“Compare your life to mine, then kill yourself.” Those are the words of Phil Fish, indie game developer, head of Polytron Entertainment, and a guy who got into a twitter battle with a “personality” who calls himself “The Annoyed Gamer,” which led to the cancellation of FEZ 2, a game a lot of people were looking forward to.
True, the man known as Marcus Beer – whose tirade about Fish and another developer, Jonathan Blow – was less than mature as well, calling the two men “Blowfish” and making a point to call Fish a bit of a whiner when it comes to difficulties he’s had to deal with as a developer, but when Fish demanded an apology, all hell broke loose, and the next thing we know, FEZ 2 is cancelled, which led to even more… I’ll say colorful… language from many users of the Polytron website.
While Fish’s reaction was a bit extreme in that I don’t believe he should’ve just up and cancelled the game over a silly Internet fight, it unfortunately reminds us of the nature of debating and sharing viewpoints online: it’s generally a bad idea.
I host a podcast of my own, and I have at times been critical of people such as Cliff Bleszinski for his seemingly childish response to the removal of the “always on” component from the Xbox One, as well as companies like EA for acting like the launch of SimCity was anything other than a disaster, but there’s a difference between disagreeing and just being a jerk about things. Beer went a bit far — a three minute tirade is a bit too much time to spend complaining about a single person, I believe — but his statements are just indicative of the culture many gamers claim they don’t represent, yet still participate in.
We operate in a fandom that needs to constantly be reminded on some of our most popular sites that we should behave ourselves and treat others with respect. We are part of a fandom that will throw slurs and insults instead of honest debate and reason. We will laugh when a person threatens to kill themselves over a video game and egg them on, and we will let ourselves be defined by the freaking objects we buy for entertainment.
And we wonder why gaming still seems to be portrayed as something only children do, despite becoming a form of entertainment that’s universally seen as “mass market.”
The blowup over FEZ 2 is a reminder that a lot of us have a LOT of growing up to do: whether we’re a game developer who suddenly has very thin skin, or a gamer who thinks it’s hilarious to yell “CHOKE IT DOWN” at someone simply because we didn’t like their game.
Come on, people. We can do better than this.
