Gamespot.com posted a very interesting article, I believe people should read about the vicious verbal attack at the hands of gamers.
Warning: May contain strong language.
"The Dangers of Gamer Entitlement "
Props to StormShade for posting this on Twitter.
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I can't help but see the relevance towards our own community here considering events that happened not so long ago.
Comments
I'd go with the latter
Yeah. I'd imagine most of those spewing this type of venom are stay-at-home basement dwellers. The rest of us with real lives have more important things to get enraged over.
Not OK...
I can't speak for thoose people... But a rule of thumb for me is: if you can't do it in real life, don't do it on the interwebs either...
I am just as much a provokative a***ole off the net as I am in here... But at least I am the same guy anywhere I go.
But in the end, I am pretty sure they are just some poor loosers living in their moms basement who need a way to channel their lack of personal self respect.
It's real life. They just can't express it there without getting the TRIBBLE kicked out of them.
No, this behaviour is true for any consumer market, not just games. The writer may just be ignorant of this because she is a gaming magazine journalist. Anyone who has worked in a customer support role knows what Im talking about. Im pretty sure the author had a predetermined conclusion which is why her conclusion, gamer entitlement, is completely misleading and quite frankly wrong.
The truth is this article doesnt speak to anything we see here on the STO forums. The fighting that is going on here is of a completely different type. Prior to the late 2011 F2P ruckus I never saw any massive hate for this game. To say that this sudden surge in anger puts the STO fans in a special group labelled as dangerous due to entitlement is a grave mistake, both for Cryptic and the gaming community.
Sorry, but this article is just unproductive. The event is unfortunate for Mrs. Helper, I definitely agree with that. But this is a classic example of a journalist not doing her homework and predetermining the conclusion before it was written. There are no experts in this article, no out-side the industry analysts, no data, just an article about Bioware, twitter feeds, and some fan-made comments. Dont blindly follow the authors conclusion before doing your own research.
^^^ THIS.
There are already rules in place to deal with the extreme violations of posting regarding the name-calling that Bioware employees have to endure on Reddit and Twitter. But this article tries to take that and lump it in with valid criticism, valid negative feedback, and essentially suggest that the company has every right to ignore and antagonize their customers.
They absolutely do. But that is unproductive for the company and the customers.
Bad customer service will bite you in the butt in the end. Customers have entitlement for a reason. They paid for goods and services. If they feel they received bad service, they react.
If that reaction involves curse words and threats, there's already rules in place to deal with and filter that out. But that doesn't change the rest of the feedback.
In short, yes people feel entitled to the products they purchase.
I got so irritated with it, I posted a thread on the PvP forums and someone replied that when I hit the "submit" button for my post, I definetly was awarded dark side points...ROFL...
So glad to be back here in STO where players treat others nicely for the most part...
Anyone ever see the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back movie where they hunt down the screen name ppl talking smack on their website...heh heh...:)
Between then and now I rarely dared open my mouth in gaming communities until STO came along and I found the forums were somewhat comfortable.
Still a nice amount of good players out there...but wow...did most of our community, an now with the addition of f2p, go down hill.
Well... maybe because they are new so they are nice xD
I've mainly seen drive-by trolls. Even the threadnaughts end up being the same three or four people going in circles. I wouldn't say it is community-wide.
There's a lot of players who were in the beta and around at launch that no longer play the game. Or no longer have access to the forums for whatever reason.
There is a very pertinent Penny Arcade comic that I won't link to due to strong language.
It is not just gamers. It is a social issue as a whole.
Consider how folks would of responded say 10 years ago, and then go back 10 years into that. Society itself is doing the "teaching" of what is acceptable. Its that very fabric that molds folks into the behaviors they exhibit.
I can show you many instances of this in other products.
Here's a fact from the article.
"This week, a small subset of the gaming community"
KK thanks for the info. We don't even have any input from Jennifer. Just some stuff Laura makes up for her. So thanks for tossing some gasoline on the fire. Very helpful.
Speaking of skippable cutscenes, how come Cryptic has forgotten to do that ever since the first Featured Episode series that has them? And hasn't fixed the episodes they've released without them?
It's not so much that I don't care about the story, but since we're funneled into replaying them on all our characters in a short period of time to get that "bonus" reward at the end....lengthy, inskippable cutscenes are kind of a downer.
Sorry, I've been around since 2 weeks after the original 2009 closed beta launched, through open beta, etc - and sorry, the forum comminity was just as volitile as it us today (Hell, more than one person was taking shots at Kestrel's writing ability; calling for her firing, etc - and again, this was in 2009 closed beta.)
Overall, though the STO ciommunity has been overall more literate overall, and in general FAR less combative then most other MMO communities. (Yes, there are alwats exceptions and a few who go off th deep end at the reading of something they don't like/agree with; but that's less common here.
Still, after some of the threads and doomsayer comments in 2009 closed bet and STO headstart, I myself wouldn't classify it as 'near-utopian' by any stretch. YMMV.
As bad as that is, what makes things worse is the fallout for those who propose reasonable arguments with merit. Human beings already have a staggering propensity toward confirmation bias, dismissing data which runs contrary to their beliefs instead of examining it and weighing it accordingly. When the voices being heard are usually the ones that scream the most inflammatory rhetoric the loudest it just makes it so much easier to tune out everyone who disagrees with you. Any opposition becomes quickly viewed as invalid and simply filed away as more of "those people."
Here's one to try on for size. Think about how folks dissatisfied with their customer service would have responded to a female sales rep in 1952 or 1962 or 1972. I mean, if we're using a wayback machine, let's use it.
Some of the offensive language would have been different, but the sexism and offensiveness would have been ramped up a bit due to the way society was back then.
Food for thought.
Wow. I think you just described how Gozer's commentary about the content drought went, and how Geko's twitter comments went. That's quite a powerful point you make since it sheds some light on the whole two-way street that communication can be.
I don't post much, due to peoples personal issues getting vented out on-line at anyone. Back when I played SWG it happened a lot. Players get a little too ahead of themselves and start dictating instructions to Devs and Community Reps.
I agree though, it's not just on-line that this happens. Without getting into the ugly details of it all, this happens at my work alot. See I work for a customer serivce based company so the idea of "The Customer is Always Right" is a statement I get told alot. Truth is the customers are not always right, they may have good ideas, but it's outside of what can be done. Explaining this to them is a no-no, since a few customer complaints can cost you your job.
I have "learned" the art of gental debate inorder to allow a customer to tell me that "It's Easy", while not hurting their feelings when I explain the truth to them. It's hard and if you take it too personally it can hurt. Sometimes though you'll get a person that for whatever reason just wants to be a pain. It's a little different in-person then on-line, but not by much (at least from what I've seen and delt with)
I often read the forums (not just this one) and think, "wow I can't believe this person is acting like they own the company or something". This article really shows the bad side of this behavior, but it's just "Cyber Bullying" by a powerless group towards a captive person (the community reps) I never understood this in real-life, nor on-line.
Yeah I know alot to read (you should have read some of me posts on SGW, TOR, or even STO back when Pep was doing it).
I am in my 40's and I can assure you that in the 70's you were still expected to be polite in commercial discourse. You couldn't usually get away with the overt rudeness you see today. The article is correct and unfortunately it's not just online (although it is worse there) it's been seeping into culture for at least 20 years.
"The customer is always right" may be a useful business policy but it's a poison in our culture.
People who claim to be fans of a genre or medium and police a genre or medium for standards tend to actlike obscene jerks.
A lot of this boils down to "what constitutes a game." I've seen the exact thing with "what makes a good movie", "what makes a good horror/action/children's movie", "what makes a good comic book" etc.
Nothing good can come of classify the essential parts of what a product must have. This goes for developers and it goes for fans.
Stop trying to pigeonhole things with features X, Y, and Z.
This is a bunch of label bashing. I've seen academics do it. And the folks doing it, on both sides, on Twitter are just engaged in a vulgar version of it.
What happened is:
BioWare employee challenged the definition of games and suggested that story can be more important than skill. Which is a valid, if extreme, position to occupy in game design. That isn't to say ALL games need to be like that but all she suggested was that some games could be that way.
Enter a cavalcade of people insisting "games must be X" and using lots of vulgarity to get attention.
I think it's very easy to focus on the gender issues or the abuse but I think you're burying the lead there by doing that. Ever since the inception of the FPS, really since the inception of competitive gameplay, people have behaved badly to one another in their discussion of games. I'm more interested in what that discussion is than the tone it's taken.
This whole thing echoes the ludologists crying fowl and claiming that the narratologists are colonizing their media while in turn many ludologists started insisting their game/symbolic interaction focus should replace traditional literary analysis. It's the same set of arguments except the crassness and accusations of discrimination are a bit reversed here. Here, it's the crude ludologists accusing the "feminist" narratologist of invading their game whereas in academia, the narrative focused people are accused of being patriarchs invading the feminine world of symbolic social interaction and conflict.
In essence, here you have gamers saying story over combat is girly. In academia, you have more people suggesting that combat/sandbox play is refreshingly girly and that a focus on story is the patriarchy coming in to oppress the triumph of feminine bloodsport.
The flaw, I think, lies in attempting to define and defend cultural products such as games as one thing more than another. A choose your own adventure movie is a game. Tetris is also a game. Being a game shouldn't involve excluding things that aren't gamelike in their focus nor should it require the embrace of things that are gamelike. Products should have integrity to what they do and illustrate a model of self-consistent excellence.
Don't set out to define what a game must be. Or what a good movie must be. That's fundamentalism. It will make you look bad and do bad things if you cling to that kind of thinking ahead of things like civility and respect for diversity of opinions, products, and artistic works.
Where the entitlement comes in is the assumption that every game that comes out with a brand you like is intended for you or that you should have a right to some kind of revenge if it turns out not to be.
The questions I pose are:
What is our "indentity"?
What do we want our "identity" to be?
What can we do to make the two become one?
These are the questions that all communities have been thrust upon themselves since the begining of civilization. It's time that we (in STO) answer them for ourselves.
There's nothing wrong with the customer always being right. People just get confused about to what extent they're the customer and whether they're being courted as the customer.
If you don't feel like you're being courted as a customer based on a company's actions, you're probably not being courted... and you're probably not right anymore.
You have to be the customer to be "always right" and however much you've spent, your customer status is always up for renegotiation.
no, thats just because of your avatar.
I'm pretty sure sexism and rudeness existed in the 1970s. Granted I was still very very young back then. But I'm pretty sure those things did happen.