Slashdot Mirror
Are Games Worth Complaining About?
A few days ago, the Opposable Thumbs blog ran a piece titled, "In gaming, everything is amazing, but no one is happy." The thrust of the article is that discussion about modern games focuses almost entirely on flaws, which are often blown out of proportion. "Every game is too short, although we never finish the games we play. Every game is too expensive, although we demand ever-increasing levels of interaction, graphical fidelity, and length. The same people who claim every game was 80 hours and a masterpiece 10 years ago are 10 years away from saying that today was the golden time, once they have the distance needed to scrub the bad games from memory." Today, gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun offers counterpoint, saying that video games need active criticism for the industry to improve. "Everything is amazing, and sometimes people are happy. That’s how it will always be. And we should probably make the most of it, and then strive to make it better."
How about a little goddamn quality control in the first place.
Gamers gravitated to console away from PC in part because there wasn't the "ship now, patch later if we fucking bother" problem on consoles. Consoles couldn't patch. You shipped a game with a game-breaking bug, you'd better be prepared to replace it for any affected customer. Nintendo had to do exactly that, paying to repair save files and ship SD cards back and forth for a game-breaking Metroid bug in the most recent Metroid on the Wii.
So what happened? Now, Xbox360 and PS3 are plagued by "ship now, patch later" crap. And the gamers are starting to get fucking fed up - though not enough to go back to PC, where games are shipped with so much fucking game-breaking DRM that they're basically unplayable anyways.
This is indeed how our brains work, but with gaming, there have been obvious steps backwards in recent years. It's mostly due to games publishers taking advantage of how locked down things are on consoles right now. Consoles are finally getting online, but most games have no mechanism for creating and sharing your own content (with a few notable exceptions like LittleBigPlanet). They charge insane prices just for a few extra maps or single player missions. Back when I was a heavy PC gamer (ie before I got a job!) maps and mods for games were plentiful. I thought it would still be that way in PC gaming, but I've seen a few people comment that things have gone backwards there in terms of the latest games being moddable/customisable. So really, it does seem like there is something to complain about.
There's a reason people love Minecraft even though it looks like ass: the focus on user-generated content.
which is totally what she said