Perhaps this diary comes a bit late, but I'm just sick and tired of the faceless GamerGate® movement bitching about Feminism and harassing women in game development under the guise of Journalistic Ethics™. To make things worse, some people within the gaming community actually believe that Radical Leftists™ and feminists will destroy game development and bring down the Video Game industry. Follow me below the flip for my take on this.
I hate to break this to you, but game developers do a pretty good job of giving the industry a bad rap without feminists or women being involved. Case in point: Mortal Kombat X for the PC.
I pre-ordered the the game because it looked like a great sequel to a much needed reboot of the series. Then came April 14th: Launch Day...Hoo boy did Netherrealm Studios, High Voltage Studios and Steam drop the ball on this one. Although given their history Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition and Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition on the PC, this should come as no surprise.
After the preload, most people, myself included, thought we'd be able to play. Boy were we wrong. Right at the start we were told that MKX would be testing a new preloading process where the game would be installed in the background while still being able to play some of the content. And we were, we just weren't able to go past the main menu. Eventually we did get more and more of the game, but even then we weren't able to access story mode or online play.
The problems didn't end there, though. Even after we finally did get full access to content, the game was littered with problems. Terrible netcode making online a lag fest, horrendous frame rate drops on some stages and a memory leak that crashed the game after playing it for a while are just a few of many things that made the game nearly unplayable.
Just over a month in, there have been a few patches. But many of the problems plaguing the game still remain unchecked, including the memory leak. For some, regardless of hardware specifications or in game settings, the game still remains almost unplayable in some respects.
And if that wasn't bad enough, the latest patch (Which Ed Boon smugly guaranteed would be 'just as good as the console versions') deleted everyone's saved progress, causing High Voltage Studios to roll back the patch and then patch it all over again less than a day later.
Needless to say, players were pissed off about having to start all over again. To their credit, HVS did give players all Krypt items for free, but the damage was done. They've alienated many folks, including me, from even wanting to play the game anymore because the elephant in the room still isn't being addressed.
Mortal Kombat X is just one of many, many games out there with terrible development issues. But that isn't all that's giving the industry or gaming a bad rap. Bad story lines, repetitive sequels, ever more expensive consoles and little if any innovation have quite a bit to do with the industry being in the creative slump that it's in.
But you know who else is giving gaming a bad rap? Gamers. Yeah, you heard me. Gamers. It's gotten so bad thanks to GamerGate that some folks are ashamed to even be associated with the word. Yes, that includes me.
With each generation of games and consoles naturally players are expecting more and more out of their games, but these days it's gotten to the point where gamers are acting like entitled children. This, I think, is where video game journalism deserves at least some of the blame. Developers and review websites alike have a tendency to exaggerate almost every single game or console as 'the next big thing' in video games.
That might have been true with the jump from...say, the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis to the Playstation and Nintendo 64 to the PS2, Dreamcast, GameCube and original XBox, but we really haven't seen too many changes since the release of the 6th generation consoles (PS2, and other consoles mentioned above).
The other bit that needs to be addressed is the fact that companies, both small and large are bribing writers for favorable reviews. GamerGaters accuse female developers of doing this by...you guessed it, sleeping with reviewers, which was later proven to be false. Even if it were true, that's no excuse for the sick behavior by GamerGate that has followed since.
If that wasn't bad enough, female game critics are under constant harassment by internet personalities from various forms of social media. All this because a small, whiny group of gamers think women and feminists are trying to take their video games away from them. Newsflash: If your games weren't taken away from you because people thought they were too violent in the early to mid 90's, it's probably not going to happen now.
Let's just face the fact that when it comes to video games and the industry, there just isn't much to cheer about these days. Instead of going after female indie developers and critics while, again, ignoring the elephant in the room: The obsession with corporate profits. Every industry has this problem, video games included.
Most of us are sick and tired of a small group of angry, misogynist man-children with a bull horn telling us what they think will destroy video gaming as a whole when those of us who have been around long enough can figure it out for ourselves. We don't need a faceless internet group backed by right-wing interests like Breitbart or the American Enterprise Institute to speak for us.
These folks need to grow up and realize that every art form that has ever existed has faced similar criticism. Video games just happen to be the latest in a long line of art forms that have faced criticism and controversy, and it won't be the last. Bitching about people you don't like or who disagree with you and calling them SJW™ won't change that fact.
Sorry for the long winded, and probably irrelevant rant, but I'm just sick of one of my hobbies being constantly under fire from idiocy, rampant sexism, poor development, tainted reviews and the obsession with profits over actual content. That's what really needs to be addressed.
See you around,
Homer