The Patreon Letters - 07th October, 2017

Hey friends, it’s Jackson and for the letter this week I bring sad, sad news. We opened our suggestion box for next month - there’s still plenty of room for suggestions!! please give us some, we'll love you forever! - and the first suggestion for next month’s game club was simply to cover a golf game, so M cooked up a plan to play Tiger 12 together in the evenings, and report back on our experience. Tiger 12 is the best golf game that EA ever made, it’s a very pleasant way to spend an hour or so, and so I was extremely on board for this idea of turning it into a little routine for our game club. If it won the poll, it would be a kind of different approach for us and it would lead to an interesting episode. This plan was tragically cut short as we discovered that the servers are going offline in three weeks. The DLC courses - which apparently is a huge bulk of the game - haven’t been available for purchase in multiple years.

We could, technically, still play this game offline and on skype and figure something out, but we want our game clubs to be generally accessible. Just as we generally don’t play brand new, expensive video games for the game club, we also don’t want to play games that don’t fully exist anymore. There’s not much point in discussing something if people can’t play along. And this isn’t a new phenomenon, servers have been regularly taken down for over a decade now, games are regularly delisted from online stores, but I don’t think we’ve really felt the full brunt of the damage that this is going to do to games spaces.

This week reviews dropped for Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, a game in which orcs are given procedurally generated personalities in order to make enslaving them more fun. You build your army of orc slaves to fight Sauron’s army of orc slaves, so that fortresses pass from the bad orcs (his) to the good orcs (yours). Eventually your orcs stand supreme and you ‘finish’ the game. After that, however, the game shifts to an endless post-game of defending and attacking fortresses, which by all reports is designed to either require hours upon hours of grinding, or to encourage the player to throw money into lootboxes. There is a true ending hidden behind this mode.

This is fucked up. It is very common in games in 2017, but it’s important we acknowledge that it is fucked up and move forward from there. After most players have had their fill and moved on, the game becomes a gambling trap for those that love the game. And I don’t mean to single it out, this is just the new normal at games of this scale and has been for a while. Halo 5’s big new mode revolved around purchasable packs of consumable cards. NBA 2K18 ties literally everything from unlocking skills to new clothes into one purchasable currency that you earn way too slow in game.

Things also aren’t going to get better on their own, and the only way they can is by being very clear about what is actually going on. Like any capitalist industry, Games is an industry of exploitation. Workers are exploited with awful conditions like crunch and a culture that fights against unionization at every turn, and players are exploited by the games themselves in order to wring as much money out of them as possible. I say this because the largest resistance to lootboxes/microtransactions in games spaces is that of consumer rights, and it doesn’t sit well with me. Crunch, the lack of unions, the fact that most games get to 50% off in months, the switch from microtransactions to straight up gambling, old games straight up disappearing without proper archival: none of this exists in a vacuum. Hell, that the main language for advocacy against the garbage of capitalism in video games is “consumer rights” speaks to just how deep in the hole we are.

So where do we go from here? Well, the main argument of this letter is that it’s not by fighting against any one thing. Getting mad at lootboxes isn’t going to stop lootboxes. Being cynical about game reviews isn’t going to fix game reviews. But this week on the Giant Beastcast, Vinny talked about how his kid played the SNES Classic and didn’t - unlike people on the podcast suspected - really give a shit about the fact the games were old and weird. Vinny’s kid isn’t an outlier for this, he’s just not drowning in a games spaces where financial and cultural forces dictate the conversation week in week out. And we can do our best to cultivate that for ourselves, and if we have them, our audiences. Heather Alexandra regularly streams older games at Kotaku, so do the Giant Bomb playdates, so do a whole plethora of youtubers, podcasts, anything. Once we branch out from the crushing single-feed discourse hell of our twitter timelines it’s obvious this isn’t rare, obvious that things can easily be better.

Which is why it sucks so much that Tiger 12 is going offline. One day Shadow of War will go offline too, so will NBA, so will the entire online network for the PS3 and 360. The companies that make these games would be much happier if we couldn’t go back, if we all had to live in the lootbox hole, and as games become more and more reliant on persistent server connections, stepping outside is going to become more and more difficult. So shout out to everyone fighting against the awful capitalist tides of games culture; to everyone who stood in solidarity with the VGA strike, to the developers who want to push for unionization, who speak out against killing yourself with crunch, to people playing, streaming, recording old games, trying to write criticism outside of topical hot takes, to those developing emulation technology. We might not win - let’s be real, we probably won’t win. But you’re why I still play games, still hang around in games spaces, and still talk about them constantly.

We can’t spend all our time fighting, but we can all be someone’s reason to stick around.

Jackson <3