Who Gets To Sonic Meme?
Videogames are having a Something Must Be Done moment in recent months. Understandable, because anyone with the slightest compassion in their body can see how truly awful things are when even the most successful of videogames still leads to teams torn apart or disposed of unceremoniously, studios closed to make a number go up on a spreadsheet somewhere, where everyone is seen as disposable outside of the people who are furthest from the work of making videogames. Of course it’s going to be horrible, of course people are going to be looking for answers. Of course, something must be done.
The solution that seems to have gained the most memetic traction is videogames need to be smaller, they need to be jankier, they need less photorealism, more something else that isn’t that. Essentially, though they never went away really, people are looking to the triumphant return of the 7/10 game as the answer. It does what it does, it works well enough, it looks good enough, it goes away.
And of course they are, because 7/10 games genuinely are the best games. That’s an indisputable fact. I will fight you on this.
Like most Something Must Be Done moments in just about anything, if only that worked so well, so cleanly, and videogames didn’t have a history of studios trying to survive in the middle ground struggling to get by and closing in the past — in the very recent past! We can worry about that some other time though because Something Must Be Done.
And sure, we’re grasping at straws a bit in videogames because there is no sense to any of what’s happening of late. Well, no sense beyond “a number must forever go up, for shareholder value is the most important value” but I think describing that as sense is definitely pushing it. And with this, it’s super easy to assume that spending must be the issue, if we just reduce costs here, things will be fine and the number will go up slower but we can save jobs, studios, videogames, all of it. It doesn’t really bear any relation to anything that’s actually happening and why but it’s tidy enough sounding a solution to catch on. It might work???
For what it’s worth, I’ve long been an advocate for smaller works. Okay, much smaller than what folks are generally discussing and I think - have long thought - they’re a vital part of a functioning videogame ecosystem. They are not The Answer because oh me oh my, there’s a lot of structural bullshit and stuff not unique to videogames too, but certainly things that can (not necessarily will or are guaranteed to) be made in more ethically sound, more sustainable ways, if only by virtue of being more limited in the damage that can be done.
A healthy videogames, to me, is one that has space for the tiny and the personal, the poetic and the proud, the nichest of niches and all manner of stuff outside of that depending on intent, resources, scale, ambition. I mean, for one thing, you can’t stop people forever pushing further at things, that’s a thing humans just do, so you just kind of have to assume that whatever you do, someone will always want to turn it one louder. It’s always going to be Spinal Tap’d, sorry.
Yet I also find myself concerned as to who is permitted to make their games smaller, jankier, more sustainably, less big box, more just box. Why? Because videogames has spent so long now saying that actually, no, it’s not okay and people will be punished for it. And oh, I wish I was just talking about our abusive fringe, I really do! That would be lovely!
When Rocksteady released Suicide Squad, opinion columns bust forth from folk behaving like in not making a Batman of that Batman quality again, they’d committed some unforgivable sin. Talk of great developers ruined because they had not turned out a masterpiece. Redfall was even worse. I watched normally reasonable sounding people take its release as a personal insult, with disgust and despair. Redfall was kinda alright, I’d give it a seven out of ten, easy. Not that it matters because it’s absurd to act as though you’ve been personally insulted because a game isn’t all that! Most games aren’t all that and we live to see another day.
They’re two especially egregious examples but this is endemic within videogames. On one hand, we say we want smaller, jankier, more personal games. We want a spread. We want games for everyone. Then we penalise people for doing just that.
The middle ground never really went away, people just stopped being nice about it in public. Individuals and teams found themselves buried under harassment, a torrent of death threats and death watch articles, regularly chastising them for their complete failure and with so much disgust. Being less good than very very very good, for a mainstream release, had the most disproportionate consequences. It’s one thing to get a critical mauling, it’s another to whatever all the fuck that is.
If we, as a space, really want the seven out of ten games, the smaller, the jankier, the less costly, the more sustainable then we also need to reckon with how we react to seven out of ten, smaller jankier games. To treat things true to the reality that making games is hard and they won’t all be winners and to not ruin someone’s life when a game isn’t ten out of ten on the consumer score index, a metacritic eleventy nine, a five star gift from heaven above. To not hyperfocus on a title or team for months on end, to never talk of redemption arcs because what the fuck, no, and let people beaver away on fixing things or chalk it up and move on without abuse, without a daily shitstorm. Without being treated like they’ve just done the literal worst thing ever in releasing some imperfect art.
In short, clear the way for it to be a sustainable, safer answer.
Until videogames does that, all the Sonic memes in the world, all the op eds saying videogames absolutely needs to be doing this, are worthless. Until games can land and not be all that with some grace, some kindness, some understanding, it’s not going to work.
I hope that what we’re seeing now is a turning point but this week, as I watch Avowed (which is fine btw, give it a go) be held up as a poster game for the new seven out of ten, I’m hoping it’s not just the case that Obsidian get a pass and it is, finally, folk realising that we’ve collectively been making a shit of things for years and we are going to do better from now on. It’s a bit too early for me to be convinced yet, but I always, always hope for the best.