Nobody Hates Video Games More Than Gamers.

Imagine going to a sportsball game where you get to see your favorite sportsball team sport some balls. You’re super pumped to see a showdown between them and their opponents. “Woo! Sports!” you yell as the ball is sported, probably from one end of a field to the other.

Now imagine that you notice everyone around you is having a terrible time. They are booing both teams while talking about how terrible their ten dollar beers they purchased of their own free will are. As a nice little cherry on top, it’s very clear that these people are season pass holders who will be here for every single game to bask in their misery.

That would be a ridiculous situation, right!? I agree, but I pretty much feel like that’s the state of a good chunk of the gaming population.

Loving to Hate What They Love

E3 took place this past week, and as I watched each press conference live, I became more and more disappointed in the chat comments. Everyone was shitting on everything being shown. For every person expressing excitement over what was going on, there were ten spewing negativity faster than I could even read the feed. “Trash” was one of the most common words I saw. This overall attitude of hatred towards the very thing these people supposedly love isn’t just limited to E3. Any time a gaming-related news article, trailer, or screenshot is released, it’s sent through the metaphorical meat grinder by people who apparently only know death and suffering and aren’t capable of experiencing joy. Seeing this trend of behavior leads me to ask one simple and profound question…

What the fuck, guys?

Are there really that many masochists in this world that they get their enjoyment out of consuming things they hate? Should I start ordering the worst looking item on restaurant menus to reach some kind of ass-backwards catharsis? I must be doing life wrong. This may sound completely crazy, but I play video games to enjoy and appreciate them. If I dive into one and discover that I’m not having fun, I accept that the game isn’t for me and I switch to a different one.

Masking Entitlement as Passion

This isn’t the first time I have complained about this subject. And yes, I admit I’m complaining, but hopefully it’ll get at least one person to stop and consider my point. In the past, people have countered my point by saying that their negativity is a result of them being passionate about the thing they are pissing all over. You know what we call that? We call that bullshit. It’s the same excuse I see used by Star Wars fans who haven’t liked one of the movies since Return of the Jedi. If you complain and find reasons to hate the last four Halo or Assassin’s Creed games, you aren’t passionate about that series. You’re spoiled. You’re making a statement that you will not like something unless it is exactly what you want it to be.

Developers have to maximize sales of their games. They are businesses and money is important to them. The best way to maximize sales is to create a product that will appeal to as many people as possible, and that means they can’t completely please everyone.

Anyone remember Halo Reach? It had these neat little things called armor abilities. Without going into too much detail, there was an ability called Armor Lock that I hated with a burning passion. People abused it to be annoying in online multiplayer. It even ruined the fun of some matches for me. But you know what? I love Reach. It’s still a great game, despite a feature that I see as a flaw. Meanwhile, there were people who took a great big poop on the game because of something as tiny as the reticle bloom on the DMR. I hope those people never have kids because they’ll put them up for adoption if they so much as have an oddly-shaped birth mark. If a game isn’t perfect, it’s dead to them.

I mean that last statement literally. One of the more humorous aspects of this awful trend is gamers’ tendencies to proclaim that a game or series is dead simply because they don’t like it. Cries for developers to just quit now after their latest “failure” ring loud from the keyboards of these cheeto-dusted rebels. How will these developers ever recover from such hostile attacks? Probably from the massive amounts of money they rake in from said failures.

Remember Destiny 2? That game has lost a lot of players (myself included) because of some arguably very poor business and design decisions post-launch. Milking players for money with shady microtransaction tactics and delivering disappointing amounts of content didn’t sit well with gamers. Since launch, I’ve heard proclamations from every corner of the gaming community that Destiny 2 is dead. I hate to break it to those people, but they’re more than a little bit wrong. The game is very much alive, albeit with a smaller player-base than launch, which saw a massive amount of people jumping in to play. But that doesn’t matter. Most nay-sayers were saying nay before launch day.

Clairvoyance

That’s right. Some gamers are so incredibly hard to please that they decide whether they like a game (spoiler: they do not like it) well before it’s even released. True, BioWare’s Anthem isn’t even out yet, but that’s not stopping a stupid amount of trash talking from being pumped out of peoples’ fat fingertips.

They don’t stop there, either. If you are a poor unfortunate soul who has the audacity to express excitement over an upcoming game, they will immediately tell you why you are wrong. That’ll teach you to like stuff!

An Open Invitation

Speaking of liking stuff, I have a challenge for all the Negative Necrons out there. Try to see the good in games. Focus on the fun parts and maybe you will realize that they far outweigh the bad parts. If you’re in a forest and one or two trees are dead, the forest isn’t ugly. Those trees are. Don’t let them make you hate nature.

Still disagree with me? That’s fine, but go do something else. Go on a walk. Read a book. Play some retro games that you actually do like. Just stop pretending to be a fan of games and stop bringing down the rest of us.