With recent big game releases, it’s become obvious that a game is either a resounding success, or complete shit. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground.
Kingdom Come Deliverance II is a ambitious masterpiece, and Avowed is lazy slop. 93% of Steam users recommend KCD2, vs 77% for Avowed.
And maybe this has been an issue for a long time, fed by the need to get viewer numbers on articles and videos, leading to more polarized opinions that give people a reason to pick a side, even if they’re never going to play the game.
But as regular people, gamers, Lemmy posters, why are we doing the same? How is it serving us? Are we all influencers in waiting, hoping to up our updoot count and build a following of… dozens?
More than 2/3rds of players of Dragon Age Veilguard recommend the game on Steam. And yet reading the comments here and other places, you’d think that 90% of people who tried the game found it to be, not just bad, but absolute trash, with a small number of people chiming in that they actually enjoyed it.
And game studios are reacting much the same way, and are quick to start layoffs, or shut down all together.
But hey, we don’t owe those corporations anything. But, as a community, do we owe it to each other to foster more honest correspondence?
I don’t think this is a gaming problem.
It is a discourse problem.
People engage in absolutes. They either love a thing or hate a thing. There’s no nuance.
And it must be made to cater for them, there’s no expectation that it will contain choices they don’t approve of.
And this stance, this modern relationship with the world permeates everything, especially forms of media.
You see it in films and books… Fans and stans and folk trying to take it down. There is no nuance or middle ground.
People don’t accept that, perhaps, something isn’t just “not for them”. That’s why you get grown men complaining about the direction of children’s shows they used to watch.
And this is compounded with social media where polarisation, blunt takes and contradiction are the primary drivers of engagement.
Audience error.
People don’t accept that, perhaps, something isn’t just “not for them”
I think this is my favorite comment on this whole thread.
It’s absolutely not just a gaming problem. Movie reviews are getting more and more bandwagon-y. Only a few reviewers post in the first day or two, and everyone else says “okay, they hated it, now I have to hate it too or I’m going to lose credibility”. I think it’s the inevitable outcome of having less famous reviewers, a NYT columnist can post what they feel, but a small blog can fall into obscurity if they have one contrarian review.
The only part that’s unique to gaming is that gamers are the most toxic community in the internet.
The only part that’s unique to gaming is that gamers are the most toxic community in the internet.
I wish this wasn’t as true as it is.
Don’t forget the vocal minority problem. The subset of people who comment on things is much smaller than the set of people who consume them. And while the threshold of effort for making comment is low, it isn’t zero, so people who hold more extreme views are going to be more prevalent in the selection because the people with moderate views aren’t going to have the motivation to spend 20 minutes explaining the nuanced position they have, while the ‘love’ and ‘hate’ camps will gladly spend 10 seconds on posting their simplistic view.
Add on the way modern systems work, focusing on likes, upvotes, etc. and you get short form responses getting greater engagement purely because they don’t take as long to read. It’s always easier to get traction with a short, maybe amusing, rehash of a common opinion than with a long dissertation on niche, complex views.
That cycles back in at the top to create a visibility bias so the people making the next round of commentary/content see the wave of love/hate and try to ride it. The result is a feedback loop with a terrible signal to noise ratio.
We do have a problem of polarisation. But on the other hand we also have a problem of too many games, so we simply can’t play them all. This leads us to a need to choose which one to pick. And a bad choice is very bad, because games are expensive and time consuming.
Now the real problem is when a community mistaken a new game for another. Like avowed was considered a terrible game because the leader scroll fanboys thought it would be their next game, and it wasn’t. Anyone who know what old school bioware games were will certainly love avowed.
Now while veilgard is not a bad game, is it actually good? I’m not informed enough yet about it, but bioware has been terrible in the last decade, so I am clearly very wary of what they’re doing.
I will wait for a discount for both those games, and I’ll play avowed first because I’m informed and careful, and I have other games to play already.
On the side there’s also the problem of fascist propaganda that will brand a game woke a try to destroy it.
With the amount of 9s and 10s coming out, why would you waste time with a 7? The polarisation is just an effect of the language of clickbait spreading in society, but doesn’t change the fact that average games are probably not worth your time.
Because most reviewers will still have subjective biases, and what some people perceive as a 10 might be a 5 to others, and vice versa.
I personally try to avoid looking at ‘raw’ ratings when I’m trying to find new media.
Full reviews are better, because they’re able to express more nuance, and I’m able to decide if the parts they liked/disliked are things I care about.
But as regular people, gamers, Lemmy posters, why are we doing the same? How is it serving us? Are we all influencers in waiting, hoping to up our updoot count and build a following of… dozens?
Many people are rationalizing their purchase decisions. Not everybody can afford to buy (and play!) two games so if you have two highly anticipated games or consoles coming out in the same time, most people can only get one. And then they have to choose. Afterward, they don’t want to hear that the other game is better, that it’s also great and they are missing out on a lot of fun and that the one they didn’t get is totally awesome.
I’ll be honest, I downloaded Avowed through gamepass and couldn’t stand it for more than 4 hours.
It’s about as dull as a game can be and doesn’t excel at anything, even when compared to games that released 15 years ago.
Do I think it’s garbage? No, but I also would not recommend it to anyone, it’s not worth their time nor money.
Well… to me this seems awfully close to “stop hitting yourself problem”.
Why are you looking comments everywhere? Do you really need that information to make a decision? Is it so bad to play a bad game now and then? I don’t see a problem, because this problem is easily avoidable by not going to social media for opinions.
Or am I missing the point?
Of course there’s middle ground. You just don’t see it much with AAA games because, as you mentioned, it’s all or nothing with those.
But don’t forget about indies. They comfortably fit in this middle ground because they’re not afraid to take risks.
Yep. Most AAA gaming is too afraid to appeal to a specific segment of the market. They make games that everyone is supposed to like, which often ends up being uninteresting at best.
Smaller games can target a smaller audience and still be successful. They take risks and do new things, and it’ll push some people away but many will enjoy it a lot more for it.
