When discussing gaming, toxicity is something that is brought up more often than the actual content of games. Toxicity exists in multiple forms— hate messages, review bombing, and literal death threats to name just a few— but they all combine into the whole that is considered the toxicity present in gaming as both an industry and a community, which is most present in the indie games realm.
We’ll get back to that last point, but first: an elaboration on games as a medium and some background for myself.
Games are meant for enjoyment, whether that be in storytelling or mechanically. Most publishers in the modern gaming sphere are made to be mechanically engaging and not so much in the emotional or story aspects— a lot of AAA games released in the modern era have a multiplayer function that is the main focus, not only for support post-launch but during development as well. These games often are littered with predatory practices that are (often) at the behest of publishers such as micro-transactions (time-savers like in the 8th gen Assassin’s Creed games, loot boxes like found in most modern FPS games with multiplayer, etc.), which are targeted at the game being a replayable, long-lived game— in example, Call of Duty: Black Ops IV. It was rumored before the release of Black Ops IV that the game would be purely multiplayer and have a battle royale component, both of which came to fruition at launch— also during development, it was said that there would be a singleplayer component for those who play CoD for more than just the multiplayer. However, at launch, this component was entirely missing and was instead replaced with a tutorial component that told a very small and inconsequential story that built up to a cliffhanger which was ultimately left unresolved. These predatory practices, focus on mechanical refinement, and player retention, have become common place in the mainstream industry. The most recent game to buck this trend was CoD: Modern Warfare, and even then their primary focus has been on multiplayer— with a battle royale mode set to come out later this season. Because these games sell, they are what gets made, and the cycle repeats upon itself like an ouroboros— creating fanbases of games that are the same multiplayer content every single year, who play only these multiplayer games with infinitely more refined mechanics than most indie games.
For example, take a look at the Steam page for Where the Bees Make Honey. The reviews for this game are pretty middle of the road, with the positives focusing on the story aspect of the game and the negatives focusing mostly on the technical side. While some of these reviews remain general, others decide to go hog-wild and tear into the game, such as this review:
“Are you kidding me? Is it a joke? Because I’m not getting it.
Nothing works. Nothing is fun. The controls are the worst I have seen in the last twenty years, controlling the girl or the rabbit is miserable, like driving a truck. The damn mouse cursor appears in the middle of the screen in every new scene and does not disappear with controller input. You have to move it away manually every. single. time.”
Reading this review, you may think something akin to “wow, this guy really didn’t like this game.” Their wording was deliberately chosen to attack the game rather than help explain their reasoning behind their distaste and what might even help make the game better. Reviews like this are found even on popular games, such as the recently released Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Steam which currently only has one of seven games set to be included. Here are a few samples:
“Community sucks **** just like the old days, and the battle pass ****ing sucks”
“Dog shit game.”
“Awful. Shoddy craftmanship. Why was this game given the greenlight? Should’ve been given the heave ho. Rest easy, young ones.”
And a few of the comments in specific relation to the fact that the collection currently contains only Halo: Reach until Bungie adds the other games much further down the line, which was a known fact since the announcement of the collection:
“wait for halo 1-3, reach is ****.”
“It’s a god damn scam. Only get Halo Reach. They will never release the whole series. We should sue these *******.”
“Um hello? it has been nearly 4 months, where are the rest of the games? waste of 30 pounds”
“Its actually just halo reach. Its all lies.”
“READ THIS ASAP!! THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE SERIES!! YOU ONLY GET HALO REACH AND IS BY DEFINITION FALSE ADVERTISING A GAME THAT HAS 7 GAMES BY ONLY GET TO PLAY ONE! DONT BUY AND STEAM SHOULD BE SUED FOR FALSE AND MISLEADING ADVERTISING!”
In regards to that last one— it’s my personal favorite from the list— here’s an excerpt from the “ABOUT THIS GAME” section of the store page:
“[…] This bundle includes titles in the collection that will be delivered over time, beginning now with Halo: Reach and ending with Halo 4 in 2020.”
Toxicity is one of the largest issues at current in games as a community— but perhaps rampant illiteracy is a close second?
Jokes aside, comments like these do nothing but deter the final product or the improvement thereof. Rather than encourage the creator to make the product better or even attempt to do so, they are given death threats and threats of legal action and general review bombing that instead makes it seem as though these projects and products should just be abandoned and left as is— as though they aren’t worth anything at all. This ultimately leads to worse products and even worse communities.
So what’s the proposed fix? As it is, I don’t see one. It is really hard to distinguish between the reviews that are sarcastic and the reviews that actually mean something. Maybe a fix in the future would be to have a definite filter that removes reviews that use a certain word set or a certain word too many times— but that could lead to abusing the system on the side of the developer/publisher.
Perhaps the best fix would be to fix ourselves as people.
2021 edit – Halo 4 DID come out in 2020, as promised, and everything runs excellently. I wonder if these people ever went back and changed their reviews?
C. B. Irby 