That’s a quote from Polygon.com’s recent article about, of all things, Fallout 76.
Maybe somewhere that quote should be printed out, framed, and hung in an office. Everyone who walks in that specific office that wants to take part in the time honored tradition of writing about videogames has to read that quote, over and over, until they understand it.
Maybe they leave and it causes them to re-evaluate their relationship to videogames. They sit down in a room somewhere, getting introduced to similar people. “Hi, I’m John Videogames.” someone will say.
“I could only afford one videogames as a child, and now I seek to obtain the same cruel validation even though I can have more than one videogames whenever I want.” In that room, under fluorescent lights that never stop humming, they’ll meet the other John Videogames of the world.
When I read that quote I drove myself up a wall over it: I’m writing this from my ceiling and I can’t come down. Where do we start? Here’s some context: Fallout 76 isn’t a very good game.
The cliffnotes of it is that Bethesda labored to create something people said they wanted (Wow! How cool would it be if Skyrim/Oblivion/Fallout 3 could be played with friends) now, people kind of realize nothing is interesting about that actually happening.
Fallout 76 has a boring storyline with characters you can’t empathize with. Combat that’s never really been enjoyable is now a focus. Player progression is tied to player interaction in a world where it’s really not necessary.
Yet, that quote is like something and addict says: sure I’ve spent my rent money on pills again but they’ll keep me up so think of everything I can get done now!
Gamers Love Fallout is a schism implied by the original article on Polygon, but it’s also the thing most wrong with that quote and why it drove me so wild to read it in a professional review. It doesn’t read as something written as earnestly invested in critique, It reads like the writer needs Fallout 76 to be good because they’re invested in it. What if there’s no redeeming value? What does that mean for our investment in the brand of Fallout? Can a world exist where Gamers do not love Fallout?
Look: we shouldn’t be in love with brands. Brands are built and maintained by inspiring us to associate them with part of ourselves. Videogames are art, but the videogame market is one where products are created to live and die based on how they resonate with us. Fallout is no exception and in the sense of the more modern games, it’s arguably driven everything about the original titles that was compelling out in the hunt to make the whole concept of a Fallout game the most marketable thing it can be.
If that single paragraph didn’t exist at the end of the Polygon article it’d be just another piece of videogame reporting where the final verdict was “Videogame: Bad.” but for the writer to go out of their at the end and say: yes, it’s bad, but: what if the developers wanted it to be good. Here’s the thing: nobody, even the worst directors in the world intentionally go out of their way to put effort into something so it can be bad. Please do not send me letters that say “okay, but this one time-”.
We can watch from a distance as brand managers and hotshot developers assign thousands of people to a project and mis-manage it every step of the way. As our favorite franchises fail to resonate with us in the ways they did in the past, we can step back and say okay. Maybe there’s even a chance we realize something we liked for a long time has no redeeming value in the long run and spend time with something different.
jesus are you okay dude