Why democracy was a mistake
Those of you who have known me for years know not to trust that title. It will never mean an actual political screed. What it almost always means is "this is the kind of thing that you don't want to throw open to the masses, because large chunks of the population are either horrible or incompetent or both, and they'll just fuck it up for everybody else." Usually it's something fairly minor. As is today's example.
Anyway. So.
Today my attention was drawn through an unlikely source to an indy game shop called Pantaloon, and as is my way, I dug through their catalog on itch.io to see what I could see, and I liked a lot of it, though I realized I probably wouldn't play most of it. The kind of thing where I'm usually like "I want to keep an eye on these folks, they have interesting ideas."
However, there was one game there called ROLLA which looked like Katamari Damacy-meets-isometric-ARPG, or perhaps Katamari Damacy-meets-the-old-Rampage-arcade-game (you youngsters will not understand that reference), and this intrigued me. The itch.io page didn't make it entirely clear to me whether the game had actually released, but it seemed to be one of their games which was listed on Steam (I'm not sure all of them are), so I went to Steam and searched for it.
Well. It released on 13 October. But I did not see that -- in fact, was not informed of its existence at all, and I fire up Steam just about every day -- because it has one of the only two descriptive tags I have blocked.
Those are "bullet hell" and "tower defense."
Someone has classified this game where you try to roll around an enormous ball of mutated flesh through a city, smashing buildings and squashing humans and vehicles, while dodging the army's attempts to destroy you, as a bullet hell game.
You know, I blocked those terms because, unlike some others, they have very specific meanings and the chance that I will ever want to play a game that either of those terms applies to is always zero.
"Bullet hell" is a very specific kind of game. It is a vertical or horizontal shooter -- think arcade cabinets, youngsters, think Galaga only hard, think of whatever game it is that Parodius is making fun of that I can't remember the actual name of because I only ever watch longplays of Parodius. We're talking about games where the enemy puts out so much gunfire that the only way to get anywhere is to memorize the fire pattern so you know where the holes in it are to put your ship -- a process I consider Not Fun, just like memorizing boss attack patterns in any genre of game is so much Not Fun that I avoid games with boss fights.
Even not yet having played it, I can tell right now that ROLLA is not a bullet-hell game. Somebody threw that tag on it, either for misguided reasons or because they are just dumb as dirt, and thus pissed in the soup for all the rest of us.
The tag system was already a mess anyway, because nobody can agree on terminology. In recent months I have seen the phrase "incremental game" start appearing on games. I have attempted to do research on this, and found it to be exactly as frustrating as "please tell me exactly how SAML works under the hood without resorting to jargon" or other noteworthy technical queries I have actually had to make in recent memory where trying to cut through the FUD and gibberish was nearly impossible.
As near as I can tell, no one agrees on exactly what an incremental game is, and one can find Reddit arguments galore if one cares to look. I do gather that an incremental game usually has at least one of the key features of an idler, which is to say, built-in forced pauses and numbers go up even when you're not actively playing, which immediately makes it anathema to me. But should I block the tag? Apparently not, because already I'm seeing some things tagged as "incremental game" which I'm pretty sure aren't really like that at all.
The term "metroidvania" is just about useless, though it does tend to mean a game I don't want to play. The terms "roguelike" and "roguelite" have also nearly become useless, though again, they are almost always bad signs for me. I have to be very careful with "ARPG" because it usually means something I might be interested in, but sometimes means something I don't want to touch with an eleven-foot pole.
(What I want from an ARPG is "like Diablo," and in particular, "like Diablo 3," where there are the dreaded boss fights but generally by the time you get to them you've also been given the tools to get through them without dying seventy-five times. Some of the sociopaths on Steam would call that "easy." We'll get to them in a moment.)
In general I find the Steam recs, and mentions in reviews, that are "this game is similar to this other game" much more useful than the tags at this point. But the Steam recs ("We notice you played X so you might like Y") seem to be on an entirely different system that doesn't use the tags. Maybe it's curated; that is, maybe a human is doing it. If so, that would certainly explain why it still seems to have some value.
I suppose I should pause here and explain to the non-gamers that this is actually all important, because there are an awful lot of games competing for a person's brainslice, and many of these games are utter shit, and many more of them are Not For You if you are a fairly picky person like I am, and also many of them are not cheap. There is a very real financial risk, is what I'm saying. I don't mind having bought games I bounced off, even though it's a lot more expensive than, say, a book I bounced off, but that doesn't mean I don't try to avoid it. And my game habits have, over the years, become so nuanced that I have become a Difficult Customer.
This is why curation is important. Curators actually evaluate and pick games using their brains instead of an algorithm. Sure, they can be just as unreliable as anything else. They're like film critics. The idea is to find a film critic whose tastes basically agree with yours; they may well be opinionated but they're opinionated in the same directions. Then you can evaluate their reviews with some degree of trust.
However, Steam curators have a bit of a reliability problem because Steam is suffering a scourge. The scourge is called That Guy. The phrasing may be singular, but there are a whole bunch of him floating around. Many Steam curators have turned out to be That Guy. Some of them weren't That Guy when they first started, but have mutated into it.
That Guy plays games not for fun and recreation, but as a means of establishing credibility. He plays games because he can't brag about how much money he makes or how good-looking he is or how intelligent he is or how big his dick is. He plays games for macho cred because he has nothing else he can possibly do to get it, and he is not self-aware enough to consider even for a second that he may be chasing the wrong standards to begin with.
That Guy loves games with grueling memorization or split-second timing or other torture tests which involve failing over and over until you get it right. None of that is actually fun, you know, but once you do it, you can claim to be very good at that game, which is worth something to That Guy's ego, as if it mattered a whit in the real world.
That Guy is likely to be the same kind of guy who is the ripest of targets for the kind of right-wing propaganda currently helping poison an entire generation of young and not-so-young men into fascism. That Guy automatically downgrades any game, possibly sight unseen, that has "woke" content, which means it contains any characters who are not straight white men.
That Guy wants games to be obnoxiously difficult, so that when he masters the peculiar rote needed to beat them, he can feel entitled to condescend to anyone who hasn't. "Git gud" is his mantra. He scorns anything that might make the game less of a torture chamber. Fun? What's that?
The only other kind of games That Guy plays are co-op shooters (now there's an oxymoron) because he enjoys fragging other players and then insulting them. This would be a good way to destroy friendships, except he doesn't really have any.
You kind of have to feel a little pity for That Guy; this is all he has in the world. He has no loves, no relationships, no real friends, no other hobbies. He's not actually rich or successful, most of the time; he certainly has no outstanding skills of any other kind. He just knows how to play a boss fight over and over until he can win it. He has to make the most of that. Of course, it'd be easier to be sympathetic if he weren't also so disposed to be a complete asshole in all other walks of life.
In fact, you could easily write him off completely if it weren't for the fact that he poisons the entire gaming world so badly and makes it impossible for the rest of us to get our hands on good, intelligent, interesting games on a regular basis.
Because, you see, all the big-money developers are selling to him. Not to you, to him. And because all the big-money game developers ran out of ideas a while back, they're trying to sell the same stuff to him over and over. Fortunately, because he doesn't have a whole lot of critical discernment, he keeps buying it. (In fact, that's why he's their target audience, that lack of discernment. They figure he's a reliable mark. They are correct. He's the same guy who keeps going to the same Marvel Universe superhero movie over and over and over.) Meanwhile, those of us looking for new, good, interesting stuff get frozen out, because the indie studios who are still bothering to exercise creativity and quality almost immediately all drown in that tide and go broke.
These days you're lucky if you get one new game of interest from a small studio. Most of them never manage to produce a second one. Many of them never manage to produce anything at all. "Early Access," e.g. users pay to beta unfinished games, has created an artificial environment where many games look much more viable than they actually are, and where many games never have a financial incentive to come out of Early Access.
That Guy has already begun to fuss in the Steam reviews about "leaderboard cheaters" in ROLLA because getting the high score is the only thing important to him; he doesn't care whether the game is actually fun. That Guy is probably the person who tagged the game "bullet hell" because that is a salve; if he's having trouble getting the high score then at least he can put the "bullet hell" tag on it, which implies sadistic difficulty, and then it'll be less a reflection on him and his poor bruised pee-pee.
I am so, so very tired of That Guy in all walks of life, I can't even begin to tell you.
Anyway, so, democracy was a mistake, because it means That Guy gets a say in things, when actually he should be locked in a box at all times. With no air holes.
I still have no idea whether ROLLA is a good game, but it's on initial sale, and I think I will pay seven dollars for it out of sheer spite.
17 October 2026