If there’s anything I’ve learned from my rapid entrance to the so-called ‘gaming culture,’ it’s that there’s a certain level of impatience that is like no other within this community.
Take, for instance, “Fallout 76” and the “Fallout” franchise community in general. In the months leading up to the game, from the initial trailer release at E3 to the first gameplay trailers, there was an overwhelming wave of hype or excitement.
However, when the game was released in early November it was clear that this was a different community altogether. If one thing glitched or broke or acted strange, the community was in an uproar, demanding it be fixed right this second or there would be blood! By blood, I mean an influx of refund requests.
Continuing in the spirit of the impatience and ‘rage-quitting,’ when DLC, or downloadable content is announced, people demand it be in the game now, for free and work perfectly.
On that note, when things don’t work as expected and it appears to take developers a few days to fix it, players decide enough is enough and quit the game out of pure anger, hence known as a form of ‘rage-quitting.’
The question is, why are we like this? Why as a culture have we become so impatient and so demanding? If you take a look at the society that most of us live in, it’s easy to see. We can get pretty much anything we want at the snap of our fingers.
TV can be put on instant replay, we can summon items from a website within the span of two days, and now we can even have someone bring us our groceries. We live in a world where ‘instant’ is the new normal, and when we have to wait for something that we feel should be a basic fix to a problem, it can be frustrating.
That being said, it’s still no reason to act as if a company of hardworking people belong to us and should dedicate all their time to fixing problems we find.
There are always going to be issues with online games unless we one day perfect it, so I vote we all stop, take a breath and maybe go play something else if it’s really bothering you that badly.
Jeri Hensley
Graphic Designer