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?
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.
I think a lot about this talk by Max Kreminski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlZinAvpwg
In there, if I remember right, he refers to many games as "entitlement simulators", which is a profound truth.
Replace the word 'bar' with 'school' and this sounds like a write-up of my much of my pre-university experience.
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.
> 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Might be tangential to your point and that of the parent poster, but the threat of gun violence in US schools for a start.
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.
(I know, I know, I could find them with more effort. But really, why bother?)
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.
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.
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!!
Here's a massive collection of examples:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideogameCruelty...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGamePervers...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatTheHellPlaye...
And also a massive list of positive examples:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameCaringP...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameCruelty...
> know the difference between the game world and real life
This is the norm. As far as I know, all attempts to prove otherwise have failed.
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.
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.
In other words, these are only pixels on a screen and these affect me in a different way than a real llama does.
My other son tried to push his brother from the stool in the kitchen because he wanted to take that place. Is this entitled?
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.
It’s real and it’s every gay bar
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.
True, but Some open source communities are good candidates for "most entitled consumers".
> I've seen it on HN also I will ever remember the launch of Dropbox here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
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!".
A lot of people have the same critical opinion, only they didn't comment.
There's constructive criticism (the Dropbox thread) and unconstructive criticism (the Monkey Island thread).
I don't see "hey, your job is super easy" as constructive criticism. I see this as an inability to judge your own knowledge and the efforts of others.
But, yes, the tone is super polite.
The difference with video games is that developers themselves build parasocial communities for their games. Playtesting and marketing are so interlinked.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
The real problem is that people like quick negative comments more than quick positive ones.
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...
This goes for both for and against, but against is usually easier. Famous examples include Dropbox (here), iPod (Slashdot), etc.
If your product is useful, there will be positive feedback. Haters gonna hate, that’s always been the case.
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.
Plus in both cases you can wait a while for reviews to come in.
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.
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.
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.
That $80 videogame can still feed (entertainment to) a family of four for months.
see: comedies whose only funny scenes/jokes are included in the trailer
I offer as a comparison the wireless providers with 60% corporate profits that everyone pays - with a job or without one.
(although I do dislike the psychological manipulation and personal-info gathering games that grown)
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.
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.
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 don't understand this complaint. Just don't preorder games, and don't buy games before reviews drop.
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.
It's spelled out in the HN guidelines; if you see violations, then downvote/flag.
In 2015, a new guideline was added; it's still right at the end:
"When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is, but don't be gratuitously negative. "
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.