How Can I Live With Myself?

In as many days, I’ve seen two articles which have, in my opinion, attempted to shame gamers into believing that what they enjoy, and why they enjoy it, is total bullshit.

The first was an article on Jonathan Blow in The Atlantic. You will probably know Blow as the creator of Braid, a platformer that received a lot of press for how “smart” it was. The article is entitled “The Most Dangerous Gamer”, and opens with a paragraph that illustrates that “Blow” is not just a guy’s last name; it’s three pages of written fellatio, sewn together with the author’s uninhibited disgust of the gaming industry. The second article, written by an indie developer and specifically talking about the dissonance between massive corporate PR booths and the smaller “honest” indie booths at PAX East, is a kind of…I really don’t know how to explain it, but after reading it (twice) I felt that the author drove by me as I was walking my dog, threw a bucket of mud on me, and screamed “How do you like it now, sheep?!” before tear-assing off down the road.

Now, look. There are many adages that we can apply here. I think the overriding choice is “to each his/her own”. “Live and let live” is another. “Mind your own fucking business” is certainly on the table as well, but what is not available for debate: people like these are not the proverbial Morpheus offering us a blue pill to counter the gaming industry’s red pill. There is no fucking “wake up call” that these people are sounding, because the rest us of aren’t asleep; we just enjoy the things that they so obviously hate, and by extension, they’re hating us for liking them.

The part that these folks conveniently overlook is that people like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft because they like them! That’s all! No conspiracy! Just as Mr. Indie-Pusher or Monsieur Arthouse likes playing their top-down shooters made in someone’s basement, or YAAP (Yet Another Artistic Platformer) created in the San Francisco Weekend Game Jam, I am really looking forward to Halo 4. I liked Skyrim because it entertained me. It’s my choice to make my choice, and I don’t make it because corporate execs and PR reps kidnap me in the middle of the night and force me to watch cinematic trailers until I commit to buying and pushing their product, or because the Max Payne 3 booth at PAX East was so goddamn gargantuan that it blotted out The Future.

The thing is – and I’ve written about this before – I can’t get all hyper for indie or “artsy” products just because A) someone says they’re counter to the mainstream, B) someone browbeats me into supporting the “little guy”, or C) because it’s considered hip or trendy. I have to like what I’m doing if I’m going to elect to spend my free time doing it, and not because someone has an axe to grind with The Establishment and is trying to foment revolution by basically insulting my friends and me in an effort to position themselves as Champion of Highbrow. Make something other than a top-down shooter, a physics-based platform, or an RPG that looks like you ripped a DS cart and packed it up for the PC. Quaint or retro or artistic is preferred by some people, but pretentiousness puts off a hell of a lot more, and I’d rather play “Desaturated Manshooter of Ghost Honor 4” than to support a community of self-absorbed pricks just because they think insulting my taste is a surefire way to win me over.