Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen. It's astounding. Someone wants to create something, and there's just so much hate and negativity on something that people didn't even pay for.
I've seen it on HN also. Someone creates a thing, and then people pour out of the woodwork to lump horrible criticism. No one is asking for blind praise for what they create, but surely there's a middle ground between blind praise and mob bullying?
This is one of the main reasons I was happy to leave the game industry after eight years of doing it.
Working incredibly hard to build a product served to a group of people that are often hurtful emotionally stunted man-children is just a deeply demoralizing experience.
Obviously, many gamers aren't like that. But a fucking whole lot of them are, and they are extremely vocal, and it doesn't take many of them to suck the joy out of the job.
Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there?
Unfortunately, I think games themselves often encourage this mentality. Most games are about making the player feel empowered inside a virtual universe that exists purely for their own exploitation and satisfaction. The whole point of playing games is to get an escape from the consequences of our actions.
People that are strongly drawn to that or spend too much time in that mindset are basically training themselves for a toxic mindset when it comes to interacting with actual humans.
"entitlement simulators" what? I'm sorry but how are Fortnite, Call of Duty, Elden Ring, Minecraft, etc entitlement simulators? That's really scraping the bottom of the barrel for a narrative there. Lol at "speedrunning" being an indicator of colonialism impulse. It's as if the author of that talk is looking at the world through entitlement tinted glasses, heavily steeped in anti-colonialism and postmodernism and cannot see anything but.
Any time you run any kind of business, whether it's retail or video game production, your most vocal feedback will be negative. People are 10x more likely to complain about a bad experience than rave about a good experience. Social media just makes it easier to amplify the negative feedback, since it's far more likely to go viral. Add to that the fact that people can get clout and even earn their own following from doing entertaining takedowns of bad games and you get an adversarial attention economy that people pick up on. You really have to develop a thick skin and roll with the punches.
But I know Minecraft because my children play this game. To understand the game dynamics, I played Minecraft for a few days and watched Youtube videos and consumed other contents about the game. I am sure I don't know many subtleties and the Minecraft subculture, but this is not neccessary to understand what "entitlement simulator" means:
I watched how my son casually killed a villager's llama then did not even pick up the remains.
I asked him why he killed that animal in the game. It seemed to belong to someone!
He was genuinely surprised by my question.
Now I understand why he killed the llama. He had power. He had entitlement. He did it just because he could. Minecraft gave him freedom.
I need to understand this because I don't want this attitude near me in real life. Luckily my son seems to know the difference between the game world and real life.
But, wow, was I very surprised by the callousness of that action!!
You play video games for long enough and the symbol of "llama" wears off and it starts to become a symbol of "crafting ingredient for this recipe I need" and then later on it becomes "a series of button presses on the road to a speed run goal".
The callousness is not against the animal. The callousness is against an uncaring mathematical system he wants to get through and towards his own goals.
He doesn't see llamas in the real world as a mathematical abstraction, nor does he see human ownership of animals as arbitrary developer code.
That's not your son being entitled, that's him being entertained in a sandbox. Even without video games your kid will stand up action figures and kill some of them with the others. Even without action figures at some point he'll play a game where killing is part of the play. Even animals in the animal kingdom do mock battles with their fellow lion cubs and wolf pups. It's completely natural.
If your son thought he was "entitled" to that place it would be a form of entitlement.
Most children start out feeling entitled. Learning that the world doesn't exist for their benefit is something that is learned. Even games teach you the concept. The game doesn't care about your goals and won't modify it's rules just so you can reach those goals. You learn while playing the game that there is a system there you need to work within. You can learn to exploit that system to reach your goals but the system itself won't modify itself to meet your goals. Games don't teach entitlement they teach you how to understand and adapt to a specific system to reach your goals.
The whole point of video games is to get to do things you can't do in real life, and explore what kind of person you are through that experience.
When a video game presents you with a verb, a possible action you can perform, in this case to cause damage to what's in front of you, of course players will experiment what happens when they use that verb on pretty much everything.
Do you also experience moral panic when you erase a pencil drawing of a llama? That's what your son did. He erased a symbolic representation from the virtual canvas of his Minecraft world.
This is a recognized phenomenon. Games are simulations of reality, almost always with softer rules, and players are essentially gods within that simulation.
> Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there?
Replace the word 'bar' with 'school' and this sounds like a write-up of my much of my pre-university experience.
I'm convinced that junior high and high school, at least in the US, amount to mass child abuse. Like, structurally, that's just what they are, almost unavoidably without totally changing how they work.
Even decent school experiences are, by the standards of the adult world, crazy-bad.
How many people have anxiety-nightmares for a decade or more after graduating high school? How many unavoidable experiences in life so consistently generate that kind of thing? How many develop sleep disorders in school, that follow them for life? Depression? They're really, really bad.
I had a quite good school experience and that ~6-year span is still, as I approach 40, far and away the worst part of my life. It's not even close. Nothing else half that bad has lasted even one year, let alone six.
> I'm convinced that junior high and high school, at least in the US, amount to mass child abuse. Like, structurally, that's just what they are, almost unavoidably without totally changing how they work.
> Even decent school experiences are, by the standards of the adult world, crazy-bad.
Why is that? What is different about US schools?
I (nor my spouse) have any experience with US mid & high school but I hear things like this so I worry, having a young child now in the US, still many years away from high school.
In contrast, I can't think of anything bad about my (non-US) high school days. As a math geek I certainly wasn't in any hip group, but everyone was nice and it was a good experience. Now 30+ years later we're all still in touch and have reunions and meet whenever paths cross and remember those days fondly.
It's not just US schools. I have a distant relation in Norway who suffers severe bullying in her school. In contrast to the Portland schools my kids go to, teachers take a hands-off approach to bullying, believing that it's the kids' responsibility to resolve it themselves.
I was beat to the ground several times a month all of high school - often by 3 or 4 people. I took care of my friend after having been stabbed at a party. 2 of my friends were killed before I graduated. I’ve been shot at and had guns pulled on me “for fun”.
The education was terrible as well, but I don’t blame the teachers or staff. They were doing the best they could.
Outright bad schools in the US are incredibly bad. I had no idea how bad until my spouse substitute-taught at a couple of them, a few years back. Like, fear-for-your-life-every-day bad. Like, there's a 100% chance that at least one kid you're in class with will be in prison for killing a classmate before you graduate. That kind of bad. That's a whole other matter from completely ordinary US schools being a very bad experience, and far more grave. Those places are straight-up misery machines. Shameful monuments to our moral inadequacy.
I think the difference as far as how the problems might be addressed, is that ordinary schools are bad in ways that are basically on purpose, while the worst US schools are bad largely due to catastrophic society-wide failures that aren't really the school's fault, and hardly within their ability to even begin to fix.
- ~8 hours in school per day, often in buildings with minimal natural lighting. During the Winter, this may mean almost no sunlight all day (no recess, like in elementary school). Wanna make people depressed and give them SAD that'll stick with them long after they're adults? Just do this to them for a few years.
- Intense workload. We consider it bad when a job takes more than 8 hours a day from you. Schools routinely take 10 or more (math classes were the main culprit, at least in my case). Hope you don't have any other plans... oh look, many kids do, so now they're in actual hell.
- To add to the above: super-strict and rapid turnaround expectations on work. You cannot put something off until tomorrow because you're feeling really bad today—it was only assigned today, sure, but it's due tomorrow. Some stuff had longer timelines, but many things were the due-within-24-hours sort (again, largely math's fault, at least in my case)
- Bizarre mind games where people tell you insane stuff like "enjoy this, these are the best years of your life" and "you think this is bad, just wait until you're in the real world! This is just trying to get you ready for the expectations of adult life!" Like, I've not only worked cushy high-paid white-collar jobs, and I've never worked in an environment remotely as bad as school grades 7-12, nor with those kinds of strict expectations, nor with such inhumane treatment. When a workplace is consistently close to as bad as school, it's news (Amazon warehouses).
- Jail-like conditions. Need to stretch? Need a quick stroll for your legs? Need to take a piss? Beg the boss and hope they're in a good mood. Granted, some workplaces are like this too (again: Amazon warehouses), but most of those at least give you a couple 15-minute breaks in addition to your lunch (passing periods don't count, they're typically only 5 minutes and you'll spend most of that grabbing your stuff and getting from A to B)
- Sitting in classes all day is about as bad and mentally/physically exhausting as sitting in meetings all day, for similar reasons. Ask most people how they feel after a full day of meetings. Expand that to a whole week. Expand that whole week to 6 damn years. Yikes.
All of that is purely about the schools themselves, setting aside their strong tendency to foster awful, abusive, bullying dynamics that students cannot escape, both among students and staff. Or problems with school start times and teen sleep patterns (shit, as an adult I've rarely needed to wake up at 6:50 for anything, and if I did and I hated it I'd at least have some realistic hope of finding a way to change that pretty quickly)
I think all that makes it survivable (and I mean that literally) are the Summers and multiple long holiday breaks. When school's in session, it is brutal like few other involuntary (or de facto involuntary) activities are.
[EDIT] OH! And crazy-high expectations of self-organization and perfectionism. Here in the "real world", honest mistakes are taken in stride and my schedule and work-tracking are much simpler, plus I have a ton of support on those things. Even college tends to be far more lenient on those things than high school.
Again, I had a pretty damn good school experience, as those go, and my school wasn't one of those high-pressure ones you hear about in SV or wherever, and it was still terrible in these ways.
Covid has made this even worse, as they are not poorly ventilated disease pits.
I've met homeschooled kids. They are fine. A cousin was Waldorf schooled from K through 12. He's turned out great.
And what you describe is the better schools.
The bad schools are even worse. And the really really bad schools are even worse. People who live near them and can manage either move, or scrape the money to send the kids to Catholic or private schools.
Completely agree. Schools aren't built around what's best for people. They're a mass education system that aims to teach multiple tens if not hundreds or thousands of students all at once. To achieve that, they need all this prison-like organization to manage all those individuals. This also benefits parents who are out working during school hours. There are so many students they can't afford to know them personally and individually evaluate them, so they use these inhuman mass testing practices under artificial conditions. Applying those tests to the whole student body is too hard, so they do it infrequently which means mistakes have huge impact on evaluation which means nobody can afford to make and learn from mistakes.
I remember when I went to High School in France, I lived in the country side so it took an hour by bus to go there which means that I left home at 7:05am and would come back home at 7:10pm 4 days a week and, on Wednesday, I'd do 7:05am to 1:10pm
Between this + homework and the stress in the last year to get in the grande école I wanted lest I miss my one shot at it, it was the second most grueling work schedule I've had. The only time I worked longer hours was when I worked for a tiny Japanese company and we slept at the company in order to meet a project deadline (the contract we had with our customer meant we had to meet the deadline but it didn't matter if it was a buggy mess since bug fixing came after).
I don’t know it must be people dependent I guess. I was in the same situation distance wise from high-school than you also in the French countryside and it was some of the easiest of my life.
Workload is low. You don’t have much courses. The material is easy. I was an awkward teenager but all in all people were pretty nice. I don’t really have a complaint about high school.
Prépa was annoying however but mostly for the pointlessness of it all. Looking back I probably should have left to do something else after the first year but I can’t deny it was a good choice for my career.
I did a prépa intégré and it was significantly easier, mostly because, I lived on campus, I didn't have to commute (I get car sick so close to two hours of bus every day was tough in high school) and I didn't need to stay all the time in a school. When I had free time, I could go back to my place...
So, I guess it's not the workload so much as the butt-in-chair, long hours always being in the same place. Similar to being in Japan actually, low productivity, but long long hours... I also had a lot of stress/anxiety in making sure I get admitted to the school I wanted so I did a lot of busy work to make sure my grades were perfect above and beyond just learning and understanding the materials. In retrospect, it was overkill and pretty much un-needed.
Interesting response. Most of the above points sound to me like saying school was bad because there were classes and one had to study and do projects. I mean, sure, kids would rather play all day but there's nothing bad about having classes and having to study.
My school days were shorter at 6 hours, although if one wanted to do any of the extracurricular clubs you'd end up hanging out at school 1-3 hours afterwards. Most kids did, but it was optional.
I can't comment on what public school is like from the inside since I was lucky and my parents homeschooled me. But from the outside when talking to my friends it did indeed look like a form of child abuse. It's sad because, while you can opt out in theory the way my parents did, it requires a lot of sacrifice on the part of the parent.
Either you spend money on private schools if you can find one without the same pathologies as the public school or you have to give up one income in the family. Not everyone can afford to do that although it's easier than some people think. Public school is mostly subsidized child care for many so it's not easily changed and getting enough public funds to employ enough qualified people to reduce the worst pathologies to a manageable level is pretty expensive.
Indeed, my life began the morning after I graduated high school. The only people from then whom I'm not in touch with but would like to be, have unsearchable common names and don't sign up for those class reunion websites.
(I know, I know, I could find them with more effort. But really, why bother?)
I did not enjoy high school. Others have had it worse, but it was mostly something I had to endure.
A teacher in my senior year said something about how some students have the time of their life in high school, while others turn the page after graduating and never look back. Despite being an obvious thought, it kind of blew my mind at the time. The idea that I could choose to have a completely different life as soon as the school year finished filled me with all sorts of positive thoughts. Unsurprisingly I loved college and the newfound freedom I had to make more decisions about my life.
I guess the takeaway I have is that high school sucks more than it needs to for many students, and reminding kids struggling through it that things can get much better afterwards can be emotionally helpful.
He refers to open world games that don't push back against the player, as feeding a colonialist desire to conquer and complete. He posits that the player never learns that he can't have it all and thus learns to be entitled.
Not sure if entitled is the right word as a lot were power fantasies that focused on rising stats and increasing combat abilities, rather than strictly speaking titles. The pursuit of more flowing rewards naturally drags the player into a position which looks like entitlement.
Morrowind did it better than the later open world games, you had to level up a lot to access dangerous areas that could kill you. The dumbing down and excessive ease in games had been commented on since the original prince of persia.
The games community acts like a bucket of crabs, pulling down anything above it and ripping it apart to feed. The greed for more digital nurturance is exactly why the industry is profitable and getting the drug just right is an art. But the greed is also what drives the crabby trash talk.
>Chalking this up to modern games not having enough grinding honestly feels like exactly that kind of crab mentality itself.
Hope my post didn't come across that way. Morrowind's storyline and side-quests didn't feel grindy and learning how to break the system and level up quicker was part of the fun back then, before internet guides were a normal way to break the meta.
Skill has gotten really 'unpleasant', there's a lot of first person shooters that have features that require a lot of unnecessary discernment. Recoil that doesn't act the way it should, wikis full of extra item knowledge needed, dual monitor just for maps, hyper-precise timing and firing. A whole raft of "unfixed bugs" left in the game that you have to know. It's not so fun to be skillful at a game.
Getting through Prince of Persia in one go without resetting feels heroic. Killing some random guy in an fps because he didn't understand the recoil mechanics and getting a bunch of loot is just abusive.
I can understand people wanting skill and difficulty that feels good and willfully accomplished against the odds.
I’m glad you’re in a better industry now, and I’m extremely grateful that you wrote up your blog posts and books while dealing with that. They’ve been instrumental to my journey in programming.
Thanks, I'm glad I'm not in games now too, though I'm not bitter about the time I spent doing it. There are some downsides like infantile gamers and crunch, but a lot of upsides too. Making software designed purely to entertain and bring joy to people can be really gratifying. Getting to work with interdisciplinary teams with artists, designers, and audio people is a rare but very rewarding experience.
> Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid
> he refers to many games as "entitlement simulators", which is a profound truth
When I started playing Heroes of the Storm (MOBA) I though... "This is stupid, why would I play a game where I'm loosing roughly half of the time regardless of what I do? I'm playing games to experience how winning feels not this bs."
Somehow I learned to enjoy HotS, but I still think that single player games that simulate the process of going from loosing, through learning and development to winning to getting stupidely overpowered are the essence of gaming. Initial losses are necessary, so I hate games that initially let you win for too long. But the last stage where you are actually winning nearly always is also very crucial for the full enjoyment.
I wouldn't say escaping from consequence is the point unless you mean consequences of real world that are punishing you hard for even trying to achieve something.
20+ years in the industry. I think you are a little bit entitled. It does take a lot of effort to make even a crappy game, I have shipped my share of those myself. But the customer is not your elementary school teacher, who awards gold stars for the effort. The customer paid a ton of money (for HN readers $60 games might be cheap but they are not for the most people who buy games) for something he or she hoped to like and it turned to be something that had been shoved out... Imagine a fancy restaurant, with $$$$ menu where you order a confit de canard and get some undercooked chicken nuggets with ketchup? Will you ask if the chef having a bad day and how could you cheer him up?
The positive-to-negative comment ratio in that thread is overwhelmingly in favor of positive. A couple of the top-voted posts are more critical, sure, but once you scroll past those it's full of support and inquisitiveness.
Edit: Even the person who posted the top-ranked comment, with the more negative tone, ended their follow-up response with, "All of your feedback was well-thought-out and appreciated; I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some of the potential criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you!".
If we're going to assume that people agree with the post, then we should also be assuming that people agreed with OP's general tone, which really doesn't read as negative criticism so much as constructive criticism. Again, OP's second post was basically, "Appreciate your response to my feedback, best of luck!". Heck, if we're looking at "people who agree based on upvotes alone" then "This is genius, because so many people have this problem," is the second highest-voted comment.
There's constructive criticism (the Dropbox thread) and unconstructive criticism (the Monkey Island thread).
I'm not sure I believe this. There is an entire industry that revolves around video essays of how George Lucas personally ruined childhoods. The difference is that George Lucas lives behind a wall between creator and audience.
The difference with video games is that developers themselves build parasocial communities for their games. Playtesting and marketing are so interlinked.
>Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen.
Replace "gamers" with "book readers" and it should become obvious why this is not an insightful comment, but rather an expression of some kind of existential angst mixed with outdated stereotypes. Gamers ceased being a distinct consumer group when the medium of games went mainstream and ceased to heave anything resembling a coherent subculture.
"People who consume games" and "Gamers" are not necessarily the same group though? Just as the two groups of "people who have read a book" and "people who consider themselves A Reader of Books" both exist. The fact that there is a broader category doesn't make the narrower one useless.
From my personal experiences absolutely there is a group of people you could reasonably call "Gamers" and performing dramatic consumer entitlement is definitely part of their culture!
>"People who consume games" and "Gamers" are not necessarily the same group though?
How do you know if someone posting a random nasty comment on the internet is a "Gamer"? How do you know if someone posting a nice comment is not?
You're projecting identity on people and then project attributes onto that identity. Most likely you're unconsciously selecting who to project the identity onto based on the same attributes. This creates a feedback loop. This is literally how stereotypes are constructed and reinforced.
It would be better to talk about the posting itself. Game post culture seems angrier than book review culture even if the community overlaps. I think this is what is meant when people talk about "gamers".
"Book readers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen."
What is weird about saying that? I'm very entitled book reader. And if the rest of book readers were as entitled as me many supposed literary geniuses would sell 5 copies before the word got out how pointless and horrible their creation is.
> I've seen it on HN also. Someone creates a thing, and then people pour out of the woodwork to lump horrible criticism.
I said this a while ago as well[1], but there's a strong bias towards people who are unhappy with $something (for any value of $something). If you think everything is just great then you don't actually all that much to say beyond "hey, looks great!" Sometimes you can expand that to a paragraph of two about what you like, but overall it's hard to write a substantive comment. But if you're not happy with something then it's much easier to write a paragraph or two about what you're unhappy with.
This isn't actually true, though. Existence proof: Tim Rogers. The man can write a 6 hour video essay about how much he loves a game and not even be halfway done. The truth is, we all have the ability - though most of us don't exercise it for whatever reason.
The real problem is that people like quick negative comments more than quick positive ones.
I'll add that writing a substantive comment opens you to comments from the mob that disagrees and you can get sucked in defending your POV or simply downvoted because the mob smelled blood.
I feel the same way. I think critiques and criticisms have their place, but the internet does seem full of people ready to complain. The quote from the critic in Ratatouille always comes to mind
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so...
It's more than gamers as you notice, it's the whole 'self-reinforcing internet cycle' - if the first reaction is X, that will be amplified tremendously as everyone piles on to agree with X.
This goes for both for and against, but against is usually easier. Famous examples include Dropbox (here), iPod (Slashdot), etc.
Very true, 'gamers' are a strange bunch, not the average person that plays a few games but those that fully identify with that label.
Huge amount of tribalism too, over which platform they 'support', they believe just because they use a particular service then they can expect all sorts of demands on it, rather than just casually playing whatever game they want on whatever platform they like.
At least someone here gets it. Except the emphasis on moderation. YouTube comments are triple-moderated (by algorithms, by channel owners and by Alphabet contractors) and still are a cesspool. Think about that.
I added "unmoderated" because comment sections that are entirely pre-moderated by a human who cares aren't that bad (it's just way too much work to do so for any site that is at all well known).
Counterpoint: I used to feel the same way about the entitlement. Then I stopped and thought about how many "hours worked" the average game costs for a person on minimum wage. While the minimum wage has risen dramatically in my area, to at least $12/hr, with games costing upwards of $80 now, that's still almost 2 full days, after taxes. It's easy to forget when people on this board are probably all making at least low 6 figures. It doesn't forgive being a wanker about it, but it does help explain the angst over wanting every purchase to be a 10/10 game.
That same economic analysis plays unfavorably the other direction: games right now are among the cheapest $/entertainment-hour value of any "modern" entertainment industry right now. Even if you only got 60 hours out of that $80 game, which is still the "entitled minimum" in many gamers' minds, that still $1.33 per entertainment-hour. You aren't going to find that at the movie theaters or on Blu-Ray. Maybe you can find better deals in streaming: if you only pay the $20/month for Netflix and maybe get 20-30 entertainment-hours per month you can beat that. If on the other hand you like so many others are paying for more than one streaming service you probably aren't anywhere near that in your spend on entertainment-hours.
That $80 videogame can still feed (entertainment to) a family of four for months.
I don't think economics have anything measurable to do with this.
I've seen entitled rants from gamers yelling at the developer while also publicly admitting that they pirated the game.
People pay money for clothes and food too and you don't see them posting thirty-minute screeds on YouTube about how they don't like the pattern of this shirt they just got.
Yes they do, but maybe not on YouTube, since that's for older people. TikTok, Instagram, twitch, etc all target niche groups all have gamer like thinking but with less autism
Food screeds though are very different depending on gender.
I've watched my husband be able to watch a streamer dissect "Mr beast" chocolate for 90 mins.
I just watch Instagram reviews, and they can get pretty mean spirited.
Compelling argument. Still, let me attempt a counter-counterpoint: $80 games tend to give 40+ hours of play, or $2/hour and the chance to play again. A movie in the theater is upwards of $20 and yields maybe 2 hours of entertainment, or $10/hour, and no ownership.
Plus in both cases you can wait a while for reviews to come in.
Movies aren’t the right comparison; they’re efficient.
Video games operate more like TV — with lots of filler that you don’t want but can put up with, and can’t really skip because there’s probably something notable interspersed (intentionally, to make it unskippable).
Honestly I’ve found that I can extract the vast majority of value from most single player games in a few hours (core mechanics and their interrelationships, anything interesting from the setting/world building/themes, aesthetic design, etc); some games can keep on trucking… but most of them are far longer than they are valuable.
All games don't cost $80. The indie game being developed definitely isn't going to cost $80. I can't think of many games that cost $80 other than AAA titles on release week and exploitative "collector's edition" items.
If $80 is a significant purchase, then there are many, many ways to reduce the cost or mitigate the risk. You can wait for a sale, wait for the initial reviews to come in, wait for a friend to buy it and try it at their house, etc. The way you're phrasing it sounds like the buyer is forced at gunpoint to buy an $80 game every month, after being forced at gunpoint to buy a console that costs hundreds of dollars or a gaming PC that costs thousands.
If someone I knew purchased expensive items and was unhappy with them, yet continued to make the same poor purchases and was continually unhappy, I'm not sure the purchaser is blameless.
To be fair, some of this is indeed "crankiness returned" given how much of the vitriol seems almost directly based on Ron's older "If I..." written on a grumpy day post. Though I still wouldn't wish a 100x or 1000x return on grumpiness to anyone, and that seems to be the case here.
"Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen."
The industry is filled with people who are entitled, the idea that game devs and publishers aren't entitled when they've been stealing PC games for 30+ years since 1997 beginning with ultima online (MMO's were the industries bid to undermine the PC game market and back end every big budget AAA title, we got steam six years after UO, lineage in 98, everquest in 99, etc).
That means every mmo would have been a regular PC RPG with level editor + multiplayer embedded in the exe like every PC game during the 90's and early 2000's before they figured out the average gamer was a computer illiterate moron.
Windows 10/11 and TPM proves the average game developer has it good, microsoft is finally killing piracy and removing ownership of PC's with the help of intel and AMD over the next 20 years, so just remember, in Microsofts, intels and the game industries new hardware drm world, you will not have access to your games, you will be able to be banned from games you ostensibly "own" because the game industry has been engaging in industrial scale game theft and fraud by selling you incomplete software applications VS quake 1-3, warcraft 1-3, diablo 1-2, in the 90's.
The entire tech industry desperately wanted to take us back to mainframe computing of the 60's where software and hardware vendors own your PC and you have no control over it.
So gamers don't measure up into the giant ego's of game devs and publishers who literally lied to the public so they could kill the PC and jack up game prices and remove basic features like multiplayer.
Google the list of all the games who've had their multiplayer shut down, that is only possible because the games are coded fraudulently to begin with, where as the 90's games mostly all still work just fine if you want to play them lan or over the internet because they were honestly coded local exe's.
The problem is that the game industry is constantly doing bait and switch, at least for the last decade. They promise a great product, and then the product is mediocre at best and full of shameless monetization.
Non-gamers may not understand the difference between a pay-to-win mobile game, and a story-driven RPG action PC game. They're both called "games", but they're in fact different products with different experience. Many of the game companies that made a name with "proper" games are now using the same franchises to create low budget cash grabs.
I think gamers are just asking for companies to stop destroying existing franchises in the name of making more money, and often in the name of some ideology. If we say, well that is their right, it's their IP, then gamers also have a right to express their feelings on the matter.
I'm not complaining, but rather explaining why there is so much controversy with every other title.
People have expectations when companies announce a sequel to something they have already invested in before. That's where the most bait and switch takes place. Companies use the nostalgia as marketing and then blame their core audience, that has contributed to growth of the franchise since the beginning, when it doesn't do as well.
I don't think I've seen a new IP get this criticism. It's usually previously established IPs, and sometimes they're old IP's from decades ago being resurrected because of their initial success, yet they change it up as if that initial success never mattered.
Most hours gamed are by kids, of course they're gonna be nasty, have you ever seen an unsupervised kid without threat of physical violence for being shitty to other kids?
The fact that people care about an insult or attack in a comment section of a random site they read about a game is what surprises me. What lives some people must live for this to be something that even registers as an annoyance.
I don't think most of these types of comments come from kids. "Entitled gamer culture" seems to be similar to any kind of culture around fandom, escapism, entertainment and sports. Some people just love to obsess about things and take their opinions super seriously, especially if they don't know what they are talking about.
I actually do think the reason why gamers tend to be nastier as a group comes from them having a large group of children and teenagers. The vast majority of a group are lurkers, so you only need a small percentage of vocal jerks to make it worse. I bet most of the jerks and trolls in the gaming world probably skew younger vs. total gamer population.
Its a big mix of tech-literacy, lack of empathy in anonymous posts compared to in person interactions, and the main demographic being in peak pubescent angst.
Recently I feel like there's a large performative element to it as well. Like virtue signaling but without the virtue. I guess its just one incarnation of in crowd bullying. Hipsterism and the like, but this current incarnation has a lot more anger to it.
The Monkey Island audience is not made of teenagers. Plenty of commenters on that site are fully grown 30, 40 or 50 year old entitled adults. It's so easy to blame teens when many people are jerkwads and get even worse as they age.
Have you ever seen older people on the Internet? Those that are too old to be "digital native" and to have learned proper internet etiquette? They can be as psychopathic as any angry 13yo redditor.
It's kind of strange. I rarely play games except a few best sellers maybe once or twice a year when I binge them (eg Horizon or Resident Evil). Because I see them so infrequently perhaps, whenever I play a new game I am astonished at the level of detail and amount of beautiful and well thought out content and feel lucky to be given such a large gift so cheaply (amortizing the hardware costs of course...).
People that play more frequently I think have higher expectations because they are so tapped in they know what's new and what's old but it takes so much effort to create a novel experience that game designers have created a kind of red queen race for themselves.
This isn't too say there aren't pointed critiques that can be made of the industry that mainly relate to profit seeking behavior (gambling, excessive grinding, lack of variety, etc) but it would be good if gamers could back off the intensity to these more important areas.
Well, they're gamers. Not that anything's wrong with playing video games, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're on average less mature than the general population.
I think I'll play through the first two parts with my children and if they're interesed I'll get this one as well.
I don't understand the outrage at this art style. Granted, I've never played any of the Monkey Island games, and have no emotional attachment to the content. To me, the art style seems very similar to a Cartoon Network cartoon, and that may have broad appeal to kids today. Like I kind of understand why people are upset: this thing you loved 32 years ago is being vandalized in your eyes. However, you're really old now, your prefrontal cortex should be fully developed, so get over it.
> I don't understand the outrage at this art style.
Oh, that's easy. It's reminiscent of free Flash games popular a couple decades ago. Vector graphics are somewhat less common in games these days, so my first impression was that the art style looked a bit cheap and dated.
Personally, as a consumer who could care less about who produced which game, the original Secret of Monkey Island - with all its pixel art glory - was a relatively hard game, like many of the games of the era, and was comparatively less enjoyable to me as a 80s/90s kid than the later Curse of Monkey Island, which had a more modern art style and much more interesting mechanics (IMHO) than just aimlessly clicking everywhere until you eventually found out the only way to move forward was to precisely time giving the bad guy a wedgie or whatever. I've also played other games with various degrees of pixelatedness, with later ones like Sam & Max and Indiana Jones being more enjoyable to me than older ones like the original Maniac Mansion, so I generally associate art style modernization in this particular genre as a good thing.
But ironically, I feel the opposite way about the Pokemon franchise, which has gone through a similar progression, with a change in art style towards a more slick art style along with a barrage of new game mechanics that I personally didn't really care so much for.
I think that ultimately people just want to consume more content that is similar to what they are already used to. It's why, I also think, bands w/ distinctly recognizable style like the Red Hot Chili Peppers did so well. The vitriol does seem completely unnecessary, though, I agree.
The first reaction my wife who has never played Monkey Island had when looking at the trailer was "Oh the art style and animation is really nice". I have another friend who is a gamer but doesn't play point and clicks who was tempted in trying it after I showed her. So in my very tiny sample size of 2, people like it.
Personally, I like it, but then, the only art style I've disliked of any Monkey Island games are the two Special Edition remakes.
I'm not sure if it's even an exclusively nostalgia thing. Over the past few years I've seen a lot of complaining around art style changes. Notably the Civ V -> Civ VI art style change pissed a lot of people off. Personally I loved the game, but a lot of series veterans didn't even bother to try it.
In the other thread about this, someone brought up the colloquially named "Zelda Effect". It is most evident when reviewing Wind Waker, which used cartoony cell-shaded graphics: contemporary comments featured quite a lot of vitriol over that decision, but the game is now fondly remembered as one of the best entrants in the series.
Deep down almost everyone is "conservative" - they want what they had yesterday again today, so any change to art style, etc, is already on a back-foot.
But in the end, the good things stand out. The reason the CD-i Zelda games are not remembered fondly is not really because of the art style, that's just an easy way to rip on them.
The game developer is basically taking all the hate that people are really directing at a society that doesn't value the same things they do anymore. I thought SNES Zelda and Final Fantasy were the best, but I didn't threaten the developers when they moved to 3d.
It's also a side-effect of being involved in the community as a creator; if you were pissed at the 3D Zelda what were you going to do, fly to Japan and track down Shigeru Miyamoto? Send him a nasty letter?
But here we have someone who posted something on his own site, and not only allowed comments, but cleary was reading them, and people just attacked him.
Fun fact: even series creator Shigeru Miyamoto wasn't thrilled with that art style at first.[0]
Makes me wonder if Twilight Princess was more his push than the widely-assumed theory that its direction was "for the fans" still disappointed from Spaceworld 2000.
I don't think that's exactly true.
Nintendo did give people what they wanted with Twilight Princess.
Both of those games had around 9.5 - 9.6 ratings, and the realistic Twilight Princess was the best selling Zelda until Breath of the Wild came out.
I think a very loud minority likes Wind Waker, but sales show something a bit different.
That analysis discounts that the GameCube[0], on which WW was released exclusively until the Wii U[1] HD remake, had vastly lower user count than the incredibly popular Wii[2], which had a Twilight Princess release simultaneously with the GCN.
Your list shows Wind Waker selling twice as many units when released on the same platform as Twilight Princess. There are confounding factors here (the Wind Waker re-release may have had a larger "missed it the first time" audience, and there were probably fewer active Wii U users in 2016 than 2013) but it's the closest thing to an apples to apples comparison here.
So what?
Zelda is a system seller.
When Wind Waker came out, people hated it, sales for twilight princess show people at the time DID want a realistic zelda.
Even Miyamoto didn't care for the Wind Waker Style.
It looks like people are trying to say the Zelda Effect is something it's not.
Wind Waker isn't more beloved then any other. In fact at best, it's par for the course. However, most fans prefer a more realistic Link, it's clear from looking at extended media like fanart, smash brother( toon link is a different character), even many Nintendo developers say the same in interviews.
Another big confounder is that the WiiU won't play gamecube games, but it will play Wii games, so someone who wanted to play Wind Waker and has a WiiU needs to buy the WiiU version, but someone with a WiiU and wants to play Twilight Princess can buy the Wii version or the WiiU version.
Fun, if barely relevant, fact: Miyamoto himself wanted to change the art style during development, according to recently-translated interviews. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwUBIjbYYNg
I don’t think that’s true about Civ 6. A lot of people who only ever played Civ 5 might have been “pissed” and didn’t bother to try it, because they didn’t realize that the Civ games change every time, but any actual “series veteran” was fine with it.
Yah that last sentence was a bit of hyperbole and poor word choice. What I meant is that many people who had got into Civ 4 and Civ 5, etc. we're critical of the graphics.
It wasn't as much about change as it was what exactly changed. There seems to be a trend in many games where certain design aspects suck as choosing brighter colors, or a more cartoons style will bring people comparing your game to a mobile game (also happened to a lesser extent with CK3 and certain total war games). While technically Civ6 runs on mobile, it's very much an outlier as far as mobile games go, I wish more mobile ames we're that good.
I'm one of those series veterans who was really put off by Civ VI's design choices. I tried to get into it, and just couldn't. I've heard criticism that the aesthetics should not matter and that getting hung up on such a thing was immature. However, I just could not get past the dissonance of the cartoony style and how busy the UI was. Put simply, I found the game to be ugly.
I loved the art direction, but can't stand the micromanagement. Every time I look at it, I want to play it again, but I just don't like the city districts thing. It's too hard to keep my happiness up.
Something I’ve increasingly felt is that nobody should feel like they’re under any obligation to read comments on what they do or replies to what they say. In the days before the internet the options for direct feedback to an author or creator were limited and often the author or creator could or would just ignore them. It was considered a good idea! Now people have things like forums for their games or comments on their articles and for some reason I don’t understand feel compelled to engage with them. They shouldn’t. It’s okay to just make what you want to make or write what you want to write and ignore any and all response to it. If your works are valuable and enjoyed then great, if not so be it. But subjecting yourself to the most obsessive and neurotic segment of your audience is just a recipe for misery. There’s little to no benefit to it. You don’t owe anything to anyone.
I agree. People who have a gripe or criticism are more inclined to comment than a person who enjoys the product. It reminds me of the old saying "assholes always advertise." It's best to ignore or take those comments with a grain of salt. However, that's often easier said than done.
It's not just gamers. The Internet has spawned a culture of "no consequences for letting your Id come out to play."
If I walk up to Big Bad John, and call him a rude name, he will knock my teeth out.
That's called "immediate negative feedback." Consequence immediately follows action.
On the Internet (although this kind of thing predates the Internet. The Internet just commoditized it), this negative feedback loop is removed. The response is just more bad words, and a good troll learns to actually savor this type of response (I know of what I speak. I was once ... not so well-behaved ... on the Internet –even pre-WWW).
Positive feedback is treated as "weak," or "syrupy" (to be fair, a lot of it is like Cute Overload[0]), and folks who try to remain positive are usually relentlessly attacked. I know of this, because I try to remain positive, and not "go there," when confronted by negativity. I assume I come across as "Snotty"[1].
Better than the alternative; believe you me...
When I hear people defending extreme hate jockeys, they always say "[S]He's just saying what everyone is thinking."
There's a reason that we don't say everything we think.
> If I walk up to Big Bad John, and call him a rude name, he will knock my teeth out.
Big Bad John is a strawman, because if Big Bad John was abusing his children or beating his wife, I wouldn't confront him either. I'd call the police. It doesn't reflect at all the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the criticism.
Also, we should probably get over that pretense that anonymity ends brutal criticism. Plenty of people are happy to sign pretty brutal criticism, or even to make a brand out of it.
The thing that it's easy to do is to attack "haters" or "cynics" because they don't really exist. They're what happens when people define other people's motivations by the effect on them personally. Somebody hates me? They're a "hater." Somebody says that something I think will work will definitely not work? They're a "cynic" that doesn't believe anything can improve and hate people who have retained the ability to dream.
The same people leaving comments on this game encouraging the designers to kill themselves will agree completely with this reasoning, because it has very little content.
> Big Bad John is a strawman, because if Big Bad John was abusing his children or beating his wife, I wouldn't confront him either. I'd call the police. It doesn't reflect at all the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the criticism.
Also, we should probably get over that pretense that anonymity ends brutal criticism. Plenty of people are happy to sign pretty brutal criticism, or even to make a brand out of it.
The thing that it's easy to do is to attack "haters" or "cynics" because they don't really exist. They're what happens when people define other people's motivations by the effect on them personally. Somebody hates me? They're a "hater." Somebody says that something I think will work will definitely not work? They're a "cynic" that doesn't believe anything can improve and hate people who have retained the ability to dream.
The same people leaving comments on this game encouraging the designers to kill themselves will agree completely with this reasoning, because it has very little content.
So ... besides telling me what's wrong with what I said, I don't see much positive stuff, there, so I assume that what I said is completely worthless, since I was basically saying "I've tried negative, so now, I try positive." I didn't even phrase it in a way that tells others to do it (I've learned to avoid "you" a lot).
That's OK. I'll keep doing it, anyway. I'm stupid, that way.
BTW: I know a whole bunch of folks, IRL, that have ... let's say ... a checkered past ... Probably not ones I'd want to walk up and insult, but hey, if that's what you want to do, for kicks, knock yourself out. Nah ... scratch that. It will likely be done for you (but maybe not. Their "checkers" are in the past. That's kind of the point of it all) ...
It's been a great help, in managing my mouth (and Lord knows, I need all the help I can get, in that department).
If you are US-based, have a great long weekend. Dogs hate this weekend.
A Robert E. Howard quote I like: Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
The behavior of the commenters is pretty abhorrent. It feels awful to make something you're excited about, put it out there, and get shit on by the people you thought you were making it for!
Now, there is something about the animation style that made me think "oh, this feels kind of cheap". Something in the loose-limbed and kind of weightless movement of the characters. I had to think about it for a while, then I realized it felt like the character animations in the "Fallout Shelter" mobile game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhOM8dGuHgM) and I guess the association with a microtransaction-based mobile game made me think "cheap".
But I'm an adult, so I don't go and tell the creator he should kill himself just because my brain made this weird connection. Criticism is valid and important, but I think too many people watched those stupid AVGN videos in their formative years and got a warped view of what criticism should look like.
I wonder what's worse... Seeing people hating on what you put out, or seeing exactly zero interest in it. Seeing your updates and comments recieve no responses as if there was noone on the other end.
I feel even in gaming, the customer is always right at the end of the day. Unless we are talking about making games just for the sake of it & then throwing them away, but I suspect not.
That said, most of the time it is better to not interact with the customer until you are certain it is the right time. Transparency seems like more of a liability than anything here.
I strongly prefer the stealth mode development pattern, assuming you do have a clear & consistent vision relative to your market & customers. A lot of human feedback is bullshit, so avoid it until you actually need it. Most people don't know what they like until they are 20 hours deep into it. Don't give them time to build up ridiculous expectations relative to your product.
Think about the way EA games launched Apex Legends. I would prefer if every game studio went down that path.
> I feel even in gaming, the customer is always right at the end of the day.
There are customers who are most definitely not right. The kind that cheat in online games, lie about it, dox you when you catch them. The kind of customer that tries to break into your systems or DDOS you. The kind that try to steal from you and your partners, or that harass other players, or that post pornography to your forums. The kind that make bots or thousands of fake accounts. The kind that build phishing sites and steal other customers' credentials, empty out their wallets and sell all of their assets.
It's a small proportion of customers that do this, but that's still a large enough number that it's a big deal. (Kindly don't respond, "Well, all you have to do is put technical measures in place to prevent all of this." You need to have been in the trenches dealing with them before you can have a valid opinion on mitigations).
I can't find it now but I think a game developer wrote a while back what a game would be like if they listened to all customer feedback and it was a nightmare, it's like the homer designing a car episode of the Simpsons. I have to admit even sometimes my gut reaction to or a game or ideas would ultimately make the game too bloated / less fun.
I have a fair amount of experience dealing with the type of customer who is not great, and who would be great to get rid of. A net positive for everyone, if it were possible.
Most customers are great. Some are not. Some are essentially (or demonstrably) criminals. At scale, it's a huge problem and very difficult to solve. The platitude "the customer is always right" is a fine principle until you need to deal with the real world of fraud, criminal activity and harassment.
With free to play being a huge gaming business model, not only do you not own games because they are more of a SaaS product, but most people don't even pay to be a "customer"
I haven't "owned" a game in like 10 years since I stopped buying CDs/physical media. All my games are digital, and I don't think you can really "own" software.
I played the original ones and I would have preferred a pixel art closer to the original.
That being said, I subscribe what Ron and many people here said. If you don't like it, don't buy it. There's no need for all vitriol. I will buy it the same, since for me Monkey Island was always about much more than the graphics.
On top of everything, this is the actual _creator_ of all the games and stories' vision. It's not like it's some knock-off copy or money-grabbing reboot. If this is how he imagined the new Monkey Island we should at least be happy there's another one!
Like Ron Gilbert wrote in one of his previous blog posts, Monkey Island 1 and 2 were (what is today called) pixel art because pixel art was "state of the art" at that time. He already (co-)created a retro pixel art game with Thimbleweed Park, no need to do it again...
For Return in particular it does make sense to compare it to 1 and 2, since Return seems to be picking the series up where Gilbert left it and ignoring what others did since then.
(For what it's worth, I remember Curse causing some controversy when it came out, because of that shift to the toon style from the original pixel aesthetic.)
All indications are that while the game picks up threads from MI2 and starts at the end of MI2, the bulk of the game may happen after Curse and even Tales. Ron has said multiple times that "it's all canon" and about the only things that he's acknowledged are kind of ret-conned around are some things that occurred in Escape, which even Tales partly ignored.
We don't have much details yet on how exactly it fits into the canon as the game isn't out yet, but Ron has kept pointing out that Return isn't "MI3a" like he originally grumped an idea about, but a post-Tales Monkey Island game in just about all senses.
Given Murray's involvement in the trailers to date, I think comparing the art style to Curse is more accurate, personally, and I think there's a loving conversation there. I like what I've seen of the art style so far. (But also I like Double Fine's "house style" and this clearly has DNA ties to that, too.)
Entirely off-topic, but this resonates so much for me - I think I went entirely off computer games for about three years, peaking around the age of 18. I left the world of the Amiga and then later got a PC for Uni and slipped into an entirely different gaming world, running at 5x the clockspeed. On school holidays I'd come back to an ever-failing disk collection, to the point I only had a shareware game called Galaxy Wars (I think?) and an install of SimAnt (on a 20Mb HD, lol), by which point it was clear that the Amiga was truly dead in the water!
If there's one thing I'm looking forward to with this new MI, it's the updated theme tune, which sounds glorious. It WILL be my ringtone again!
Nothing wrong with a preference but online everyone bikesheds this. I heard endless complaints about Wind Waker cel shaded graphics and that was one of peoples most favorite thing about the game.
Sometimes I wonder how a site can disable or discourage bikeshedding in their comment section. It's probably impossible or needs so little traffic a moderator can handle it (1K comment per second is impossible)
I think you got to discount points of view from the perspective of how valuable their perspective is to your goal. The problem with social media and open forums is that it’s not obvious and takes time to figure out who’s who.
Having said that, it seems a little childish to me that Ron just shut down the haters. I think that there might be a bit of his ego attached to the outcome versus the process. I can only speculate that perhaps he wanted recognition and adulation for this bold choice and was hurt when feedback didn’t match expectations.
Sure people might be rude about it, but it seems that there is clearly a market for the retro pixelated aesthetic, so why not give people what they want if his goal is to satisfy the fan base and continue the story? I have no doubt the story, set, characters and jokes will be great. I guess the comment asking for Ron to do a Sonic might have been too on the nose for him.
I think that any creator has to reconcile that if they create for others, their art becomes something more than just theirs, like a sort of reflexive co-creation.
Seems to me the best artists understand this while not letting it stifle their creativity.
> it seems a little childish to me that Ron just shut down the haters.
Maybe, but there are too many comments for a flat page like that to be useful anyway (other than the first 50 or so comments.) Nothing of value was lost.
I think a lot of the comments in this (HN) thread are falsely assuming that he is reacting to the tone of the comments, rather than the fact that they don't seem to like what he has shared. Having read only a small sample of the linked comments, they seem to be overall civil but negative, which is probably even worse news for an approval-hungry creator than a rude response. There is a ready-made narrative about the badness of user-posted internet commentary that a subset of internet commentators love to post about, but in this case it doesn't seem to fit. This is said as someone who has absolutely no investment in the trailer's particular art-style or whatever their issue is.
In any communication, regardless of the medium of transmission, a positive reaction on the part of the recipient of the message is not guaranteed.
> ” falsely assuming that he is reacting to the tone of the comments”
I think you are wrong. The assumption that he is reacting to the tone is correct. He explicitly said that he is closing comments due to personal attacks.
I don’t get the hate- I like the style of the new graphics, and I think they are a sensitive updating of what’s good about monkey island’s original graphical vibe.
I guess I am the target nostalgia demographic though; 70s latchkey kid. I fully intend to play this with my kids and enjoy the shit out of it.
To me it looks very similar to Alegria corporate art which kind of turns me off, but he should do what he wants and I have no reason to think I should give him my feedback.
I've seen people making that comparison, and it feels off to me. The defining element of that "corporate" art style is that it's really flat -- abstract figures with minimal details and bold colors.
By contrast, Return seems to have a lot of detail -- it's just expressed through a blocky, almost papercraft aesthetic. The level of specificity and caricature it's showing is honestly pretty opposed to the general goals of the "corporate" style.
(None of this is to say there's anything wrong with not liking Return's art style, of course. Taste is subjective, etc etc. I just feel it's a poor comparison.)
It's not that I don't like the graphic style--from looking at the trailer I don't like the style execution.
I think the style is "ugly", but that could work well--especially in a game about pirates.
The problem is that the backgrounds and animation look "cheap phone game". And that's not going to make people happy.
The worst part is that I suspect that this is intentional--and that's what is REALLY pissing both sides off. Ron Gilbert probably wants this to be playable on lower end tablets and phones since phone revenue generally dwarfs PC revenue--so getting called out on this is not going to go over well. By the same token, the rabid fanbase is PC centric and is looking at a game that sure looks like it has made significant compromises for phones--they're going to be more than a bit upset about that.
To top it off, Gilbert is used to getting nothing but positive reception and now is getting slammed. Furthermore, the project is too far along to actually do anything that might be able to mitigate the criticism. Whoops.
People don't like the art style. There's even precedent for this in gaming, remember what happened to Mass Effect: Andromeda? Or in broader media, there was a redesign of Sonic the Hedgehog for the movie.
Monkey Island is a very old game with lots of fans which was previously renowned for highly detailed art. People don't enjoy the corporate memphis skewed proportions of this new style, simple as.
> whatever you do dont make it a leftist multiculti gender bs
I see this as exhibit #1 "why we need diversity". Let us hope to see a day when it will be so common for a game to have characters in any variety of races, cultures, and genders that no one would call it leftist bs.
The vitriol in this article is really hard to read. Watching a creator get attacked liked that is sad. I want to say something snarky like "that's what you get for having anonymous unmoderated comments" but honestly I just wish we could not be assholes.
There are a few things I've learned - or not learned - from releasing software.
1. People like to VENT. Some people are going to post nasty stuff even though they would normally act different in person.
2. Can you turn the nasty things into something positive? People vent because they are annoyed, or angry, or confused about something. Can that be fixed? Can that be improved? There may be a legitimate issue that could be improved even though they are not expressing themselves positively.
3. People vent because they care. They are invested enough in your software that they would like to see change.
4. For every person venting, there are probably 10x that are happy but just aren't commenting. Sometimes it seems that everybody is just unhappy, but really it's just the vocal minority.
5. Some people just need to be ignored.
6. We are not made for the Internet. It's going to be the downfall of civilization.
Our social structures and social instincts are made for small groups of people in a tribe, distrusting outsiders. The Internet can be great for humanity, but we're 200 years away from learning how to use it correctly.
> Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen. It's astounding. Someone wants to create something, and there's just so much hate and negativity on something that people didn't even pay for.
I sometimes end up on Steam and the like when I search for "some-game pass level-I-find-difficult", or "some-game Linux". Almost every single thread I've seen there starts with someone asking a fairly reasonable question ("I'm having trouble with X, any tips?", "Are the developers planning to release this game on Linux? Thanks!") and quickly devolving in to a complete shitshow ("you're a lazy fake gamer if you can't pass X, it's so easy!", "lol Linux only for autistic nerds").
To say I'm not a fan of the "gamer community" is an understatement. I'm sure the majority of people who play games are nice folks, but the online spaces are dominates by obnoxious loudmouths more than any other community I've seen.
Now, I have to admit I'm also not wildly impressed by the art style of the new MI game, but you know, it's Ron's game; I can take it or leave it... (and since I'm fairly sure the writing will be as good as the earlier games I don't even mind all that much, as long as it doesn't have the horrendous controls from the 4th and 5th games I'll be happy, furthermore, I'd rather people try something new instead of merely regurgitating what was done 30 years ago, even if I'm personally not a huge fan of it).
I feel bad for him, but really the problem is he’s made a directorial mistake and it looks like the only point it’s gonna click is when the sales numbers hit.
Will he realize his mistaken then or will he continue to blame the customer?
No, that’s not the problem. Not the problem that’s relevant to this discussion anyway. The problem is that people are either relentlessly telling him that they didn’t like the art or hatefully attacking him for choosing that art style. Hateful is what made him decide to close comments and not share stuff anymore. But relentless, even if polite, criticism also takes a toll.
And art style quality is subjective. I, for one, don’t think he made a mistake. If it does hurt sales, it is an objective evidence that it was a mistake commercially speaking. Which is just one dimension. He might still be happy with his decision.
Regardless of sales effect though, I think people feel entitled to be heard by him. They are not happy only with voting with their wallets, or just telling friends that they didn’t like the art style, that are making a point of going to him pointing fingers that he messed up. That’s not fine in my view even if they do not use hateful words, which a minority does. But the majority is still pointing fingers at him.
For me Ron is doing the right thing in managing all this. Stop sharing stuff, close comments, go back working on it silence. If, because of that, the game is a commercial failure, so be it. It is his risk to take. People are acting outraged no because Ron is screaming rude things back to them, because he is not. People are outraged that he just won’t change the art style at this point. That he is not pulling a Sonic on this. And I think the behavior of those people demanding change is just silly. And dangerous when potentialzed by the scale of the internet.
So good for Ron going back to silence. It will be better for him and the team. And, I think, better for the game as well.
"continue to blame the customer?" He's never said that folks were wrong, or blamed anyone for anything. Seems to me like he just wanted folks to not be shitty.
Take, for example, this comment by someone calling themselves _Proud Retro Fascist_:
> Nice attempt at silencing critics. The game will fail because it is
> objectively hideous and you will only have yourself to blame.
>
> Inthe end all you will have achieved is killing off Monkey Island once more.
> This time permanently.
>
> All you had to do was make a game with an art style that appeals to
> everyone, whatever it might be. Instead, you opted for the most repugnant,
> revolting and hideous TRASH art style that anybody has ever bared witness to
> in a video game. You must be out of your mind.
>
> All said, try hiring good artists next time... if there is a next time, that
> is.
>
> RIP MONKEY ISLAND
I wouldn't blame anyone for being upset after receiving this kind of vile commentary "Objectively hideous;" "repugnant, revolting and hideous TRASH art style." There's nothing constructive or even reasonable there, it's purely nastiness for nastiness' sake.
Stay strong, Ron Gilbert, don't let the assholes get you down.
Yeah, that's a very harsh comment. Nonetheless, there is something to be learnt here:
If anything, the comments of the fans show that this artstyle alienates many of the fans. So, if for example the artstyle would've been showed at the very start of the development, then the developers could've listened to the fans and changed it. But everyone's in a tough spot now because development is nearly finished (game is planned for this year) and it would be too late to change course.
As such, Ron Gilbert can only do one thing: Buckle up, release the game and let it be played by those who are not alienated by the artstyle. Maybe it will charm new fans even more; maybe not. Who knows. However, it certainly is an artstyle that is not "universal". E.g. AAA developers usually refine their main character so much that he appeals more or less universally, they want someone who is liked by everyone. They don't want a main character that is only liked by 50% of the target audience. BUT! This comes with the caveat that these games might be overoptimized for the mainstream and thus being somehow boring. That's why I love what the artists and Ron Gilbert did, even though I am torn on the style myself.
Btw. I myself was even more alienated by the artstyle of Broken Age (so much that I never played it) and that was a game where I even invested money in. However, I never could've thrown words at Tim Schafer. And neither on Ron Gilbert, for that matter.
The lead artist of Return to Monkey Island worked for Double Fine previously, so it shouldn't be a surprise that if you didn't like art style that Double Fine made a "house style" you likely wouldn't be interested in what an alumni of that art style is trying to innovate at a follow up studio.
> If anything, the comments of the fans show that this artstyle alienates many of the fans.
Vocal fans are a sampling bias. Don't forget that volume in terms of loudness of complaint does not equal volume in terms of number of complainers. It may not be that "many" fans in number just because they have been that loud/obnoxious.
Interesting, I absolutely loved the art style of Broken Age, it's original and distinctive in a way few games are. I guess you're right about that optimizing for the main stream tends to create relatively boring art.
And it's also why I like the new art style too
I understood it differently, to mean: "All you had to do was make a game with an art style that does not get in the way [of enjoying the game], whatever it might be."
I think this interpretation makes sense, since the original game is primarily story-driven.
Holding up the complaints of someone called "_Proud Retro Fascist_" shouldn't invalidate legitimate criticism just because a broke clock it right twice a day...
> Take, for example, this comment by someone calling themselves Proud Retro Fascist: [...]
For what it's worth, the person called themselves like this in jest: apparently in an earlier comment, someone referred to people skeptical of the new design as "retro fascists." Not sure if that was supposed to be sarcastic as well, since the comment has been deleted.
I could not agree more. A lot of game producers get this arrogant approach of: "Making games would be such awesome job if it wasn't for those pesky gamers".
The question here is: "Is this a really innovative graphical design that will get praised by future generations but is misunderstood now" or "Is this just a bad decision that the creator is unwilling to own". I tend to think it's the latter. Ultimately the sales will tell.
Obviously I'm not defending the minority of insane comments made my mentally unwell people, but it does feel to me that the rage-quit was prompted more by the general negative sentiment people expressed about the looks of the game rather than by the personal attacks.
We have seen the same thing happen to Star Wars where the legitimate criticism was painted as toxicity of the fandom.
To quote another HN comment I saved recently:
> “Ultimately, the reason some people get upset when a series changes isn’t because the new game is new, but because the old games get their future cut off. Getting a sequel you don’t want closes the door more definitively than creating a new IP. Nobody wants to see the corpse of something they love puppeted around when it could just be laid to rest.”
If you believe games are at all art, then they cannot ultimately be judged either by commercial or critical success, or even by whether they please their creator. There is something utterly subjective and nondeterminant in the evaluation of art.
Obviously, as humans we tend to evaluate the “success” of art on its long term impact. Commercial and critical failures in the short term can and have become treasured as masterpieces in the long term, and bestselling beloved work can turn out to be forgotten quickly.
> We have seen the same thing happen to Star Wars where the legitimate criticism was painted as toxicity of the fandom.
Hold on a minute here. Yes, the racist assholes got more attention than they deserved. But Rise of the Skywalker was thrown together by a bunch of marketing executives looking through all that “legitimate criticism”, making a big checklist, and feeding it into their lifeless movie factory to create a giant wish fulfillment fantasy for all those “real fans” who were upset someone would dare to shake up their stale, predictable franchise. It was a terrible movie. Lessons: Disney is a cancer, but also people on the internet, as plentiful as they are, have no idea what they want.
This is one area where I think Nintendo and Apple really excel at.
They hardly, if ever, cave to user "wants", because they understand that often, the user has no fucking clue what they actually want.
It's why they manage to succeed despite initial opinions being so against them. It's because often the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Looking at a thing can only tell you so much, it's only when you are able to actually experience the thing will you be able to judge whether it is good or not.
Users often don't know what they want, but they frequently know better than rando companies.
Apple's strategy worked during the era of Steve Jobs because Steve Jobs was miraculously good at intuiting what users want. Since his death, Apple has lost that ability. See: The Butterfly Keyboard, the Touchbar, the 2013 Mac Pro. Apple's recent successes have been things consumers very much said they wanted: iPhones with larger screens, Macs with better performance and incredible battery life.
Nintendo does seem to have some leaders with Steve Jobs's talent, but I'd argue they're more hit or miss than he was. The Wii U didn't go so well, and the Wii—while an initial success—was ultimately kind of mixed.
The reason I explicitly noted Nintendo and Apple is because they are not "rando companies". They are companies with explicit track records of not focus grouping every product to death.
You say the Wii was "mixed", but that's just wrong. It outsold the PS3 and XBox 360.
The Wii U was a misstep, but the Switch is essentially a Wii U/Game Boy hybrid. Because Nintendo saw what was off with the Switch and made the changes.
As for Apple, they were lambasted for removing the Home button, removing the audio jack, making their own chips. But those have all been not the major missteps people thought they were.
> You say the Wii was "mixed", but that's just wrong. It outsold the PS3 and XBox 360.
It did, but many of the people who bought it purchased few (if any) games. It's not clear to me that the Wii was more profitable than the PS360 when you take the full ecosystem into account. And even if it was, remember that those competing consoles made major technical missteps—the PS3's high initial cost and weird Cell processor, and the 360's red ring of death.
> As for Apple, they were lambasted for removing the Home button, removing the audio jack, making their own chips. But those have all been not the major missteps people thought they were.
I don't remember as much outcry about the home button's removal. But I bet if you asked a focus group what they wanted in an iPhone, "the biggest possible screen in the smallest possible body" would have been high on the list, and that ultimately necessitates removing the home button. Android phones had already been moving in this direction.
Similar situation with Apple Silicon. Normal consumers don't know what a cpu architecture is, but I'm sure a focus group would have asked for a Mac which was faster and lasted longer on battery.
The headphone jack's removal was a money grab, pure and simple. It allows Apple to exert more control over the ecosystem and receive more money in licensing fees. Consumers didn't like it, they were merely willing to put up with it.
It's not true in the case of Nintendo.
They always actively get JAPANESE feedback for games like Zelda and Pokemon.
As western and eastern tastes diverge, you'll see bigger issues.
It's one of the reasons Square Enix just sold all their western studios.
> The question here is: "Is this a really innovative graphical design that
> will get praised by future generations but is misunderstood now" or "Is this
> just a bad decision that the creator is unwilling to own". I tend to think
> it's the latter. Ultimately the sales will tell.
The question here is not "should people like a thing," it's "why are people such assholes?" To quote Ron Gilbert's linked post:
> Play it or don't play it but don't ruin it for everyone else.
It sure seems like this is a fantastic example of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [0]: nobody would speak so awfully to Ron Gilbert if they were leaning over his shoulder watching the trailer.
> “Ultimately, the reason some people get upset when a series changes isn’t because the new game is new, but because the old games get their future cut off. Getting a sequel you don’t want closes the door more definitively than creating a new IP. Nobody wants to see the corpse of something they love puppeted around when it could just be laid to rest.”
Except in this case, my understanding is that this isn't even true. This game is an alternate sequel to MI2 (which is widely beloved), throwing out the story from MI3 (and maybe Tales? Many fans did not like the story direction of MI3. Perhaps because Ron didn't work on it.. I didn't mind it). So I guess in that case, for the really opinionated MI1&2 fans, this is another bite at the apple.
I'm sorry, but getting upset about a sequel you didn't want is an immature and entitled attitude. This is a sequel from the original creator, not some corporate cash-in, what else do you want? Ron Gilbert is not a mind reader, he can't deliver on 1000 contradictory fan expectations. This is the game they wanted to make, that's their right, if you don't like it just move along.
Top Gun 2 is great example of understanding the audience. it was a love letter to the fans.
Gilbert made it all about himself with no awareness of what other people thought. That's his biggest mistake. He keeps saying he making the game HE wants to make. He really doesn't care about the fans, and they noticed. I strongly suspect it will only get uglier between the deep monkey island fans who kept the brand alive and Gilbert.
If Ron wants to make art, then make art. But Monkey Island was never art for the sake of art. A far more successful revival that pleased the fans was Broken Sword 5.
The comments on the linked article feature a number of examples of this, despite already having had the worse stuff moderated-out. For instance:
> You are an abhorrent and miserable human being, Ron Gilbert. You should be ashamed of yourself. One can only hope that you retire from the industry and never return.
In my experience, people in general have little ability to judge anything. I went through some peer reviews and in one case some workers did not understand some terms on the questionnaire (such as "proactive"). Anyway, the most popular people get ten for being proactive. The internet only make this worse, because in the Internet everyone is "anonymous".
I ignore 99% of judgments, I only start listening if there is a "because" in the judgment: "It's not good, because"... of course, the "because" needs to make sense.
I've been a professional game developer for 22 years and have definitely seen the amount of toxicity towards developers increase sharply in the last decade. Interestingly, though, some have suggested that this is not a bad thing, per-se.
I believe it was a recent GDC talk where a Bungie dev who said something like "hate is only 2 degrees off from love." I think what he meant was, and I've heard this echoed from other developers, is that the fans are so emotionally invested and want you to succeed and fulfill their fantasies in the game that when you fail or things aren't quite right their love turns to hate in a blink of an eye. The theory is that you just have to listen to them and deal with their feedback no matter how rude it is and you can steer those 2 degrees back to love.
I think there's something to that, but also I think a huge factor is the Free To Play model and how it's encouraged massive time-sinks into games which can create cognitive dissonance when the player has finally exhausted their interest. If a player has invested 3000 hours of their life, which I suspect in many cases matters more than putting in $50 or $100, being bored might make them feel guilty for their behaviour which quickly turns to anger and rage at the developer for letting them down and failing to continue to entertain them. This cycle only gets worse the longer they play because it's increasingly difficult for one game to have enough to offer after such a long time and so they get more bored but simultaneously more bitter that they've wasted so much time on it.
Finally, burnout-rage is particularly bad for content creators which are serving a fan-base that's interested in a particular game. They might not even like the game that much but their add-revenue depends on an audience that wants to see content about it. I've seen numerous content creators go super-nova at the end when they finally break down and explode in bile (which, of course, includes performative outrage which is good for getting clicks too).
Monkey Island was cutting edge technology when I first played it as a child in the early 1990s, I fell in love with it. Why would anyone expect that Ron would create a pixel-art, retro-style game? Ron articulated this line of reasoning. He is the creator and has every right to select the style that he desires.
Agreed, although I think the genre is mostly popular as pixel art retro style, especially that he made thimbleweed park that way.. that's probably why they wanted a different art style.
Personally I think Ron is an artist and I'll buy whatever he's selling.
I don't like the art style either, but I see that as a "me" thing.
Ron is one of the few people left developing the kinds of games he would like to play. For that reason I'm glad he's pressing on with it, with the art style he wants to see.
I don't imagine it's that kind of game (the series thus far hasn't been), but at the same time I like the idea that we're seeing a mature Guybrush reflecting on his adventures and mistakes in life.
At this point I don't really mind what direction they take at the end of the day. I love the characters, and just want to see where they end up.
I do hope we get another game where they play with Claymation style animation, though.
I know this feeling. In one case, I have/had a project this is used by a ton of people--it is even still used by a number of people today--and I finally just didn't enjoy sharing it with anyone anymore so I stopped working on it in public or making any new releases of it... I have put an incredible amount of work into it since the last public release, and I am really proud of where it went, but I have almost no interest in showing that work to anyone else or ever doing another public release, even though I know a ton of people would enjoy it and potentially benefit from it... it just isn't fun anymore.
Just wanted to chime in when I saw your username. I'm incredibly grateful for all the work you've done over the years with cydia, substrate and cycript.
I've always tended to be grateful but not necessarily think about leaving comments, over the years I'm starting to realise that it's important to offset negative entitled comments that always seem to come out of the woodwork.
Is it just me or does the art style in the earlier trailer look almost nothing like the style in this one? I can't say I like the change. The old one was kind of cool with transparency and lighting effects and this looks very flat.
The average internet commenter is careless and dumb. I've definitely made comments which I've later regretted, after realizing that the author would actually end up reading them. Often times comments are based on gut reactions which are given after barely taking any time to consider the art. Having a bad day and didn't enjoy the media quite that much, so you're a bit too mean and careless in your comments. It's easy to forget that there are real humans behind each creation.
As creators, it's probably healthiest to avoid comments entirely and have someone filter the feedback for you. It only takes a few inconsiderate assholes to make the creator feel terrible.
I recently experienced a lite version of this, where I posted what I considered to be constructive feedback on how to make a game community better. Immediately I was insulted, criticized, and downvoted. After the initial few comments I realized there would be no intelligent responses and I just stopped reading. Despite my intellectual awareness of this, having some kind of emotional reaction to the severely negative comments was unavoidable. It also means that going forward I'm less likely to engage with the community through that medium.
The game for which I have the largest number of criticisms and complaints is also my favorite. When you spend multiple thousands of hours playing a game, you'll acutely feel each minor bug, issue, and problem. The list of compliments and praises is just as long, as it's the most fun and entertaining game I've ever played.
Hatred is a badge of honor for an artist. You’ve created something that stirs the passions. Would you prefer indifference?
If you care so much about the opinions expressed by your audience, then maybe take a step back and look at the collective sentiment. This is an opportunity for growth and reflection, not to cry in some corner like a child who’s taken his ball and gone home. You’re a professional, Ron. What would a professional do with this feedback?
Going meta (note the lack of capitalization and insert your own joke here) I would say that the stress of running comments on your own blog, in any form, costs more most of the time as compared to sending the comments to places like HN, Reddit, and the like. I can see where size of concern means that you engage and host comments on your own site. However, it also seems to be that running a comment space in service of sharing something made and/or selling a product is the equivalent of painting a wall a nice, pristine white in a highly visible and accessible place and then getting mad at that same wall getting tagged with graffiti.
In other words, I am sorry that the Ron Glibert got burned, and I sympathize, but it seems to me that YouTube (where the video is hosted) runs a perfectly serviceable comments site that you can turn on and off. No need to run your own (unless you want to).
I've recently done some art projects. The comments/feedback can be really bad. Really soul-destroying.
The trick is to weight them correctly. Multiply positive by 5. Then re-evaluate. It helps. Negative people find water disgusting and yet water is a necessity for life. Its therefore very important to keep perspective.
I can relate. I was a game developer just breaking in when the whole gamergate nonsense happened. People were not only shitting on “political” games, but also doxxing people and harassing developers outside their offices. The experience caused several friends to leave the industry, myself included.
Verifying that we are talking to real, authentic humans is going to be crucial for the future of the internet. Maybe not "real name" policy but let's answer the question, "How do I know I am having a conversation that is as authentic as meeting someone on the sidewalk?".
The healthiest thing for a creative person to do is ignore reviews, and not pay attention to comments about your work. Mentally, and emotionally, and creatively, I mean. Your job is to make things that other people can appreciate, or not, but you don't need to listen to them if you don't want to. Active community engagement is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it's a marketing technique, not an artistic one. I'm sure it works for some people, but don't feel like you need to do it if it causes you pain, and not, by any means, if it makes it harder to do your job.
It may feel necessary in 2022 to engage with fans and build a personal brand, but go ahead and audit the creators you really respect, and how many of them do this. Some do, I'm sure, but some don't.
I think Gilbert got hit hard by this because he's been running this personal blog since 2004, and suddenly getting a flood of shitty comments can't be fun.
Yeah, up until Return's announcement, it was a very quiet old school blog with a tiny readership (raises hand), one of very few left. It survived a long time without getting faced with modern internet communities and Reddit/HN hugs of death.
All the special editions weren't even updated for Windows 11 WDDM 3.0, one nvidia driver update broke them even on windows. Not sure if they even run nowadays on latest windows versions. They also removed the ios/android versions from the app stores before the special edition releases. Your only option is ScummVM and that doesn't support the special editions. All of them are rated as broken on wine appdb. I would not expect this to get Linux support, its Disney and its obvious by now that Ron doesn't care about his fans so there is that.
Oh wow. Let's hope the old saying "there is no bad publicity" turns out true and at the very least, all this outrage will make everyone aware that there's a new Monkey Island.
In the distant past (when the other monkey games came out) if you loved something you could put out effort to say something nice about it. But if you didn't like it, you wouldn't bother.
Now the threshold for complaining about or trash talking something is nearly zero, so here we have everyone on equal speech/public platform footing and we hear everything. It's sad, but also reality.
He would have quit after the first game (1990?) if the internet was as widely accessible and used back then.
I bet someday in the future new fans of the game will find the art style so fresh. Ron is an artist and true to his craft.
As a fan of the game series I can't wait to see what's in store.
I think the artwork is unique and will attract newcomers, instead of repeating what's already there and serving only the "hardcore fans" who threw all that hate.
A lot of creatives have a hard time understanding the product side of art.
Games are far more products like movies than they are "art".
There have been a bunch of recent examples lately that showcases the minds of masses.
Spiderman No Way Home did supremely well by giving the masses what they wanted, and not straying too far from the marvel formula.
Sonic the Hedgehog Movie had a awful original art direction. The fans complained and the director reversed course, and now its a beloved and highly rated movie.
Top Gun 2 is another great example. The tone, direction, spirit of the original movie is captured supremely well and is on track for a billion dollars.
Pixar's Lightyear is a disappointment at the box office. Honestly who wanted a "realistic" version of Buzz from Toy Story. The tone, spirit, and art direction are too different.
I think Ron made a horrible directorial mistake, and while he shouldn't be attacked for it. He does deserve criticism, and people should be allowed to voice their dislike for a product and its direction.
As people on other sites have mentioned, this whole project has the feeling of the George Lucas Star Wars Prequels. George Lucas needed some honest feedback, and collaboration with other people like Kasdan. Ron Gilbert should have gotten some opinions from the original Monkey Island artists/Lucas Arts Crew.
I don't think anyone is arguing that the art direction can't be criticized[0], just that Ron doesn't deserve abuse for it. Unfortunately "Gamers" includes a group of extremely entitled and vocal internet asshats who frequently do things like hurl death threats at developers for missing deadlines. Now they have chosen to harass a legend who shaped the very genre because he has offended their aesthetic sensibilities. It's ridiculous and no one should have to put up with that crap.
[0] honestly I'm also a bit put off by it, but that might just be because it is unfamiliar, which isn't the same thing as bad. Besides, since I consider graphics to be one of the least important things in games I don't think it will affect my enjoyment that much.
> Games are far more products like movies than they are "art"
Says whom? You demonstrate your points by showing that blockbusters make money, which says nothing about whether they are art. They're entirely different dimensions of the same work, and hard to compare. Obviously the accounting department will have a different point of view than the creative director.
You're also arguing that people making new films on an existing franchise should stick to giving the fans what they want. But who's to say the fans even know what they want? They might not care, they might be mistaken, they might misremember things. For example, people clamoring for World of Warcraft Classic or a back-to-the-roots Sonic game back in the day weren't really hoping for a product per se, but rather to go back to a time when the product was more culturally relevant (and they were younger).
A new direction can also capture a new audience, which might make fans negligible. For instance the Star Wars prequel are still divisive but a large, younger portion of the fandom likes them very much.
And what fans are we talking about anyway? You give Spider-man as an example. But there have been thousand of pieces of Spider-man media, with wildly different art styles and tones. Which one is "what the fans want"? Disney went with the Marvel formula precisely because it's a lowest-common denominator style of film, accessible to non-fans.
And finally another obvious problem with your thesis is that nothing new can be made if it is required to give to the masses what they want for sure. Almost by definition, it is unknown whether any new concept, style, tone, or property are what people want. At the same time it is known that the public at least somewhat values originality, so companies take risks and release films such as Pirates of the Caribbean or games like Assassin's Creed.
If you don't want negative comments don't post on Internet. I still don't understand how freaking stupid people have to be not to understand this reality. You are not entitled to positive comments.
I like Ron Gilbert. I don't like all of the games he's worked on but I like most of them. I think it's great that he's making this new game and he's doing it how he wants to. I will likely check it out when it's released and there's a good chance that I'll enjoy it.
all of that said, I have a hard time understanding this situation. when you've been making games for decades and you've watched the Internet grow from nothing in that time, how can you possibly release a trailer for your upcoming game showing an art style that you don't have to hire a focus testing company to tell you that the Internet will knee-jerk react negatively to... without knowing that there would be The Usual, Expected Amount of "toxic" backlash? how could you not see this coming, and why would you then go on to take it personally?
I fully understand the human angle where like, if I released a trailer for a game I was working on tomorrow, and for whatever reason the Internet Hate Machine started churning against me, I would have a very hard time handling it, because I have never been in a situation like that before, and the human mind is ill-equipped to deal with the onslaught of criticism, both fair and over-the-top, that is just part and parcel of putting things on the Internet these days. in the past ~15 years of the indie game scene there have been countless examples of this exact scenario playing out time and time again, and I have complete and total empathy for anyone in that situation—it has to be hard.
but this is a guy who's made both games that are considered classics, as well as games that have been critically panned. why is he taking the perfectly predictable response to the art style shown in this trailer so personally?
the only conclusion I can reach—and it's a mighty cynical one—is that this must be part of the planned PR cycle for the game. the game was announced earlier this year, as being planned to be released later this year, meaning that at the time of that announcement, the art style was almost certainly already settled upon... yet the decision was made to withhold from revealing the art style at that point in time. now, awhile later, we get a trailer that shows and demonstrates the art style. again, the Internet's reaction writ large was wholly predictable. now Ron Gilbert says this wholly predictable reaction makes him sad and makes him not want to share any more of the game until release, and various "journalists" and commentators in the space get to write up think-pieces about the event heralding this act—not sharing any more of your game until it's released—as one of moral bravery in the face of the innately toxic and reprehensibly evil Internet Comment Section saying mean things about the latest game from a respected and celebrated creator of some of the most cherished classics in the history of computer gaming. Entitled Toxic Gamers get shamed for being Toxic and Entitled and Gamers, as though we haven't learned anything over the past 20 years about how anonymous comment sections inherently work in the everyone-has-an-Internet-connected-smartphone-in-their-pocket-at-all-times contemporary society we now live in. blogs get something juicy to write about. everyone wins!
is there any reason for me to not believe that some version of the above is what happened here? or am I completely off-base here and perhaps Ron Gilbert is just mentally stuck in the 90s, where your publisher sends promotional prerelease screenshots to a gaming magazine and you don't have to directly see any criticism, as someone else at the company reads all the (e- and snail) mail for you? or something else?
tl;dr I can't understand getting mad at the Internet for being the Internet in 2022, it will never get better, if anything it will only get worse—this is the price we collectively had to pay when we decided everyone should be online at all times.
So, your argument is "The art is terrible and he must have known it was terrible and possibly made it terrible intentionally for some sort of complex culture-war publicity reason because the only other possibility is that he's actually offended by people telling him he's a terrible person and and idiot and a moron and only capable of producing absolute garbage because no person today would be offended by that because I guess it happens a lot because internet"?
Honestly, I'm trying to say something about this argument that falls within the site's guidelines for discussion and I can't really figure out a way to.
the first four words of your attempted paraphrase of my post, or anything like them, do not exist in my post in any form. while reading my post you hallucinated that I was "one of them" and disapproved of the game's art style.
to clarify: I don't have any strong opinions about the art style of Return to Monkey Island, and while I have some thoughts about it, that entire line of discussion is uninteresting to me. I see no reason for the art style to have been chosen other than that those involved in making the game think it's a good fit for the game they're making. and it probably is! so please, if you're going to continue to engage with me on this topic, update your mental model of me and the position I'm taking on this, because you seem to have made some faulty assumptions, unsubstantiated by what I've posted here.
however, it should be obvious to anyone that the art style is both a departure from the original games, and their later sequels, and that it's such a stylistic departure that backlash should be fully expected. if Ron Gilbert really, truly did not expect backlash on the reveal of the art style, then either he is ridiculously naïve compared to how I would expect him to be, given his career and previous works... or the reveal and subsequent response, in which we all meant to feel warm and fuzzy and sympathetic to a legendary game designer who had anonymous fuckwads write mean things about him and his game on the Internet, was expected, and planned as part of making a broader audience care about a point-and-click adventure game being released in 2022, at a time where great lengths must be taken to get anyone to care about any game you make at all, as there's way too many options for not just games to play but places to give one's attention in general.
what do you think the net effects of this entire saga are going to be? do you think more people know and/or care about the release of this upcoming game, a game which is of a genre that is broadly (back) in decline (after a brief resurgence a decade or so ago), as a result of this debacle?
and almost more importantly: what was it about my post that made you think I disliked the art style of Return to Monkey Island? because it wasn't the words that said as much, because those words don't exist—yet something made you think I think the art style is bad! it might be useful to analyze what led you to this incorrect assumption.
So what I did is look up all the Monkey Island games. There are essentially 7. The Secret of, LeChuck's Revenge, The Curse of, Escape from, Tales of, and Special Editions of The Secret of and LeChuck's Revenge.
And I went look up screenshots of every game.
Consistency does not exist. The Secret of and LeChuck's Revenge are pretty similar, The Curse of looks very Dragon's Lair-esque/Don Bluthy, Escape from looks kind of ass to be honest. It's very "early 3D" and did not age well. Tales of is also 3D and is ok-ish. The remakes are also 3D, but also different from both Escape and Tales of.
And the character design of Guywood changes from the first two, to the third, to the fourth to the sidestory, to the Special Editions.
So any argument based on "consistency" is a red herring for something else. Consistency has not been a hallmark of this series, graphics-wise. This series has more departures than LAX.
I agree with everything you've written here 100%, and this is why I actually think the art style they've chosen for this new game is interesting in a tentatively good way, despite me having basically zero grounds upon which to judge art in general. they eschewed the sort of overwrought cartoon whimsy of the later games and Special Editions, and found an art style that allows much of the same level of expression you'd get from pixel art, while not being pixel art, if that makes sense. it's certainly a bold choice, but it kind of had to be, right?
this is why I never said anything about "consistency" and why I am empathetic to the plight of having to figure out how a Monkey Island game in 2022 should look, because as you discovered it somewhat surprisingly (for someone unfamiliar with the series) doesn't "draw itself" like one would expect for a revival of a retro franchise.
all of this reasoning is exactly why I don't understand why Internet backlash to the art style reveal was so allegedly unforeseen—it was a real "damned if you make it look like any of the old games, damned if you make it look completely different"-type situation.
I can't recall any real backlash about any of the other games though.
That's the issue. Just about every game looks different, but not until this one do people "care".
It literally has no real basis to base its look off of.
> however, it should be obvious to anyone that the art style is both a departure from the original games, and their later sequels, and that it's such a stylistic departure that backlash should be fully expected.
This here seems to be you talking about consistency. Saying that it doesn't match the older games. Well, which older game should it match? If anything, it not matching any of the older games would be more stylistically appropriate than matching any of the older games.
I never played the old Monkey Island games in their day because for some reason my dad had pretty much the rest of the SCUMM catalog except for Monkey Island and LOOM. but if I understand correctly, the transition to 3D wasn't as criticized because everyone was trying to figure out how to make games look good in 3D at that point, plus Ron Gilbert had left LucasArts at that point in time, so those games weren't as appreciated as the first two. the Remastered version of the first game was certainly met with mixed opinions though.
> Well, which older game should it match?
I already explained that I agree with you that this is the exact problem they faced when coming up with a look for the game. if they had picked any of the different styles, there would have been fans and detractors both. arguably, if they wanted to minimize backlash at the expense of everything else (such as broad marketability), they would have painstakingly recreated the art style of the first two games, with its weird disconnect between the cartoonish character sprites and full-screen realistic-looking closeup shots intact. so they did the almost certainly right thing and figured out a new style. but just because they chose the correct course of action doesn't mean that it wasn't going to frustrate just about everyone who looks at it and says to themselves, "well Monkey Island looks like many different things to be but it doesn't look like that." as a comparative example, see the reaction to the art style of the remaster of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. I haven't played it but I think it looks great—much like the Return to Monkey Island art style, it found a way to split the difference in making a new graphical style that still retains some of the "vagueness" of the old, hardware-limited style, while looking unique and good. as you can imagine, even though the Zelda franchise has had its fair share of totally different art styles over the years, there were many people who felt like this particular style doesn't jive with their franchise preconceptions. (I'm kind of at a loss for why I'm fully explaining all of this... this all seems pretty self-evident, for self-evident reasons.)
It really feels like you're defending the backlash though. As if it was a foregone conclusion.
But why? They've done this exact thing N times before, this is just the N+1 iteration of it.
You also keep positing alternatives they could have done and claiming that those alternatives would have been better. But it's all based off of your conjecture. You claim it's self-evident, but it's only self-evident in the way that is evident to yourself.
The backlash seems out of proportion to what was done.
> They've done this exact thing N times before, this is just the N+1 iteration of it.
I think what you might be missing is that "they" has been a different group of people each time since the original two games—this is the first Ron Gilbert Monkey Island game since LeChuck's Revenge. I believe Gilbert has also said that he's disregarding everything in Monkey Island "lore" that he wasn't around for the writing of. because of all of this, the franchise has a general identity problem, including a visual identity problem. most people who are excited to play Return to Monkey Island are not coming from a place of "well most of the rest of the games looked different from one another, let's see something new!" I think most people expected the franchise to either maintain its new "Remastered" look, or look closer to the original two games. personally I'm glad they chose neither!
the backlash only seems disproportionate due to reporting on it. "New Game In Franchise Looks Different From Old Games In Franchise, Many Anonymous Internet Users Vocally Upset About This, Like Everything Else, As Per Usual" doesn't really have the same emotional galvanization effect, see?
Except that the graphical style isn't even that dissimilar from MI1 and MI2 once you account for the obvious difference in resolution and detail. It's a lot less cartoonish than, e.g. Day of the Tentacle where Gilbert was also involved, that came out not long after MI2. So I'm really not getting what the complaints are about. MI1 and MI2 were never trying to look anywhere near photo-realistic, so what's the alternative those complainers have in mind?
fullscreen character closeups in the VGA release of the first game at least (never played the second one! keep meaning to) were most certainly more realistic-looking than anything else in the series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Monkey_Island#/m...
but again I agree that the new style is actually a neat compromise between the old cartoony pixel art character sprites and something totally different, without going down the full-cartoon-whismy route that the later titles and Remastered games took. part of the charm of the first game is how expressive the characters without being too over-the-top cartoony like DoTT or Sam & Max. the new style looks like it should be able to recapture this feeling quite well!
again, the complaints are stupid, but should have been very easy to expect, because pleasing everyone—especially when it comes to nostalgia—is basically impossible.
One might argue that you need realism in a character closeup more than anywhere else, to avoid falling into the uncanny valley. But even then, these are not trying to be actually photorealistic. They could be described as painting-like, not unlike so many other scenes in 1980s and early-1990s games.
> tl;dr I can't understand getting mad at the Internet for being the Internet
> in 2022, it will never get better, if anything it will only get worse [...]
If I may provide an alternate tl;dr to your comment: "People are being absolute rude, disrespectful assholes; which is absolutely fine. Ron Gilbert asked for this abuse by making things. The real issue is that he disabled comments on his own blog, where people should be firmly allowed and encouraged to shit on his work."
There would have been some degree of angry backlash to any art style that wasn't a meticulous recreation of MI 1 and 2 (a decision that would have also been criticized, but probably much more politely). I don't know why it's supposedly predictable that this particular art style would receive this degree of hostility.
what alternative course of action do you suggest instead? I don't understand why you think people should continue to be surprised by wholly predictable reactions contingent upon inherently flawed human behavior.
hopefully your solution isn't simple moral posturing that Things Should Be Better, because that might feel good to say but as a solution it's pretty obviously untenable.
regardless: either Ron Gilbert is, somehow—even after DeathSpank(!)—hopelessly naïve with regards to the state of anonymous shit-flinging on the Internet in 2022, or all of this moralizing and othering of Toxic Entitled Gamers (which we've definitely never seen deployed before!) is part of the PR plan for this game, to make people feel sympathy/empathy for a celebrated, legendary game designer being forced to read mean words on the Internet about something he made, as though this is some great moral travesty of our times and not just the baseline level of Internet interaction one should expect by now. again: why is any of this a huge surprise to anyone involved? why is Ron Gilbert taking any of this personally instead of just taking the tack of "lol well this is what I wanted to make so fuck off if you don't like it"?
either way, sad state of affairs, especially given that I'm looking forward to the game's release regardless. hopefully the lesson everyone learns from this is that people act like fuckwads on the Internet and there really isn't anything you can do about it aside from refraining from looking at it... which is a lesson I thought we all learned a long time ago.
presumably the last time he made a game people weren't such huge dicks about it... no big deal but modern gamers cause a chilling effect in the industry by behaving this way, inevitably. Creative professionals /don't/ have to get used to being punching bags.. they're exactly the type to take their toys and go home. That's what happens when you do something for love (and take a pay cut to do it).
The hateful gamers will just have to continue to enjoy loveless games made by companies who know that a 100mm budget is table stakes to protect them from their customers. The passionate makers will find something else to love; that's their power.
the current top comment in this comments section is also decrying the Entitled, Toxic Gamers that are the cause of all that is Bad and Wrong in the world of video games today—have you ever noticed how convenient of a recurring boogeyman this is?
"gamers are the worst, they suck and are terrible. no, not you, of course—you're not a gamer, you're a Cultured Video Game Enjoyer, just like me, the writer of this Kotaku article. you and I are different from these vile and horrible "gamers", who aren't being misogynist or racist today but you just know any day now they'll be back to doing that too. how we hate them! now anyway, the latest vile act that these abject villains have done is make Ron Gilbert sad by writing mean words about an unreleased video game based upon trailer footage, on the Internet. imagine! being mean to Ron Gilbert, celebrated adventure game designer! the nerve of these gamers. how we hate them! now, Cultured Video Game Enjoyer, what do you think about the art style of Return to Monkey Island? do you love it? answer carefully, because the only people who don't love it are those people we hate, those untermenschen 'gamers'! now answer: how great is Return to Monkey Island's art style?"
don't you find the rise of this kind of rhetoric over the past 15 years or so, and all of the moralizing it entails, to be at the very least curious? "othering" a broad, diverse population of people by strawmanning them as though they were a political party or something, generalizing based upon anonymous Internet comments, an eternal beast of a boogeyman who is always lurking in the shadows just out of sight, only to emerge in the public consciousness now and again as the driving force of moral outrage that you should definitely feel very strongly about, because as we all know there is no greater evil in the world than typing mean words into an Internet-connected text field and clicking "Submit", right? and it always seems to happen whenever somebody wants their personal and/or game's profile to be raised, whenever it sure would be nice for all involved if more sympathetic Cultured Video Game Enjoyers would point more of their eyeballs at the person and/or product being promoted, on grounds of moralizing against the uncultured gamer swine, and above all, proving that you're not one of them.
idk for me after 15 years of this shit it's pretty old by now and that kind of appeal-to-emotion persuasion doesn't faze me in the slightest anymore. some people said some mean words on the Internet to a guy who's going to release a video game later this year, and it made the guy sad. that's a bummer, but I just can't bring myself to get worked up in the way the Video Game Journalism Industry wants me to—I'm kind of done being emotionally manipulated by everyone in that sphere. I don't need to "identify as" either a "gamer" or a Cultured Video Game Enjoyer to enjoy video games, so it's not hard to reject the attempted pseudo-political cultural bifurcation here by rejecting the whole dichotomy and saying "lol video games amirite"—and I recommend others do the same!
I dunno why you think demanding that people can't feel hurt on the internet is any less overbearing than condemning people who are mean on the internet.
I'm not sure where I issued such a demand, but, it should be obvious that it is easier to learn to deal with the existence of negative Internet shitposting than it is to try to morally posture it into nonexistence, despite the latter feeling good.
You're confusing disgust with surprise. One can predict abuse and also not enjoy it and decide to close the comments down after you get too much of it.
I've seen it on HN also. Someone creates a thing, and then people pour out of the woodwork to lump horrible criticism. No one is asking for blind praise for what they create, but surely there's a middle ground between blind praise and mob bullying?