The Tragedy of Gamers as Anti-fans

(This is a timely reminder that anything that appears on this tumblr is very much half-baked)



Been thinking a bit lately about the ongoing No Man’s Sky backlash. Not just those who felt they had been tricked by marketing into buying a game that was different from what they wanted who then got (or are trying to get) a refund and then move on. More those dedicated anti-fans who seem to have a real investment in not just not enjoying the game but ensure others, too, do not enjoy the game. Those who feel betrayed by the game’s very existence and who seem to want to mobilise more of a mass movement of refunds and complaints and bickering to get back at those filthy liars at Hello Games.

These are mostly just people talking on reddit and neogaf and so, really, should be largely irrelevant, except they are given relevancy. I’ve seen websites report even more missing features and lies because a single redditor’s game seemed to briefly hiccup. Now these are articles have little update paragraphs above them clarifying that the entire post is actually factually incorrect, but the point remains that many outlets are happy to translate the fury whirlpool sinkhole of places like reddit into validated outrage.

So I’ve been thinking about these people and that investment they must have in order to feel so so so slighted by the mere existence of a game like No Man’s Sky. Not just its lack of multiplayer (really the only feature I think it is fair to say Hello Games and Sony were misleading or at least unclear about) but its entire existence. How dare this game release for $60. It’s not worth $60. You hardly do anything in it.

I’ve been thinking about more than just consumer advocacy at misleading marketing (which, again, is fine). A lot of this fury reminds me of backlash against ‘non-games’ (ie. mechanically minimal experiential videogames) whenever they dare creep out of itch.io or personal websites to appear on the gamer’s own land of Steam or consoles or the expo stage. The backlash against Proteus, against Dear Esther, against Gone Home, against Depression Quest. The backlash against No Man’s Sky reminds me of that cultural clash in its vigour (albeit not in the violence directed at the women who developed some of those above games).

I don’t think this is a coincidence. Beyond the lack of multiplayer, the anger hardcore gamer subcultures have at No Man’s Sky is largely the minimalism of its mechanics. It was marketed and dreamed as this big massive space adventure. That final videogame where you can do whatever you want and as I went into in my review, this rubs against the very minimal and simple experience the game actually is. I was saying long before No Man’s Sky came out that it looked like an intergalactic walking simulator. I mean this as something very exciting, but I failed to consider the fallout that was always going to happen when a walking simulator got released for $60 on a disc.

If people were mad at games like Proteus, Gone Home, and Depression Quest for daring to step on the sacred gamer lands of Steam and consoles (those territories that belong to real gamers to play their real games), then they’re mad at No Man’s Sky, in part, for being a trojan horse of one of these non-games wrapped up in the plastic seal of a AAA release with a AAA price. Not just simply because they feel ripped off (but that is certainly part of it) but because it feels like an encroachment on their territory.

Myself and others have written enough things elsewhere about how ‘gameplay’ and ‘gamer’ were very deliberately cultivated through the late 80s to the modern day as a very specific type of videogame player and a very specific type of videogame experience. Together they produce a dominant culture. The gamer who players Half-Life and Final Fantasy VII because they have good gameplay over the player who plays Angry Birds and Candy Crash because they look and sound good. Gameplay is an essence of those games that the real gamer validates as real games, and so gameplay is reinforced as an entirely socially constructed marker of quality. Good games have gameplay and thus determine what gameplay is going forward. Games without this gameplay are bad games. To say that walking simulators don’t have gameplay, even though they require a player no less than the most complex action games, is to say they have the wrong essence; they produce the wrong experience. Essentially: they are the wrong genre.

Videogames have expanded in recent years so that, as Leigh Alexander rightly said, gamers don’t have to be your audience anymore. There are so many other people playing and spending money on videogames. Gamers are visibly becoming the niche they always actually were. The rise of casual games on the Wii and smartphones at one end of the spectrum, and the rise of altgames et al thanks to more accessible middleware at the other end have both contributed to this. Videogames are now both more mainstream than AAA and more alternative than AAA.

But AAA still owns the high budget spectacle experience, and there is undeniably something glorious about indulgent, high-budget spectacles. This is really why I still love AAA games despite their general homogeny: they can still do some cool things that could not be done beyond AAA. This is essentially why my favourite ‘genre’ of AAA is those games that feel like they really should not have been allowed to exist. Those weird and broken and messy and self-indulgent titles. i’m thinking of games like Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain, and Homefront. Games that are broken in fascinating ways. Or, on the other hands, AAA games that are just really sincere and unpretentious about just being a silly, high budget romp, like the Uncharted games, or Wolfenstein: New Order.

Those AAA games that are broken in interesting ways are rare because most AAA games can’t afford to be. All the ones I listed above were financial disasters in one way or another. The sorts of people who will pay $60 on a game (the sorts of people who have been trained to find certain types of games worthy of $60) like a very specific thing: gameplay. And no AAA game can deviate to much from this mould without feeling the gamer’s wrath. AAA made this bed when it made the gamer, and now it is stuck in it.

So No Man’s Sky entered this space. Whether it is AAA or indie is not a useful question (the answer is simply ‘yes’) but it entered this space, and people felt mad at it for being $60, even aside from the multiplayer fiasco. This game is interesting, I’ve seen no shortage of people say, but not for $60.

What makes a game worth $60? An easy answer, usually, would be length. Proteus isn’t worth $60 because you only play it for half an hour or so. Perhaps a certain level of graphical quality to prove this game cost a lot of money to make. Depression Quest isn’t worth $60 because it doesn’t have high-def graphics. Just text. But both of these fall down when it comes to No Man’s Sky with its limitless ‘content’ and really quite beautiful graphics. So what is it missing then that make people so made it dare release for $60? The right sorts of gameplay.

No Man’s Sky lacks the essences that gamers have been cultivated to believe (and which they have cultivated themselves) is worth spending $60 on. A certain amount of challenge and agency and freedom. More so, people felt deceived into thinking that No Man’s Sky possessed a large amount of that essence that they want, that gameplay. Be that the fault of marketers or gamers themselves is an ongoing debate that has no easy answer, but certainly: No Man’s Sky had framed itself in a particular, gameplay-orientated way in order to muster the pre-release momentum that a game releasing for that price needs to.

Which sort of gets me to the point I actually want to make: there are particular kinds of videogame experiences that can only be achieved with a large budget and the hope that enough people will be interested to justify that budget. At the moment, only a specific kind of high-budget game is possible because of how gamer culture has been cultivated and solidified, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Yet, games like No Man’s Sky are exciting because, masterpieces or failures, they push against that strict border of what can be done in a $60 title by trying to do something else. This is always going to be an imperfect project as it needs to work within existing constrictions (this is why No Man’s Sky is criticised as both having not enough gameplay, and being too arbitrarily gamey by different audiences). But they can be interestingly imperfect. Importing teething problems of pushing a boundary to see what else can be done in a space.

The tragedy of gamers is the desire to push back against this. To not just be fans of what speaks to them but anti-fans to what doesn’t. To see any imperfect attempt at experimentation as an attempt to open the floodgates and wash away the walled city. A scandalous affair of betrayal and deception and Trojan horses invading their platforms.

The ways in which corporate marketing, critical discourses, the influences of the most popular titles on the next most popular titles all perpetuate each other so that specific kinds of videogame experiences can only exist in specific budget brackets and in specific conceptual digital spaces/storefronts.

This is what I find upsetting and frustrating about the No Man’s Sky backlash. Not the fact that some people don’t like it or don’t ‘get’ it. There are plenty of entirely fine reasons to dislike the game. Not even that some people want a refund for the game being different from what they’d been led to believe it might be (an entirely fair desire, to be sure). What I find upsetting is that dedicated and ongoing backlash. The anti-fans. Those dedicated to tearing down the game on their subreddit and neogaf communities that are then validated as ‘sources’ in news stories, almost solely because the game is not the sort of game they want to play.

It’s a very visible and tangible backlash from that central, cultivated audience that works to say: don’t experiment in this space, don’t be weird, that is not what happens in $60 titles. Don’t fail in interesting ways. Be safe. Stick to good gameplay. Abide by our markers of quality that you imbued in us decades ago, and don’t dare try to challenge those markers or provide alternatives beyond a very finite spectrum. Stick to your $10 ‘indie’ bracket if you want to do that, your free itch.io games. Be safe and conservative. Don’t experiment. Don’t dream.