Why can’t people just play a game, say it’s fine, and move on anymore? Why does everything – whether it’s a finite single-player experience like Black Myth: Wukong or a stab at live-service immortality like Helldivers 2 – devolve into a numbers-driven culture war battleground? On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we talk about how fandom has skewed people’s understanding of why we engage with works in the first place.
Before we get to that, though, we’re joined by Wired’s Makena Kelly to discuss content creators at the Democratic National Convention (a topic I’ll be covering in more depth next week). Was it a savvy move on Democrats’ part to give them press access? Did they do a better job of shining light on protesters and their causes than traditional press? And what was the deal with all the rumblings of conflict between creators and journalists?
Then we move on to Black Myth: Wukong, a Chinese action-RPG that’s taken Steam by storm, but not without its fair share of controversy. After much ado about sexist undercurrents at the studio that made it and streaming restrictions that asked content creators not to talk about “feminist propaganda,” the game is, like so many others at the heart of endless culture wars… fine. Then we wrap up by figuring out popular video game characters’ political affiliations (Sonic is an anarchist, Mario is center-right, and Zelda has probably overseen at least a handful of drone bombings).
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can grow large enough that somebody will one day wage a culture war over our concurrent player count.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: The reason why people care so much about concurrent players – even though it makes no sense in the context of a single-player game – is because it’s one of the few metrics people can point to and say “Look, we’re winning the culture war. Here’s a number that says we’re winning." Number goes up or number goes down, and – you can do this in either direction, since numbers are never entirely steady – you can say “Ah, our side is winning.”
I’ve seen this a lot with smaller games that come from indie developers – that are focused on more diverse casts and things like that. There’s the new game from Red Thread, the company headed up by Ragnar Tornquist, who made Longest Journey back in the day. Dustborn, is what it’s called. It has a diverse cast and tries to deal with a lot of serious issues. But it hasn’t performed that well on Steam, so people are saying “Nobody wants these games. They’re doing badly. They’re made by bad people. This validates our stance in the culture war.” Even though single-player games that are made by relatively small teams are not gonna attract millions of players or hundreds of thousands of players – and in fact can sell slowly over time and recoup their costs. It’s a different scale of production.
But it doesn’t matter to any of these people. They’re all using the same standard of judgment and saying that if you’re not hitting massive triple-A numbers or live service numbers, then you’re nothing, and that proves that you don’t matter, nobody cares, and actually every game should be the same game about the same white guy.
Luke: Bleeding Cool or Comic Book Resource or whatever don’t need to be reporting on box office numbers while a movie is only three days old or rating single episodes of a TV series while it’s still running. It’s a series that’s got an overarching story to tell. We don’t need to be breaking everything down into numbers.
Chris: I did actually calculate the gross for an internship once. That was my job. I worked at ThinkFilm for a minute in film school, and they were like “Here are all the ticket stubs. Here are all the takes from these things.” In retrospect, I don’t think I should have been doing that. I think that’s not something you want to trust your intern to do.
Luke: Well that’s part of why [I said what I said earlier]. I’m definitely guilty of having done this in the past. We all would be to some degree. The need to constantly be posting and providing fresh stories and fresh SEO hits for a modern media website has you looking at those numbers and thinking they’re news.
Chris: For multiplayer games, they’re also germane. With the Team Fortress thing, I think it’s important to be like “How many people here are bots?”
Luke: Yeah, because a multiplayer game is reliant on the size of the player base to an extent.
Nathan: Even then, though, that can be germane, but you’ve gotta contextualize it, and you’ve really gotta work to do that, because people will look at a game like Helldivers 2 and say it’s a failure because of bad updates. Meanwhile, it still gets up to 50,000 concurrent players sometimes. That’s more players than most games!
Chris: It’s made its money. They’re good for a very long time. I will say for me, though, there’s this element of, every time I see somebody who gets that way about box office stuff, I’m like “Do you own stock? Are you a shareholder?” Because if not, I don’t see why you fucking care.
Luke: Did you like the movie or not, man? That’s all that should matter to you.
Chris: If you do [own stock], I get it. If you put all your money into Tencent, and you want to be like “Oh, the numbers,” then sure.
Nathan: I think it’s a byproduct of the fact that people in many ways feel powerless to express themselves and their values beyond consumption. And so they’re like “I’m gonna be the ultimate consumer. I’m gonna show that the things I consume are more right and just than the things other people consume, and that bears itself out in the number of people consuming them. If my thing is more popular, then my views are better and more popular. I’m the best and the most normal.”
Chris: I just thought of the term “emotional shareholder” for fandom. Just somebody who is like “I gotta sell this franchise. The movie’s bad. I gotta sell!” Or they’re like “Alright, what am I buying? I’m buying Deadpool 3. Alright, cool.”
