It's Okay to be a Bad Player
Never played it
According to the ESA “Over 164 million adults in the United States play video games and three-quarters of all Americans have at least one gamer in their household. As the leading form of entertainment today, video games are an integral part of American culture”. So when you factor in the rest of the world, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people play video games and that still surprises some people. Now it’s been known for a long time now by video game developers that two thirds of their customers never complete a single player game. It’s a similar story in other game genres. The majority of MMO players never play any endgame content such as raids. A lot of players don’t make it to level cap either. Yet, so much of the game related content produced by gamers themselves does not represent this. So much of the gameplay videos you find on YouTube comes from technically adept players. Similarly, many popular live streamers gain their audience through being competent.
Now you can cogently argue that there’s not a major market for watching footage of people playing badly, unless it’s presented in a humorous fashion. You can also argue that the term “bad player” is loaded to begin with, as it implies that there is a mandatory skill curve that we all have to progress through and abide by (guess what, you don’t have to). It’s a classic false axiom that so many gamers still cling to. So when I use the phrase “bad player” in this post, I mean it as “someone who is playing in a manner that may not be optimal or even unorthodox, who isn’t driven by a need for continuous self improvement or a sense of competition but is still deriving enjoyment from their approach to the game”. Now if we go with this definition, I think it’s safe to say that not only are there a lot of bad players about but they make up the majority of the player base. And that is fine.
Something, something Tyler "Ninja" Blevins
There is still a major cultural divide in the video games community. Those who see games as inherently competitive and those who play games for “fun”. I’m painting with broad brush strokes here but it usually comes down to some variation of these two philosophies. However, this is not an even split. I’m sure there is sufficient data out there to show that the latter group is the larger. From my perspective, it certainly seems that way anecdotally speaking. When you consider how many games genres have evolved over the last two decades, adding quality of life improvements such as quest trackers, auto looting and fast travel it seems that the developers know this as well. Games with corpse runs, excessive penalties for failure or death, or punishing learning curves tend not to find mass appeal and settle into niche markets. And any game that relies heavily on twitch mechanics is going to face a dwindling player population among the middle-aged. This is why not every game is not Dark Souls.
Just like the cult of youth and beauty that blights popular culture despite it not being applicable to most of us, we also see the equally unrealistic myth of the Über Gamer everywhere. However, if all the distinctly average players decided that they were a disgrace to gaming per se and subsequently took up train spotting, the video game industry would go bust (and freight yards,railway sidings and bridges would be very crowded). So not only do I support and extend a sense of solidarity to all bad players like myself (because I hate arbitrary hierarchies) but I actively encourage players to do things their way. Not only are we keeping a lot of regular, decent people in work but we’re challenging capitalist dogma that everything is about conflict, winners and losers. We may be keeping Bobby Kotick rich but we’re wearing our mediocre, poorly organised ,“I don’t even know what these skills are for” play style as a badge of honour. And so this is why I will continue to RPG spam in Call of Duty Warzone.
