Opinion: The Gaming Community Has an Anger Issue

The gaming community can be a fickle one. We love the games that we play and the people that work to deliver them to us. Our favorite creators and websites are the ones that we flock to for discussions and content regarding games that we’ve already played, and ones that have yet to come out. But once a match is struck in the gaming community, it gets angry and it gets nasty. This has been happening more and more lately, with increasing levels of vitriol. This isn’t just concerning. It’s a serious issue.

This is at the forefront of my mind right now due to the response from the gaming community to reviews of Cyberpunk 2077. Reviews for the PC version of the game came out shortly before launch, giving the game a 90 on Metacritic (though it currently has an 86). The game received largely great reviews across the board, with the most common critique of the game being that it’s littered with bugs. There were some not so positive reviews of the game as well, with Gamespot’s review of the game possibly garnering the most attention. Kallie Plagge, Gamespot’s Reviews Editor, gave the game a 7/10, a score which is considered “Good” on Gamespot’s review scale. However, members of the community bombarded the review with large amounts of hate.

Going into the review’s comment section revealed comment after comment attacking Kallie and attempting to discredit her review by bringing up other games that she likes, or the fact that she critiqued the way the game handled representation, something that they feel shouldn’t be a factor in her review. The replies over on Twitter aren’t much better. With the way these people are acting you would think they played the game, but at the time they hadn’t. Instead, they refused to accept that either a) the game wasn’t as good as they hoped, or b) that this one review was not the end-all-be-all of reviews for the game.

We saw a more extreme form of aggression from the gaming community earlier this year when The Last of Us Part II released. The game was already very divisive going into reviews due to the leaks that had spread a month prior. People were attacking Naughty Dog because they didn’t like the leaks, although they hadn’t played the game yet. Players even started sending death threats to members of the development team, something that is in no way, shape, or form acceptable.

Death threats haven’t been reserved just for games that people don’t like. Just a few months ago, Marvel’s Spider-Man developer Insomniac Games was the victim of these types of messages after they revealed that they had changed the facial model for Peter Parker. Coming back to Cyberpunk 2077, the developers at CD Projekt Red also received death threats when they announced the game’s final delay back in October.

This type of behavior isn’t a recent phenomena. It’s been happening for years, yet for some reason it’s something that the gaming industry has gotten used to and actively anticipates when big releases are on the horizon. But the thing is, these kinds of reactions shouldn’t be considered “normal” or “par for the course” just because they happen a lot. It also shouldn’t be seen as people being “passionate” about the game, because that’s not the case here at all. There’s nothing “normal” or “passionate” about a person wishing death on someone over a video game that they don’t like, or a review that’s not what they wanted to hear. That kind of behavior is unacceptable and should have no place in the gaming community.

Reviewers shouldn’t have to be afraid of giving a game a negative review, or even a positive review, because the community may react very poorly to it and attack them. Game developers shouldn’t have to worry that the project they’ve worked hard on for years is going to lead to death threats being sent their way because players didn’t like something about it.

Now I’m not saying that you can’t disagree with a review or not like a review. You’re well within your rights to do that. The same goes for the games themselves or any changes that the developer makes to it. But there’s an appropriate way to go about expressing and vocalizing this. Having a civil discussion with the creators, or even a comment as simple as “I don’t really agree with this creator/like the way they approached this, so I’ll look elsewhere for something that I’m more aligned with” is the type of response that people should have. The personal attacks and other kinds malicious messages need to stop.

It’s important to note that while it may seem like it’s the majority of the gaming community that’s up in arms, in reality, it’s probably just a very vocal minority that’s making their voices heard. This is an issue though since having reactions like these can only serve to reinforce the negative stereotypes that are associated with being a gamer and make the community as a whole look bad. If we as a community want to be respected more by those outside of our hobby, and those inside it as well, then the games industry as a whole needs to step up and start to seriously address these responses. Us players need to call out our fellow gamers when they do something like this and hold them accountable. Throughout the week, multiple figures in games media spoke up in support of Kallie, and it was very heartening to see. It would’ve been even better though to see CD Projekt Red themselves say something directly to their fans. More companies need to speak up and let players know that what they’re saying isn’t okay and that they don’t condone it.

For a while now it’s been obvious, but now more than ever, it’s abundantly clear that the gaming community needs to be better than this. I know that we can be better. And it has to start today. The community as a whole may not be ready to start growing and improving itself, but it’s high time that we did.