Speaking at the Reboot Develop event last week, Devolver co-founder Mike Wilson talked about some of the problems facing the gaming industry at the moment, including the issues that come with the culture of “crunch time” in development and how that impacts mental health issues. Of course, another thing that can negatively impact your mental health is people on the internet slinging shit your way.
In an article transcribed by GamesIndustry.biz, Wilson, who co-founded both Devolver and Good Shepherd, described some of the problems that indie developers can face when trying to have a discussion about their game with thousands of players. As you might imagine, it typically doesn’t end well.
“The biggest problem is they’re now expected to have direct conversations with their audience on a regular basis throughout. That’s something that no other artist in the history of making art has had to figure out.
“These are already people trying to do something very hard: make a game that stands out from the thousand games coming out each month with just two or three people, and knowing that the audience will never understand it’s just two or three people. They’ll just assume it’s some big studio and should be as good as [bigger] games.
“The gaming community is… great at being complete fucking assholes online, and I don’t understand why that is. When you’re having a hard day and there’s a thousand people on Twitter at any time willing to agree that you’re a piece of shit, that you should stop working because you’re never going to make anything good, it’s pretty hardcore for a sensitive person.”
Wilson also added: “I think that’s why the indies are having such a hard time. It’s just this mass of noise from a mix of fans and monsters online. And it doesn’t matter if you read a thousand great comments, it’s that one or two that say you’re an absolute worthless piece of shit that sticks in your heart when you least need it.”
Mike Wilson isn’t sure how the situation might fix itself, but he says that the onus is on the community to highlight the abuse when it occurs: “You can’t just say ‘you have to be nice’ from on high. People do try to moderate to some extent, but I think it’s really down to the community to say, ‘Hey dude, that’s not cool at all’.”
He also expects that this wall of ignorance that developers can face will lead to more indie developers communicating through PR companies indirectly, which he hopes doesn’t happen: “I hope it doesn’t come to that because it’s pretty cool to be able to interact with the artists you love directly, to ask questions and feed them compliments on their work. I really hope it doesn’t become something where you’re talking to a PR all the time on Twitter.”
To be honest, we can’t disagree with him on this one. The level of vitriol that flies around the internet on a daily basis is beyond belief, and over the most asinine things you could think of too. “Oh, my favourite gun on Call of Duty got nerfed? Better threaten the developers with violence!”. Just look at some of the tweets highlighted in this piece from Medium a few months back. Absolutely disgusting behaviour.
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But it’s not just gaming that has this problem. Ghostbusters (2016) was marked for death as soon as the first trailer came out, and though some offered fair critique about how they didn’t think the humour was for them, the level of sexism and bigotry leveled at the film and its stars was horrendous. There was also that “attempt” to sabotage the Rotten Tomatoes review score of Black Panther by DC fanboys and racist dickheads.
The point I’m making here is that whilst the gaming community has a lot to answer for in how it conducts itself, the problem is much wider, and it’s exacerbated by the internet. Every community has that vocal minority that exist to just be insufferable twats, and the rise of Twitter and Reddit has given these groups a chance to congregate and communicate. Hiding behind a veil of relative anonymity, they’re “allowed” to run their mouth relatively consequence free, attacking artists, game developers, fellow human beings who are now more susceptible to this hatred on those same social media sites.
It’s a problem that doesn’t just affect gaming culture: it affects everything, and everyone. In the end, the only advice we can give is that of famed musician and scholar, Bill S. Preston, Esq:
Be excellent to each other.
Do you have any thoughts about Mike Wilson’s comments about the gaming industry? Do you agree that this level of toxicity affects more than just gaming? Let us know in the comments.
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