Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Why Is It Cool To Hate Games?

Why Is It Cool To Hate Games?

I love Undertale ; I consider it my game of the year, but I’m not going to try and force my opinion on anyone else. I remember tweeting Kill Screen’s review of Undertale because I thought writer brought up some good points that I hadn’t considered. That said, I’ve noticed that it’s become cool to hate Undertale , similar to how it’s cool to hate Call of Duty or Skyrim . It’s cool to hate any popular game, really, and it seems Undertale ’s status as an independently developed game does not grant it immunity from the hate brigade that protests any and all popular games. What the hell happened? Scratch that question: why does it keep happening?

Gamers are a passionate bunch, and I’m certain this passion is the driving force beyond the extreme spectrum of love and hate. I don’t think such passion is exclusive to just gamers–geek culture in large knows how to rally around a work of art; the fight against Jack Thompson’s crusade against violent video games, the response to Mass Effect 3 , and GamerGate are the examples that immediately come to my mind – I’m sure you could think of many others.

Without any idea of the proper term to Google, I asked the search engine “Why is there a backlash against critically successful games?” TV Tropes gave me a term that I’ll use for now, although I’m not sure if it completely articulates what I’m writing about: critical dissonance , which is the polar opposite to popular critical opinion. For instance, critics gave PS1 classic The Legend of Dragoon middling scores, but the consumers seem to love it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with critical dissonance. As someone who also loves The Legend of Dragoon , I welcome the different perspective.

What I’m thinking of, however, is delayed critical dissonance . Think about whenever Bethesda releases an Elder Scrolls or Fallout game; there’s usually a week or two of praise, and after some time, people tend to talk about why it’s the worst one yet or criticize Bethesda for releasing yet a buggy product (although for some reason I feel like Fallout 4 got the most attention from marketing and the media). Undertale is slightly different in that it didn’t have the same kind of media attention as a AAA game – it’s indie, after all. Apart from its brief stay on Kickstarter, Undertale received little media attention until it was released, and, to everyone’s surprise, it was temporarily the highest-rated PC game on Metacritic. Then it had everyone, especially the critics’, attention, so I suppose it’s a natural progression that some detractors would call it Tumblr the Game .

Why Is It Cool To Hate Games?

I can only speculate, but I believe delayed critical dissonance has to do with combating extremities. Let’s go back to a Bethesda game: the critics love them for the sprawling words to explore, and give them high scores. Detractors hate the appalling number of bugs (in an open world, mind you), stiff animations, and more. One side loves it, the other side hates it. Somewhere in the middle, taking into consideration of both perspectives but approaching the game with an open-mind – avoiding hype as much as possible while maintaining reasonable expressions – I think is the most accurate score for the game.

I should point out that it goes both ways. Blogger and freelance writer johnmichaelmaximilian pointed out that the commenters in the same Kill Screen article that I linked to in the beginning that readers verbally lambasted him for voicing a different opinion from the consensus shared by many critics. Cheat Code Central’s own Becky Cunningham faced similar criticism in the comments section of her review of Fallout 4 . I’m curious to know what those readers think of her review now that the game has been out for a couple of months.

I suppose none of this really matters, because Undertale is just one of many games that will receive universal praise and backlash, no matter how delayed the detractions may settle in. I’m not a fan of choosing a side for whether or not a game deserves the recognition it deserves or the condemnation. I don’t like extremes, but I appreciate the differing perspectives; a world in which critics and fans agreed on every game would make for a very boring Internet, wouldn’t you think?

To top