No platform is good for gaming under capitalism. The majority of pain doesn’t come from the platform choice itself anyway; it comes from the gradual conversion of video games into something like a digital combination of arcades and casinos, where gameplay is made to have as little differentiation from spending money as possible while still retaining player interest. “Gamers” get treated as semi-sentient wallets.
When their legitimate concerns are expressed with outrage, they get dismissed as “taking entertainment too seriously.” When these same concerns are expressed with polite attempts to provide constructive criticism, do compliment sandwiches, and generally “be nice” about it (which is the majority of complaints expressed), they get almost no results at all because they typically have little to no power in the equation. They come to learn that kicking up a shitstorm of bad PR for a company is often the only way to get anything to change because it forces the company to contend with their broader public image. Still, this tactic is rarely used in practice because gamers are largely unorganized, their outrage rarely in agreement about what the most pressing issues are, and even among those who might otherwise join them in it, some of them are so obsessed with tone and their own reputation, they’d rather disavow outrage of fellow gamers than associate with it. All it takes is a company to claim (without evidence) that someone got a “death threat” and you can have a bunch of people doing an about face and giving up on their own concerns to go disavow a given game “community” as going too far.
Why couldn’t I have been into rock climbing or something instead?
No platform is good for gaming under capitalism. The majority of pain doesn’t come from the platform choice itself anyway; it comes from the gradual conversion of video games into something like a digital combination of arcades and casinos, where gameplay is made to have as little differentiation from spending money as possible while still retaining player interest. “Gamers” get treated as semi-sentient wallets.
When their legitimate concerns are expressed with outrage, they get dismissed as “taking entertainment too seriously.” When these same concerns are expressed with polite attempts to provide constructive criticism, do compliment sandwiches, and generally “be nice” about it (which is the majority of complaints expressed), they get almost no results at all because they typically have little to no power in the equation. They come to learn that kicking up a shitstorm of bad PR for a company is often the only way to get anything to change because it forces the company to contend with their broader public image. Still, this tactic is rarely used in practice because gamers are largely unorganized, their outrage rarely in agreement about what the most pressing issues are, and even among those who might otherwise join them in it, some of them are so obsessed with tone and their own reputation, they’d rather disavow outrage of fellow gamers than associate with it. All it takes is a company to claim (without evidence) that someone got a “death threat” and you can have a bunch of people doing an about face and giving up on their own concerns to go disavow a given game “community” as going too far.
Why couldn’t I have been into rock climbing or something instead?