Cutting Through the Treacle - TwitFaceTwitchTube

"Feeling your sting down inside me
I'm not dying for it"

Godsmack - I Stand Alone


Back when I used to get more involved in online games and the player guilds thereof, I would occasionally grow annoyed at the repetitiveness and inanity which flooded my guild chat window. Most of that chatter consisted of greetings, which seem quite pointless given that your grand entrances and exits are already automatically announced to any guild member who cares to keep the "log-in notifications" UI option flagged. So I'd liven things up by magnanimously providing smart-ass rejoinders to any hello or good-bye which rubbed me the wrong way. Among my favorites, I'd taunt anyone who said "hello, people" or "good night, people" with:
"We're not people. We're just random collections of pixels on your screen."
- and as far as you get to demand of a fellow player, that's all I am. Wintermute. Basta. We shoot lazorz at goblins together. We're not automatically friends. Friendship should never be required for basic goblin-laser interactions.

To my great shame, after over a decade of pointedly avoiding any of their products, I've recently started playing Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm MOBA to fill my quota of blowing tween brats' idiot heads off with rockets. Though I've grown accustomed to all sorts of false advertising, cash grabs, market manipulation, datamining, microtransactions and other charlatanry and robbery by the game industry, I'll admit old Bliz upped the ante with this loading screen "hint":
"Playing with friends grants you a 50% bonus to experience granted after playing a match."

OK, sure, there might be some practical reason for this. Maybe it shortens the team-making algorithm's search a bit. As likely as not, it's also touted as promoting "community spirit" or some other codependent tripe. Really, the rip-off artists at Blizzard are just well aware how many customers remain in their uncreative multiplayer extravaganzas merely to maintain their existing online connections. And they're not shy about exploiting your emotional weaknesses.
Pushing it to the extent of punishing me for queuing solo undermines such games' strongest selling point. Automated matchmaking exists precisely so as to save me the anguish of associating with any of you shiteating degenerate subsentient vermin for more than one match at a time. You are pixels on my screen, no more. Moreover, players should never be rewarded for trying to stack the deck in their own favor by stacking teams in random matchups. An alliance of convenience is already convenient. That deal doesn't need to be sweetened.

But it's a sign of our hypersocial times.

I also recently grabbed War for the Overworld, a by-the-numbers copycat of Dungeon Keeper of dungeon keeping fame. I decided to hold off on playing it after my first attempt, when it ground to a halt on the very first tutorial mission.

Now, either that's a memory leak the size of Niagara Falls* or these assholes really think their piddlin' little 20x20 tile 2D playground for a dozen units is supposed to take up over three Skyrims' worth of RAM. Looks like someone didn't bother paying for bug testing. On the other hand they did bother wasting development time on integrating every possible form of interwebz hot air.
I didn't pay you $15 for a link to TwitFaceTwitchTube. Nor do I want to sign up for your spamletter. As for spotlighting your niece's custom map for me to download and uninstall in disgust five minutes later, I'll pass. "Chat with the devs" - ? To accomplish what? Have your representative at the Indian call center tell me your buggy p.o.s. of a product's "working as intended?" Or try to sell me three dozen DLC packs?

Players can and will socialize in games, and providing the basic tools for them to do so aids even single-player games via discussion forums. However, as the decades drag on, more and more developers have been using social media tie-ins as a crutch, as a distraction to keep customers busy chatting to each other instead of rationally evaluating the product's performance. In contrast, here's the main screen for FrostPunk, a beautiful piece of game designerin':

Look, ma, no twits!

A good cook doesn't need to mask the food's flavor with too much salt, grease or capsaicin. A good architect doesn't need to over-decorate a building's facade to distract from its structure. A good game gives you the game, to stand on its own, not to be engaged in as some form of simian social posturing, as the popular thing all your "friends" are into - but as a solid work capable of withstanding cold-blooded, independent scrutiny. Even in a multiplayer game, I'm here for the game. Other participants are merely a necessary evil.

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* That this program's acronym very nearly spells out WTF OMG was merely a hilarious bonus.