So there is a new game on Steam greenlight called Revolution 60. Its made by Giant Spacekat, a name you should know well because the company is headed by Brianna Wu. Brianna gained notoriety when she stood up for Zoe Quinn who was being harassed by the then fledgling #gamergate movement. As a result Brianna has been targeted heavily by the movement and it was her defiance that made me truly aware of just how widespread this movement is. In fact if you go back to my first blog about #gamergate you will see her blog linked.
Now Revolution 60 normally isn't my kind of game, I'll be honest. But from what I saw of the preview the story and voice acting are top-notch. In my view it's okay to allow certain gameplay elements to falter as long as they can be supported by good story. Anymore games are literally interactive movies and a game without some kind of backstory just doesn't interest me anymore. I even forgave SWTOR's shoddy gameplay because the single player campaign story lines are just so good its hard not to get emotionally invested in them.
#gamergate, however, does not share my enthusiasm for story. In fact going by the comments under the steam greenlight page you'd think no one who supports #gamergate gives a rat's ass about the quality of the game. They want Brianna Wu to fail. They want her to go away. They want her dead, dead, dead. Okay sure, occasionally someone says "I support #gamergate and I think this is a crappy game." but more often than not someone is telling Brianna off and even dropping threats. They don't want this game to succeed because she made it, not because of it's quality.
This is hypocritical because lately the battle cry of #gamergate has shifted to "don't tell me what games I can play." They have tried to paint feminists as some kind of video game dictatorship that will force all gamers to play games based on My Little Pony, Barbie or the Bratz dolls. They scream, cry and complain about how feminists are ruining games because nothing new is any good anymore. To them, gaming is dying because of (gasp!) a heavy reliance on story telling.
Now don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with mindless entertainment. Men and Women alike flock to League of Legends, a game I just picked up recently and for me it was easy to see why. The gameplay is really, really good. Its the kind of game anyone, of any skill level can pick up and become competitive at. It also takes a lot of skill and knowledge of character classes to really become one of the game's great masters. But as far as story goes there really isn't any. The characters have a brief lore page and that's about it. That doesn't at all stop LoL from being a truly great game.
But let's face facts. With technology being what it is we are capable of creating games with graphical quality that is almost life like. For most developers what that means is you have a brand new territory to push games into. Game developers today are probably of an age where they are familiar with the Choose Your Own Adventure line of books. In these books you didn't just start at page one and stop at the last page. Every so often you had a choice to make and depending on that choice you flipped to a new page of the book. Make different choices and the story unfolds very, very differently. To anyone who has played Mass Effect or the Dragon Age series this probably sounds very familiar.
While the days of "bang, bang, shoot em up" style video games are fading into the past #gamergaters are crying foul. Those are the games they knew and loved. They see more and more often that games are relying on story and they are getting pissed. They need a boogeyman or more specifically, a boogeywoman to vent their frustrations out on. They don't want to change to fit into the new landscape, they want all of US to change to fit into THEIR ideal.
Fuck that. Don't tell me what games I can play.