Dragon Age and Anthem veteran Mark Darrah has encouraged fans to channel frustrations constructively and to the appropriate place rather than let lose on random developers "because you don't know the circumstances that resulted in the thing that you're mad at."
In a new video titled 'Your $70 Doesn't Buy You Cruelty,' the former BioWare executive comments on the harassment of developers within the games industry – from the celebration of layoffs to more targeted personal attacks.
To start things off, Darrah makes clear what the video is not about. People don't have to like a game because they spent $70 on it and can certainly be critical about it. They spent a lot of your own money on it, after all. That said, there's a difference between airing grievances where it's most likely to make an impact and just being cruel to a random human.
"If you are mad at that Ubisoft game, be mad at Ubisoft," he says. "Express your anger to Ubisoft or the studio that made the game. But you cross a line when you start being cruel about it."
So what's wrong with being cruel? First off, why would someone ask that? Darrah says you "don't need to go out of your way to cause harm to other people because of a video game."
"When you celebrate layoffs at a studio because the game that you don't like didn't do that well, you're crossing a line into being cruel, and fundamentally, you should have more grace for other human beings," Darrah says.
Secondly, fans don't know who is actually to blame. Darrah throws up a hypothetical that someone might not like how an actor delivered a line. Sure, it could well be down to the actor, but it also might be down to who was directing them, how the writer asked their work to be delivered, or maybe that was the only take they got.
But even then, it's not so simple. Continuing with the hypothetical, if the actor's funky delivery was down to the writer, that doesn't necessarily mean someone should seek them out to be mean. You don't know what kind of time crunch they were under, how many rewriters were required due to shifting game direction, and so on.
"All of this isn't to say that you aren't allowed to have your own opinions to not like the things you don't like," he says. "It's specifically to point out that you being angry at a specific person, you attacking a specific person is often misdirected."
So, who can someone blame? Darrah says that if yelling at the corporate or studio Twitter accounts isn't doing it, don't go lower than the first person you see on a game's credits, as sad as feeling the need to do so is.
Typically, you'll see the executive producer, which, in the case of Anthem, was Darrah himself. While someone can and should go higher than that to the heads of a company, factors like social media presence and availability likely mean you'll end up with a senior developer.
That's not to say that an executive producer has a magical sense of insight into every design decision that happens, but they do get paid a decent salary to "theoretically" be in charge and protect their team. And again, as Darrah explains, it's better for leadership to take a complaint on the chin than a more junior developer who possibly wasn't even responsible for someone's grievance. Obviously, the ideal situation is that no one is harassed, but if someone truly must, Darrah says the higher they go within the organization, the better.
Finally, even if fans don't feel like they're being listened to, Darrah says they very much are.
"Be aware that this stuff is carefully scrutinized," he explains. "Not just by the social media teams, also by the teams themselves. Arguably, in a lot of cases, to too great of a degree. The team is listening, I would say, often too much to what you're yelling about and complaining about."
Darrah also encourages players to remain constructive. If someone is actively celebrating layoffs and being cruel to strangers on the internet, they're not giving anyone any means of creating what they like – because what is that, exactly?
"You are entitled to your opinion," he says. "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, [and] 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."
Darrah's video comes after layoffs at BioWare following the launch of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, though the message has been echoed across the industry, especially in the past few months. If you're up for more listening or reading, I'd point you toward Fallout creator Tim Cain's own video about the difficulty of delivering what fans want when they aren't entirely sure of it themselves.
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