Allow me to dust off my digital soapbox as i bestow some tough love upon many of my fellow gamers. With regard to many different kinds of arguments ranging from social issues to politics and yes, even in the world of gaming, different points of contention are continually being obscured by people who have clearly not actively researched the opinions they express. Which brings me to this question : when is no opinion preferable to a poorly thought out one? I submit that as this question pertains to us (the gaming industry audience/consumers), many popular ideas bounced around on message boards and the like do nothing but paint the rest of us as uniformed reactionary dicks, to coin a phrase.
After recently listening to a podcast featuring David Jaffe discussing the topic of used games and online passes, this issue became crystallised as i instinctively flashed back to all the misinformed vociferious opinions i have read over the years. To give a specific example, how many people who have ever said something to the effect of "greedy Activision/EA/Ubisoft/Insert publisher of choice here", clearly betray the fact that they have zero understanding of how the games industry is structured in their impassioned viewpoint?
I am not trying to debate the fact that sometimes there may be a justifiable case to argue as such - what i am trying to put forward is that much of the audience often chooses to have a populist reactionary mentality, without making any effort to understand why certain decisions are made. If one understands what they are talking about, and how it affects everyone in the chain (from developers to publishers to retailers to consumers), then no matter what their stance, they at least have a respectable, informed opinion. How can one hope to criticise any decision and expect to be taken seriously when all their opinion demonstrates is their unwillingness to look at an issue rationally and critically? By taking this approach while willingly keeping oneself in the dark with respect to all the factors they may be overlooking or outright ignoring, how do we really expect a more informed person to perceive us as a whole? It becomes particularly more egregious when it comes from reactionary professional critics (as opposed to the 'everyman' on message boards) who really should know better.
There have been many times (to take this specific example), where such an argument could have had some weight. Unfortunately, it seems that the broader gaming enthusiast demographic has done more to set our collective culture back when the majority seem to do little but continually react this way without any measured thought beyond "f*ck microsoft". It should not come as a massive shock that often developers opinions are in stark contrast to this mentality - if one had to guess who would have a better understanding of the mechanics of the industry between JohnnyDouchenozzle420, and a developer who depends on their understanding of his/her industry in order to earn their salary, whose opinion would the average person give more credence to? This is not to say that people on the industry side of the fence should be immune from criticism - far from it. What i am saying is that i would hope they are not subjected to scathing critique from people who have made no effort whatsoever to understand the issue.
I do not intend to hammer home this specific issue, but rather the lesson to be learned from it. As my chosen pastime becomes increasingly popular and ingrained in modern culture, it pains me to see how the vast majority of non-gamers must see how utterly mental and willingly ignorant many of us can be. The broader point here is that if you want to find fault with something, at least know what the hell you are on about. A lot of the time no opinion is preferable to one based off bugger all information. Choose any arena of life, and you can all think of an appropriate example here. We all know someone in our lives who behaves this way about something....we are better than that - don't be that guy or gal!
-S.Pastic
ADDENDUM : word of the day = "Reactionary" (bugger off, i know i used it heaps
:))