These days I feel like I come to GAF to be told how much the games I like absolutely suck and that I should be ashamed to be a person who plays them.
It's funny but since NMS' release I've been covering staffing shortages at an elementary afterschool program my org runs, for about 5 hours each day of a combo 2nd/3rd grade class (so 7 & 8 year olds). The speed at which they latch onto something as "dumb" or "undesirable" and then gang up on and shout down anybody that disagrees is astonishing. No big revelation for me there, but it has made the occasional dip into any number of the angry threads a lot more bearable as it's essentially the same mentality at work, and I just envision my 2nd and 3rd graders banging away angrily at the keyboard over some perceived slight.
I'm not dismissing people being upset at something legitimate, it's the
tone in some of those threads however that has them coming off like a bunch of upset 7 year olds that just got their Pokemon cards confiscated because they were taking them out during homework time.
Also, it has reminded that that I need to work harder to disassociate the personality or opinions of devs from the product they produce. I think Sean Murray comes off as a genuine, down-to-earth bloke-- absolutely someone I'd want to sit down and have a few pints with-- and I need to separate that perception of him from the product he and his team have produced and judge the content based solely on what it is; FWIW I'm having a
great time with NMS, will plat it, and will continue to play it as HG adds to it. On the flip of that is seeing devs that are GAFers like Jobbs just go HAM on Murray & Co. in these threads, and not let that colour the way I engage their work; I strongly disagree with Jobbs when it comes to NMS, and think the constant hammering comes off super overzealous, but he's an absurdly talented artist whose game (Ghost Song) I will continue to support without reservation. I also am not trying to pick on Jobbs since I don't think he's a bad person at all, just as an easy example (for me) of not allowing my agreement or disagreement with a developer re-frame how I look at their work.
Games (for fun, not work) are something we attribute to our leisure time. So when we feel someone is fucking around with what we've freely chosen to spend time (which we never get back) and money (which we sometimes can) on, we can get crazy personal and sometimes just plain crazy. The nice thing about having a nexus for people that enjoy games like GAF, is that you can always find people that are having fun with the same things you are; it's not going to be a universal opinion however, so when it comes to things that you've chosen to invest your leisure time in, best not take those people who chose something else too seriously. When I read people screaming at each other over things like this, I'm now going to forever have that image of two 3rd graders screaming at each other that the other person's method for jumping rope was "not the right way", devolving into tears on both sides.
They are the worst. Once you learn the full story of the NMS universe through the Alien Plaques of all three Races.....maaaaaan, screw the Gek.
<3 Vy'keen
Of all the lore bits scattered throughout the game, the ones you get from monoliths that give out the history of the race whose system you're in, piecemeal, I find the most interesting. Gone through all the Korvax and just hit my first Gek system two days ago so starting down that path, but yeah, the Gek come off pretty awful. Looking forward to getting to a Vy'keen system in the future!
