One Other Thing... (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, January 05, 2017, 19:57 (2861 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Games are art. Art is made by humans. Many many people place value in knowing about the artist, and the artists process. Art is expression, so to understand the artist is to better understand the expression. The fact that you find that unusual is kind of puzzling.

Remember the Revenant? Part of the marketing campaign was about how the movie was impossible to make and how much of a disaster it was!

Tying this back to Claude's original comparison (to knowing how they make the sausages we eat), there is also a layer of "customer dissatisfaction" that is tied to this whole topic. Running with the analogy, most people don't typically care how their sausages are made... until there's a huge scandal where thousands of people get food poisoning. THEN there would suddenly be plenty of interest in how those sausages got made.

That's obviously a silly comparison, but my point is that the majority of people who play games might not have a burning interest in how their games get made, until something goes wrong. Games like Destiny, No Man's Sky, Street Fighter Five, Halo MCC... all these games were met with disproportionately high interest in what went on behind the scenes, because in each of these cases something clearly went wrong. I don't agree at all with the level of outrage expressed by some gamers over these titles. They're videgames, after all. But people get passionate about the games/developers that they really love. And when gamers feel let down (or worse, "slighted/betrayed/lied to"), it can lead to strong feelings. Some gamers obviously don't handle those feelings in the appropriate way. But I do understand the desire to understand what happened. In part, it comes from a good place. Some bungie fans want to believe that there must have been some kind of behind-the-scenes catastrophe during Destiny's development, because the alternative explanation is that everything went fine and Bungie made the exact game they wanted to make. And for those that want "more" from Destiny 2 (whatever "more" means to them), that is a troubling explanation.