Gamer Culture Too TOXIC?

As someone who's been a fan of Blizzard game for more then a decade, I kind of see what he's saying. The community site Blizzard runs is all kinds of awful to the point that I felt the need to stop using it altogether. Not that the entire fan base is like that, but still some of those people need to take five seconds to read what they write before they accuse the devs of being lazy because something needed to be cut for time.

It usually boils down to the people with the most to say give the least thought to what comes out of their mouths.

My 2 cents..  Development is expensive, time-consuming, and a very large risk especially for indies.  The internet, as a whole, is fueled by hype, escalated expectations, and entitlement for an industry that exploded.  People don't know, and don't care to know, about the rigors and backgrounds of their past-time.  They just need to calm the fuck down.

Well it is just smart to be quiet on any intracacies within a media production you are working one whether it is movies or games etc. If you talk about things you are working on within the game not only can that open up to potential spoilers you also might be talking about stuff that might not even fully make it into the final product. This can lead to speculations, disapointment, or unneccerary hype. Most companies have you sign non disclosure agreements though where you can't talk to anyone about what you are doing. So I don't know where this is coming from(unless you are an independent developer).

Where did Mica did that shirt? 

Yeah, I can definitely see toxicity at work and developers trying to avoid it.

On a somewhat related tangent, it's been discussed that many of the changes from Destiny 1 to Destiny 2 that are trending towards the over-simplification and "dumbing down" of the game were intentionally done to cater to more casual players (rather than the hardcore fans) in an effort to minimize elitism and the toxicity casual players have towards the hardcore players simply because the hardcore players have more time/energy/skill to commit to the game. Bungie's thinking is that you can't have toxicity over elite players getting elite rewards if there is no elitism. Yet this has the adverse consequence of compromising Destiny 2's end game content by providing even less of an incentive to play once certain milestones are achieved, despite the fact that hardcore players never want to be "finished" with the game.

The point is that yeah, toxicity is real, and not only does it affect developers' level of candor with their fans, but it also can directly impact the critical decisions developers make on their games by tainting the developers' central philosophies about what their games should be. It's a case where the developers really don't trust the fans, and for good reason, especially when casual players outnumber the hardcore 50 to 1 and a sizable portion of that 50 are toxic towards the elite 2%. If there was less toxicity among Destiny players, it's possible that Destiny 2's endgame content could have been much more robust.

I don't fault'em for it and if anything, they talk about it too much. Talking about a game before it's out, all it does is generate expectations that may or may not be met.

I think comments regarding, well anything really, boil down into 1 (or more) of 3 categories: 1) Positive comment 2) Constructive Criticism, or 3) Destructive Criticism (not sure if it's actually called that). The problem isn't people saying they don't like something, that's really helpful and is good to know, as long as it's kept constructive.

For example: 'I don't like this cover system because I feel it slows down the pace of the game' is constructive criticism which is useful to know, compared to destructive criticism which would just be 'This cover system is shit' or something like that, since without knowing WHY people dislike things, it'll never change, and just generally in life if you tell someone something in a, for lack of a better word, respectful manner, they are more likely to take it on board than if you just say it rudely.

As you said, this isn't unique to the games industry, this applies for everything, this is something that's particularly strong in media though. I think it's something that's important to note for everyone entering a media industry though, whether it be games, films, TV, new media etc that there are going to be people that just don't like it, to quote (or maybe slightly misquote, I wrote it down right after he said it but couldn't fully remember it properly) Miles from a mid season live stream at some point, he said "[Your work] can be the most beautiful peach, but there are still people who hate peaches", this doesn't pardon it, but as I'm sure you'll confirm working in new media, you have to have a thick skin. But it is totally understandable why devs would want to minimise that as much as possible.

And as well, as you said in the video, part of it is due to the fact that most people underestimate the difficulty of making a video game (and again, this also applies to all of media), not too long ago I finished a Games Design course, and from the course I was on, other courses in the same place, and other people on the internet, I was quite surprised by the amount of people that dropped out of games design, most of which is because it's more difficult than they thought. While it's true, gamers shouldn't have to know how the omelette's made (I think that's the saying right?) I think having an idea of how something's made makes you appreciate it more, and again, that applies to everything, especially media; specifically the games industry & new media.

I also found this recently when looking for some new podcasts to listen to while working, and I was looking to see if there is any good games development podcasts, and I found a few lists about of good game dev podcasts, such as on reddit and that, but upon going to the websites, most cases either 1) the website was taken down or 2) the hasn't been a new episode for years, like 9 years or more. I didn't really think about it until now, but that probably is due to the fact that developers are hesitant to talk about their games.

Of course though, if any gamers are interested in hearing about development of games, you can find it, with stuff like GDC's YouTube channel. Sorry for such a long comment, I couldn't stop writing :)

Honestly if I were a dev I wouldn't share either time and time again we see the fringe edges of internet people and gamers quickly jump to extreme measures when they don't like things. Games get ddos'd, people get doxxed, death threats get sent so often it's not surprising anymore, people get Swatted, and in game chats might as well be disabled because it's a stream of "kys", racial slurs, profanity, and toxicity. Even if "not all gamers" it would be naive to pretend that the community taken as a whole is insanely toxic if only because we can't get rid of the fringe elements because we can't find them. Jeff Kaplan just talked about it as an issue with OW that the team has to spend so much time dealing with toxicity in their game that it is slowing the release of actual content. 

First of all, it is not "gamer culture", it is our culture in general. It was only a couple of weeks ago that the director for Netflix's "Death Note" remake received death threats. And my god, as a NFL Dallas Cowboys fan, I would not go within 10 miles of an Eagles forum if the Cowboys are winning. Scratch that, I would go there even if the Cowboys were losing. Eagles fans partially funded a documentary called "Dallas Sucks". 

Second of all, while it is true that some developers might not want to deal with that kind of harassment, there are surely other reasons. For example, if a game is bad, the developers probably know it. They don't need feedback, what they need is to get the game out the door before they waste any more money on a failed project. A demo, and the reaction, will just cost them sales. Not to mention the fact that developers probably do not want to waste time sifting through comments to find the good stuff. Your average gamer does not know the limits of the project, and it is only by luck that your average person can say something that has not been thought of already. 

It seems as if "development transparency" is being used as a scapegoat for PR and business practices/transparency.  Very rarely have I seen a developer who is open about there processes face significant backlash about the development it's self, as a popular example just look at Divinity Original Sin they have development streams on twitch were there actually working on the game in some

fashion,  and there are others that put out dev blogs talking about what there working on some of the problems there having and other such things.  I have never seen a AAA dev say anything more then well we simply can't find enough resources to run the game a 60FPS and keep or vision of the game,  I have never heard of any AAA dev actually coming out and talking about there development process. 

      This seems like a neat way of saying well we can't come out and talk about the development process because we would inherently also end up talking about the publisher/PR side of things too and that could have a negative impact and the company image and that would almost certainly be a breach of contract.  

    In the end we see many indie devs who have an open development process and many of them have a very good fan/consumer base,  and yet we have never seen a AAA dev/publisher do anything close to what some of these indies are doing.  And at the end of the day I can't simply ignore the incongruity between the two if this was simply about the transparency of the development process.                  

100% agree with this. Go to the Destiny 2 forums and you'll see how bad it is. From what I can gather is that the average gamer feels entitled as was quoted in this video. You couple that sense of imagine entitlement and couple it with the lack of knowledge how the dev process works and it is a cess pool of toxicity. Before I started my life in game dev I had a superficial knowledge of the difficulties of developing a game yet I still knew vast more than most people I interacted with. As I continued in my career I realized there was still a ton more that I had't known yet. When the average gamer can't comprehend the fundamental basics of how to design a game and automatically assume it is as easy as turning a setting on or off they will often misinterpret what a dev says or flat out call them liars. The bigger companies understand this and is why they have taken to a simple PR stance when discussing their dev process (what little they do)

This in turn is a double edges sword in that, yes, it does keep most gamers complacent with how things are going but it also fails to help educate those gamers of the bare minimum information they need to have patience with the developers. I've had adults try to chew me out about the ineptitude of dev's when I tried to explain why a particular bug may have been occurring and why it may be some time to fix it. A whole generation has grown playing games and fostering their own sense of entitlement which is being copied and magnitude with the next generation coming.

It's not necessarily the dev's job to educate the masses on the fundamental basics but unless the masses figure it out, or simply learn how to not be toxic, it will only likely get worse and less information will be shared from the dev's. Also if the average gamer really understood what it took to make a game not every college and university in the country would be toting an absolute crap game dev degree and flooding the job market with incompetence. (Sortof like people trying to personally hand off their resume to Rooster Teeth, yeah they deal with games but they are a video production company and your resume means just about jack squat. Build a portfolio of your cinematography and video design projects. Or be a lightning in the bottle streamer or YT content creator and hope LP likes your stuff)