What’s With All The Hate?

Posted by Stropp on June 3, 2009

I’ve been reading about the lawsuit that Richard Garriot has initiated against NCSoft alleging some naughty behaviour by them regarding the circumstances of his departure. Behavior that allegedly cost him millions of dollars. Fair enough if what he says is true, I reckon, NCSoft should be held to account. But…

In reading these articles I’ve delved into the dark murky depths of the comment sections and some of the comments there are not so friendly.

There seems to be a lot of hate directed Garriot’s way because of the failure of Tabula Rasa. A lot of people have taken offence for what seem to be a bunch of different reasons.

• Tabula Rasa didn’t end up as good as it was hyped. (It joins a growing club here.)
• Richard Garriot did his space trip at the wrong time. (What would have been the right time I wonder.)
• Tabula Rasa would have been better had it not taken years longer to develop. (That’s debatable I think.)

The overall sentiment seems to be, hey, this guy screwed up the game I was looking forward too, he should: a) be driven from the game industry never to develop a game again. b) be punished for letting me down. c) rot in hell. d) all of the above.

Bill Roper and team faced the same level of criticism when Hellgate London tanked. I saw a phenomenal number of nasty remarks directed at Roper at the time. A lot of them, completely irrelevant, were directed at his weight. What that has to do with game development skill is beyond me.

The crazy thing about this is that the critics seem to have forgotten who these men are.

Garriot has been highly influential not only in the development of a few games, but in the development of an entire genre of computer games. The Ultima series didn’t start as a MMORPG you know. It was a series of well designed, and highly loved single player role playing games beginning back in the early 1980’s. Garriot has been described as one of the most influential computer game designers in the history of video games.

Roper can also be considered one of the influential figures in the computer game history. He has been involved in the development of both Diablo’s, the Warcraft RPGs, and the Starcraft games, all at Blizzard. Tell me that any of those games didn’t set standards in the video game industry.

So both of these guys, after a long string of successes, develop a couple of games (separately) that fail.

Wow. The critics must be right. They’re complete and utter failures. After all, no-one else in the history of humankind has failed before, especially not these critics, right?

I know that gamers are passionate about their games. Hey, I don’t like seeing our hobby misrepresented. I’ve posted about MMOFUD often enough here for you to know that. But people, we need to grow up and stop taking the failures of others as personal attacks on the very fibre of our souls. The sort of fanboi criticism I’m seeing thrown at veteran game developers is the sort of thing that the Simpson’s character, Comic Book Guy does. CBG is the epitome of the stereotype angry gamer.

Do we really want to be seen as the insecure parents-basement dwelling nerd, or would you prefer that we are seen as mature open-minded people who like games?

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