When you’ve been on the internet as long as I have, you get the distinct displeasure of watching cycles of toxicity repeat themselves ad nauseam, usually over things that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The world is on fire and rather than devoting energy to important matters, a subset of the internet will create and participate in online campaigns to harass developers who made a video game they didn’t like. These campaigns go beyond reasonable criticism and veer into attacks on people’s personhood, and sometimes include gleeful celebrations of people losing their jobs after layoffs.
Mark Darrah, the director and producer of the Dragon Age series from its inception until his departure from BioWare in 2020 (he then returned as a consultant on Dragon Age: The Veilguard), has uploaded a YouTube video titled “Your $70 Doesn’t Buy You Cruelty.” In it, he breaks down how the perceived failings of games are often misattributed to the wrong people, and how rather than voicing reasonable critiques in a reasonable way, people often resort to personal attacks and online harassment. And despite multiple instances in which he makes clear that you’re allowed to have an opinion on a game you bought and didn’t like, the comments section is still treating the benign statement of “don’t be shitty to people” as a personal attack.
Darrah uses the video to talk about a phenomenon in which dissatisfied customers often harass lower-level developers on social media over what they see as a flaw or problem in a game they bought. He points out that while criticism is warranted and can help developers make better games, too many people online resort to cruelty and personal attacks, typically without understanding how a thing they’re unsatisfied with ends up the way it does in the final product. Darrah explains how development pipelines, poor decisions from up top, and sometimes bad luck can result in something not reaching a certain quality standard. He then goes on to say that higher-ups in development should act as a “lightning rod” for the feedback and inevitable toxicity, but often the internet will look for anyone they can reach on social media as an outlet for their frustrations, even when those folks likely had no say in whatever they’re upset about. Says Darrah:
Be a human being, have some empathy, and stop being cruel. Stop throwing a party because a bunch of people lost their jobs because you don’t know the circumstances that resulted in the thing that you’re mad at. People deserve some grace. People deserve some empathy from you and if you can’t provide that then stay off the internet completely. One last time for the cheap seats: you are entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to be angry about a game that you bought. You paid good money for it, but try to remember that it’s just a game. Even more importantly when you are expressing your complaints, stay away from cruelty. Stay away from targeting individual people. Stay away from trying to cause harm. Stay away from celebrating harm done to actual human beings. Express your opinion to the company that made your game. Tell them what you like, tell them what you don’t like. Be specific. It will help you get games that are more like what you want, but when you are personally attacking individual devs you are crossing a line, and you’re probably attacking the wrong person anyway.
YouTube comments have never been a great place for levelheaded discussion, so I’m not surprised the comments section on Darrah’s video is full of responses twisting themselves into knots to justify exactly the kind of behavior he’s calling out. There are also plenty of barbed responses using dog-whistle buzzwords like “politics,” “agendas,” and “lecturing.” This is most likely in reference to Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s inclusion of trans storylines and character customization, which have been the subject of culture war nonsense since before the game launched. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many times Darrah says that you are allowed to express your opinion; some people equate honesty with cruelty, which is how we end up with someone having to make a video like this in the first place.
This video follows layoffs and restructuring at BioWare in the wake ofThe Veilguard’s release. EA says the game underperformed despite reaching over 1.5 million players, though other games of similar scale often do about as well and aren’t considered failures.
