-A is all there is to video games. In a way, those people are also judging something in its entirety by a small subsection of it — in this case, that anything outside the big budget triple-A space is somehow unworthy.

The important thing in all this is to remember that not everyone agrees on everything, and not everyone behaves in the same way. For some people, trash talk and being a jackass online is just part and parcel of the way the modern Internet-connected world works. For others, they prefer to spend their time actually playing games rather than typing comments or tweets to each other online. And for others still, they prefer to engage in intelligent, lengthy discussion about things some people may not have heard of. (I kind of straddle the latter two categories.)

Of those groups, the people acting like jackasses are but a small part of the whole. They’re a problem, for sure, and it’s difficult to know what — if anything — it’s possible to do about their behaviour. (Hint: It’s not posting lengthy social justice-themed editorials on the sites they frequent; that just makes them defensive and even more inclined to be obnoxious.) But here’s the important thing: they are not everyone. They do not represent an entire medium. They do not represent the entirety of people around the world who are interested in games. Chances are, in my experience, there’s a considerable amount of crossover with those people who believe in nothing but triple-A.

Fuck those guys. If you enjoy games — however you enjoy them — enjoy them in your own way, and never, ever feel ashamed of something you enjoy because of the behaviour of people you probably have nothing to do with on a regular basis. In an extreme case, simply think back to how it all was before the Internet came along and ruined rational discourse for a lot of people; everyone could enjoy video games without feeling ashamed, guilty or disgusted then, because you never, ever came into contact with the more objectionable parts of humanity. Simply stay out of comments sections and only talk about games with your friends, just like things used to be. Works out pretty well for me, personally.

And if you’re one of the jackasses I’ve mentioned in this post? If you’ve ever told a writer to kill themselves over giving a game an 8 when you thought it deserved a 9? (For those who don’t frequent gaming sites, this actually happens on occasion, though it’s usually over more extreme differences of opinion.) If you believe there is only one “true” way to game, and that everyone else’s interests and passions in one of the most diverse creative mediums in the world is somehow invalid? Take a good, long, hard look at yourself and decide whether or not that’s the person you really want to be.

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.]