This is typically the time of the year when we make wide-sweeping, hand-wavey gestures towards notions of being better. Better family members. Husbands. Wves. Fathers. Mothers. Working out more. Living life healthier. For those of us who are into the content creation gig, we often resolve to do something better in that space. Sometimes it is just to do it more. Or more consistently. For me, for the last two years, I have been on a spiritual journey to find myself as a gamer. I’ve been round the moons of Nibia and back. I’ve settled on a place that I am happy with. And now that that is done, I’ve given my mind over to what to do about this problem with the conversation on gaming on the web and how it gets in my windshield.
I did more soul-searching throughout this year in particular and determined that I needed to get back to writing. That creating video and audio content was not the sole vector that Professor Glynn wanted me to pursue. In doing so, I also had to wrestle with whether I was going to let social media be an impetus to the topics I would take on. I decided that it would not. Moreover, I’ve also determined that I will not let social media drive my audio content either. I’ve grown so weary about talking about everyone else’s outcries over the gaming industry’s business practices and everyone’s boasting about the quality and output of their chosen brand. In fact, being a content creator in the gaming space has been an entirely exhausting and wearying experience this year.
I know that I’m not great to have as a collaborator. A recurring theme this year for me is how the hobos of the internet frequently made me leap off of the bench in crusade of egalitarianism and even-handedness in the formulated opinions of the gaming pulpit. And in doing so, I would also wind up lashing out inadvertently and unintentionally at friends of mine; the “good guys”. I did all that I could to walk that back as the year went on and I fear I still do not do as good job of ensuring that no one has cause to respond to my tweets with “I feel attacked.”
My conclusion: Gamer Twitter reactions are not news. And we need to stop treating them as such, which continues to give them power. A quick aside: in very similar vein, I identified a couple of years ago that Twitch is soooooooo much less of an influence on the gaming industry than streamers claim it is. This coinclusion can be gleaned by scanning the spectrum of sales figures, Metacritic scores, and what titles are trending on Twitch. Those indexes are often moving in wildly different directions, and it is almost always without fail the Twitch metrics (Twitch Strike and the like), moving off-topic from sales and Metacrtitic, which are typically always in unison. Streamers tend to play mediocre and often bad games. And yet the “real” gamers tend to figure out what to spend their vey real money on.
Much the same way, Gamer Twitter seems to have convinced itself that its opinions matter. That in some manner it’s voice influences companies to make significant business decisions. I am sure that the occasion for a company to walk a thing back in response to Twitter outcries is taken as evidence of this. I think this is a lofty aspiration. Far closer to the truth is that companies use Twitter as a sounding board if and when they deem it pertinent. Decisions that they are not beholden to are thrown like wet paper towels against the wall of Twitter and if there is kickback, they take those intentions down. But don’t fool yourself. Those are only for the decisions that they were not entirely convinced of in the first place. Things that they could either do with or without. Microsoft wasn’t going out of business because Twitter didn’t accept its thoughts to increase the subscription cost for Xbox Live. And Jim Ryan didn’t ask Twitter’s permission before he decided that y’all were gonna pay an extra $10 for the privilege of playing a new triple-AAA first-party title. Sony believes in generations and they stuck to that, despite what Twitter had to say about it.
The problem with Gaming Twitter reactions is that they represent but a fraction of the real temperature of the gaming market. Whatever heat is perceived as being in the discourse on Twitter is but a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are too small a percentage of the buying power of the consumer space to be valid analytic.
So what is Gamer Twitter? What label do I put on it in order to put it in a box that ascribes to it an appropriate taxonomy that classifies it in a manner that I appropriately weight it in the consideration of its relevance to what I do as my night job? I think Twitter is reflective of what, in the past, has been the social structures that have given way to the proliferation of public opinion in its written, and, now with Spaces, audio form. Let me not declare its value an absolute zero. While Twitter tends to the end of the value-spectrum of communications that is akin to hieroglyphics and paintings on the wall of caves, it IS a form of written communication. In that cloak, it offers more value to me than I would typically account for in a verbal medium. Barely. At the high-end, Gamer Twitter is akin to the parlor which encapsulated Socratic discourses between Shelley, Shelley, Byron, and Polidori. But for the vast majority of Gamer Twitter, it’s a mosh pit at the sweatiest pub in Croydon.
It flows along a spectrum of low-end to higher-end content, and this is the crucial problem with Gamer Twitter; the level of effort to find the gems, the truly intellectual nuggets amongst the floatsam is excruciatingly steep. It is incredibly questionable as to whether or not the ROI is there.
More often than not, I have arrived at the conclusion that it is not. I have my podcast crew, and often I am left to think that I should just be flat in consideration that maybe those four are all that there are in kindred spirits in the world. But I have empirical evidence to the opposite. I have been blessed to come across the path of some truly ingenious commentators on the gaming industry, the state of the art, and its designs. The guys at The Backlog Pod, who include my former podcast co-host, K-Med. The crew of The Game Junky Show, with whom I have had some of the most existential conversations about the gaming medium. The show and its dialogue are literally experiences that are spiritual in their nature, allowing me to achieve a height of thought and verbal excahnge that is quite frankly unequaled, even on my own show, as our cast is static and CSmithStine raises the dynamic flow by having a constantly rotating cast. And of course the man whose intellectual shadow I am forever cast in, Gurnico.
So there have been some choice gets. Bonds that have been forged that, in truth, make the constant slog through the picketers and rioters of Gaming Twitter, those seeking to burn witches at the stake, whether there is just cause or not (and 99% of the time there is not), on rare occasion, worthwhile. 2021 has been exhausting. It has literally been exhausting to love games and attempt to have a conversation about them on Twitter. And that’s not the way it should be. There are those that love football; that study film, Hall of Fame players, the famous games and situations, who talk about the nuances and shades of microseconds between victory and defeat when two great tactical genius head coaches deploy their troops to face each other on the field. And then there are those who shout at each other while sloshing their beers; these are the conversations where, no matter how horrible a team is, their fans are incapable of doing truthful analysis on their team’s pros and cons, but will always defend them with the worst deliriums absent of any rationale. These are the two levels of conversation on gamer twitter. And I am looking forward to putting my coat on, walking out, and leaving the noisy din of the latter behind.
Rounding Off Infinity 