On Being A Hater
If you're not familiar with the latest stuff going around social media, Mixtape has become the 'content creator' of the week. A bunch of people on the far right hate it for obvious reasons, other people dislike it for being nostalgia-bait or anything between.
This post, is not about Mixtape. I have not played Mixtape, nor will I play Mixtape. It's not something I'm interested in. Instead I'm opting to instead engage with the controversy itself in a sort of moth-to-flame moment and talk about what it means to be a hater. And why I think it should be done very sparingly.
Let me be clear, it's also a perfectly normal thing to do. Sometimes we encounter something in a game that is just too odious to ignore. Things like the creator being an asshole; sneaking in shitty jokes or any sort of boring hatred you can think of. Anger or frustration are powerful motivators for reaching deep into why a game made you feel a certain way and can be perfectly valid.
But I think you have to be careful when you raise the red flag of being a hater. When you fly the flag because you disliked a game's mechanics; or because the story didn't quite stick the landing or when you do so frequently, you are sending a signal out to social media. Social media is a mirror, the people who follow you and respond to you are going to be those that respond to those signals. I think this is obvious to most of us that have been on the internet for any length of time, but what's less obvious is when you drift into murky waters. Your flag becomes a signal for people to use your posts for their controversy, to further their own cause and twist your own words. Your posts are reduced to a thought-terminating cliche. People will take the existence of your blog or writing as reason enough to not bother playing a game because most people will simply read the title and move on.
This isn't to say that you can't be critical or even downright mean to games. Critical analysis and review absolutely should be; I firmly believe it's unfair to treat something as art and then be unwilling to fully engage with it. But I personally view haterism with the same degree I view being ironic. Much like how ironypoisoning can slowly contort you and your audience, haterism does the same thing. It's satisfying to our lizard-brain, and even more satisfying when other people indulge and agree with our take which is exactly why it needs to be measured.
There's a bunch of games that I've personally really disliked. It would be incredibly satisfying to scream out into the void about how much I disliked CloverPit, but as a game it's just not offensive enough regardless of how much I want people to agree with me. I wrote a critical post on why I disliked it however.
But yeah, that's the gist of my thoughts here. It might just be one of the things I'm particularly weird about, because I've seen people go down these paths before and it seems to never end well. I'd be a hypocrite if I said I haven't engaged in hater-mode before, so writing this post was as much a warning as it was an exercise for me to figure out why I've gradually tempered my anger. Maybe I'm just reserving most of my hater energy for all the things I love being ruined by AI and LLMs. In either case if someone manages to read this whole post then thank you, and have you heard of my favorite roguelite Ark's Wonder Dungeon?