If You Give A Mouse A Cookie…

My engagement with video games and game culture this week has been decidedly depressing and it has all had a common undercurrent: notions of consumer revolt or consumer rights that are fundamentally poisonous at worst or remarkably uninformed at best. I understand that such a statement can sound highly presumptive but actions and events have made it amazingly clear that enthusiasts are struggling with the idea of exactly what their money gives them control over.

Let’s start with the most visible example: GamerGate’s harassment of Beamdog for the inclusion of a transgender character in Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. I have no particular intention of discussing the particulars of the character in question at the moment other than to say that interaction is notedly small, apparently optional, and that the character’s backstory is behind two dialog options. Hardly shoved in your face, as detractors claim. But let’s talk about those detractors in earnest. One of the things we are seeing is fans of the Baldur’s Gate series or the Forgotten Realms setting in general genuinely believing that their extended contact with the series or, more specifically, their long term financial patronage grants them not just mere insight to the setting greater than Beamdog’s but also greater authorship.

The idea, although never explicitly stated, is that a monetary investment imbues the consumer with enough ownership over a product that they have a right to dictate or demand creative changes to the game’s text. We saw this before with Mass Effect 3. In discussing issues of “censorship” with a commenter on my latest Giant Bomb article, I attempted to explain that I think consumers have a fundamentally flawed idea of what censorship is and what exact authority they have over a game. To the point: in a practical sense, the only force that can dictate content changes to a developer is a client or producer. It is their capital that pays for the game and therefore they have a true state in the product because it is a work that they have either commissioned directly or will weather the burden of distribution for. This wasn’t really understood, I think, by the commenter.

So, what does it mean to purchase a game? When you walk into Best Buy or order something off Amazon, what are you actually getting. The answer is that you are not getting much. You are getting a copy of the work. Imagine the purchase of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. A fine, high quality framed canvas reproduction. You do not own the Mona Lisa, that much is obvious. You own a copy of the Mona Lisa. Purchasing this copy does not mean you own part of the Mona Lisa but it does give you ownership over the entire reproduction. Total ownership over the copy. You can’t demand that a change be made to the original. You do, however, have free reign to alter the copy. In video games, this is what game modifications are. They exist because you have ownership over the copy and may alter that. But do you own any part of the original?

In the vaguest sense, your copy of the game is partially imbued with the care, tears, and labor of the workers who made it. From the creative director of the game to the invisible factory floor tech, your copy of the game contains some type of indelible and ineffable part of the labor itself, which might be considered a facet of the game but because this quality is immutable, owning a portion of it or the fruits of the labor still does not grant ownership over the work. Furthermore, that very same labor places possession in the hands of the creators.

Gamers don’t have any real conception of labor’s role in art. I’m not going to suggest that we take some extended time to educate consumers with particular theory. Rather, we can at least look at the root cause of this confusion and it comes back to a well worn but nonetheless true fact: games tell players that they are special and game marketing places a premium on the consumer in a way that other media simply does not. Coupled with a general lack of cultural curation and the end result is large swaths of gamers who truly believe they are the final arbiters of a game’s content on a scale that extends beyond their copy of the game. No one particularly pushes back against this idea. EA created the extended cut DLC for Mass Effect 3, Intel (for a time) took their advertisements off Gamasutra, Nintendo fired Alison Rapp. These concessions, made in the face of pressure from hate groups and terrorists, send a clear message that companies will bend if enough force is applied. Beamdog is bucking the trend by apparently expanding the role of the transgender character in question but the damage has already been done and may as well been made irreversible when Nintendo, a company that might as well be a symbol for the industry at large, bent knee to these cretins. And because no major authority figure or force has adequately pushed back against the sea of petulance, the children have never learned what it means to be told “no”.

The issue gets compounded when there are actually arguments with actul merit for protesting or boycotting a developer. Because the most visible examples of success are hateful, efforts to take action begin to morph and twist. This week, the mobile game Final Fantasy Record Keeper had a Final Fantasy Tactics event. You could unlock some characters from the game to join your party and spend in game currency or separate currency bought with real money in order to have a random chance of getting character specific items. When in the hands of their owners, they granted special powers and abilities. One item was the Platinum Sword for Ramza. It’s special ability grants a massive speed and attack boost to the player’s party when used. Many players wanted this ability, as it makes content significantly easier. It’s a major ability in the metagame. So players spent their currencies to roll the dice and try to get it.

I’m not going to give the math here but it came to attention, from a significant data pool of player results, that the numbers for acquisition for this “relic banner” were lower than usual. With so many players pulling for the item, this rocketed Record Keeper to new heights in mobile stores. Like any FTP thing, it’s pretty shady and only further affected by the fact that the international version is not subject to the restrictions of the Japanese version. There, item chance percentages must be shown because the process is legally classified as gambling, with consumer protective measures in place. Internationally? Not as much. It’s not the biggest scandal but it was enough for people to write to the developer to express their displeasure. This is good, productive, and collective action against a corporation that was, to a degree, dishonest and manipulative.

On the same hand, hate and resentment are high; these are the conditions that give rise to vile tactics and brigading and while it hasn’t grown into something awful yet, the seeds are there and the potential exists. In an industry lacking proper contextualization for labor and one which has also responded to consumer fits with mollification, we are only one bit of progressive writing or a few percentages off expected math from majorly misplaced acts of “revolt” like GamerGate which are, in truth, fascist and operate with an appreciable and unchecked cult of violence.

What’s the solution? I do not know entirely but part of it is something that many of us already have been waiting for: creators to stands firm against irascible consumers. Basically, we need people in the proper places to actually say something. It’s been years of functional silence broken only by smaller voices. Larger voices with greater privilege and power need to take the risk to say something instead of allowing the cultural sphere to fester with no comment. I have no notion of how this will happen or what it will take to actually get such a voice to speak up. Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood made a statement regarding the controversy surrounding Baldur’s Gate. This provides a suitable example and in a more ideal world, would set a precedent of creators speaking out against mob campaigns but without some way to pair this with proper protection for the little guys as well, any real cultural pushback can’t really occur. I will, for the time, spare an extended rambling on the need for an organization (read: union) that isn’t as useless as the IGDA and SIGs that have any type of flex for the time being but we are continuing to see such empty gestures from these groups that it at least bear mentioning that stronger worker protections and more effective groups speaking out against harassment would constitute exactly the type of entity that could be paired with the voice of larger creators.

In the end, we continue to stare as smaller devs like Beamdog hold the line without any real means wider means to address the underlying causes that bring the hordes. Until we begin to alter the way we communicate towards players and until we create actual safeguards against harassment (and see the safeguards backed by significant entities), each new week brings the kernel of a new storm. A grim prognostication with an even more grim question: “Just exactly what will it take for us to do anything that lasts?”.