Fallout designer Tim Cain thinks influencers have changed how people make and play games: "more people seem to be abdicating their own judgement to that of people they see online"

Gaming
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In a new video on his YouTube channel, veteran RPG designer Tim Cain outlined how he’s seen the internet change games and game development, from the first message boards to the ubiquity of streaming content. As with everything, there are pluses and minuses, but he seemed deeply concerned with the state of commentary about and around games.

Cain said that the late '90s was when he first noticed a shift in gaming tastes due to the internet, with the proliferation of message boards and guides supplanting an earlier DIY ethos where the only supplemental reading to be had was a game’s manual and maybe a print magazine⁠—like PC Gamer, say. 32 years strong, baby.

The next seismic shift, according to Cain, was the rise of video content and influencers. With the former, Cain notes that the importance of clips and streamability has affected what gets made and how developers think: “What part of our game would make for good clips,” as he put it. This has always been a struggle for me as a CRPG fan: Most of them make for sucky videos, thanks to the zoomed-out perspective and walls of text. No part of a CRPG makes for good clips, I’m sorry to say.

Much of the video was devoted to how Cain sees trends in videogame tastemaking. In particular, he argued that parasocial relationships and alignment with preferred influencers have supplanted informed, critical review for most gamers.

“Many gamers don’t even look to influencers for reviews, they look to influencers to be told what to think about the games,” said Cain. "People don’t form opinions from the online video, they’re handed an opinion from the online channel they’re watching.

“I’ve seen reviews go from ‘this game has less combat and more puzzles and dialogue for you to interact with than this other game,’ to, ‘This game is stupid and slow -paced and made for casuals, I think you should skip it.’ That’s a huge difference in how games are presented. They find someone they just like, and then that person’s opinion becomes their opinion.”

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Mixed feelings on this …

Literary and film critique are mature disciplines. Pick a random professional book or film critic and a random YouTuber, and I would feel comfortable assuming that the professional critic probably has experience and insight that the YouTuber doesn’t.

It’s not obvious to me that the same applies to video games, purely because critique and analysis of video games is so much newer and less developed.

That’s not to say that there aren’t great professional video game critics, and gamer YouTubers who aren’t idiots. I’m just less sure that having an IGN or Eurogamer byline automatically makes someone’s insights any more valuable than the next guy.

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This is an interesting retrospective from Tim. I love hearing him talk about the good old days of game development.

But it feels like he doesn’t get the psychology behind tribalism and how people will get behind A and defend A against people playing B, just because they want to be part of a group!

Influencers have always existed in every part of society. They are the hardcore that tells the casuals what to like and what to dislike, sometimes they are wrong, so casuals go find another one, but there’s always a minority of people that influences others, because they represent some core aspects of that culture or that particular group of people, which is how they identify themselves.

There’s always been some back and forth between creators making something and critics. Even famous painters were trolling critics sometimes, because they didn’t understand what they wanted from them. Critics have always invented genres and multiple ways of making their point valid and coherent, even though they will never truiy understand what’s in the creator’s mind.

Game development is the same. People will criticize Ubisoft games for being checklists, but then people will love Crimson Desert even though at a glance it seems to be no different. It’s because people will react as a group and not as purely individual critic. That’s why some reviewers get thrown under the bus, because they don’t say the thing that people from this particular group is pushing.

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I don’t know if this is fair, but not do I care: Christ influencers and hype merchants are shit. I cannot stand how teenage gaming still is.

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