Can/will the vocal minority ever be a majority?

[SweetShark]

No because it's a vocal minority for a reason.

You have to consider that most people who play games, just want to play and don't want to get involved in the bullshit. Hell most people aren't even aware of it.

I have a bunch of guys that work in my warehouse, and I can't tell you how much they just talk about playing Call of Duty multiplayer and Halo. Most of them aren't aware of the gaming world outside of Madden and CoD. I brought my Switch to work and they had no fucking idea what it even was.

There is a broad spectrum of people who play games, and most of them are just your console players, or naive gamer who like their CoD's and their Assassin's Creeds and just buy every new one that comes out. It doesn't matter to them that the games are the same, because they like those games. To them, more of the same is perfect.

I fully agree here.
In my case most people around my town are fully aware games like in the Facebook or Pro Evolution Soccer/Fifa. PRAY THE GOD if you say you don't care about these football games.
Gladly I have a small circle of friends who gladly I play with them some games I am interested.
But I digress, most of the time want to play CS or L4D.....over and over again which at some point I get sick of these games.
Only some rares time on these days I get to play together with another friend of mine PS3.

EDIT:
Oh, and classic MMO games like WOW or Lineage II are still hot in Interenet Cafes.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

The side with less votes has won a presidential election twice in my lifetime now.
The vocal minority is the majority in politics.

The minor or majority don't matter with the presidential elections. It's the Electoral College that determines who the President will be, not the voting mass. Their vote is just to show to the Electors who their preferred candidate is. The Electors don't actually have to vote for the person the people want.

OT; At the start the Vocal Minority are a united people. But eventually they splinter due to infighting, so any opinion they try to convey will be attacked by the other shards, until the only sound from them is squabbling.

 

[sXeth]

Its like pop music. Critics and more intense hobbyists certainly will range from finding it annoying to overly bland. But there's still a base of millions of listeners who mostly just listen to music as a background or time filler. While working out or whatever.

There's plenty of people who buy a game just as an idle time filler, or something to do with their kids, or to play online with buddies. And unless it's insanely bad (a level AAA will rarely fall into. They may not be innovative, but they aren't incompetent). They aren't looking for something completely new to wrap their head around, or a head-against-wall challenge, or some deep convoluted story. Someone's who just sitting down to chill and relax with some escapist entertainment in a video game is mostly fine with an Assassins Creed or whatever, they aren't going to get their sought after experience smacking their face into a Dark Souls boss 15 times in a row.

There's also time limitations. You can squeeze in a few rounds of CoD or I assume a game of Madden into a fairly small time frame. Tackling a 10 hour game, particularly if you don't have regular playtime and don't have a good ability to put down/pick up gameplay and story can be a challenge. A lot of the more critically acclaimed games don't really lend themselves to short separated bursts of play.

 

[Trunkage]

Well sure. Look at Rare, THQ, and all the other defunct companies, and how they crashed. They put all their money into one or two projects that utterly tanked and you can't recover from that.
Ubisoft will sink like 100million into a new Assassin's Creed that'll absolutely bomb and they won't be able to recover.
Just look at Bioware. Andromeda was their last gasp after Inquisition, but they're done. EQ will take 'em out back and put the double-barrel to their head.

These companies actually do die regularly. EA might have a good buffer with the sports games and battlefield games, but that won't last forever. Come 2020, 2030 they'll fly to close to the sun. Won't be one game, but maybe a dozen over 2 or 3 years, all over budget, all critical and financial failures. And that'll be it. They'll sell of studios left and right until they're nothing.

As to the Bioware, my hope is that people start realising that Mass Effect and Dragon Age weren't the downward turn of Bioware. Baulder's Gate was written as well as either of these two, and they sunk Interplay and Black Isle because they didn't sell well enough. EA just put Bioware's problems on loud speaker.

OP: I wish that people would give up praising the lore in Dark Souls 1. People made connections they shouldn't have and elevated that game to height undeserved.

I'd also wish that GTA wasn't a thing. Other than the Euro Truck (or maybe Uber) simulator feel of the game broken up with gunfire, it also eclipsed Sleeping Dogs and Watch Dogs which are way better games. Or more to the point an actual game. (Well Watch Dogs 1 couldn't help but shoot itself in the foot a lot so I understand people not liking it.

But I think I'm going to be in the minority for those ones for ever

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I hate to sum up my opinion with three words at the front, but it's almost essential to do so.

Least Common Dominator.

Why are most games about killing, violence, and beating someone? Power Fantasy. People like the experience of being unbeatable to all.

Why do people like multiplayer so much? Same reason. Power Fantasy. Some will say that it's because they like to be challenged, and some people do just like that part of it. But in the end, it comes down to wanting to beat someone and win.

Why does the runaway unforeseen hit tend to influence gaming culture for years? After the success of Call of Duty, 'Doom'-clones went to the way side. After minecraft dominated the world and created the Video game billionaire, every game had a bit of crafting in it.

Why are most game characters white males? Majority of game players are white males.

Simple fact is this: You can not sink in the overwhelming time, the long hours and the missed schedules... not to mention the metric ton of money into a project to appease a minority. This is a business. And it's why games will never truly be art.

Art literally needs one person to appreciate it to pay off. You hot glue a can to a tree and frame a Mannequin trying to chop it down with a Barbie, the entire world will call you a pretentious douche and will tell you to get a real job. One Billionaire off his rocker looks at it and sees inner peace and gives that Artist 50 million dollars for it... Well, he might be a douche, but he can buy and sell your family.

Video games have a set price. They don't make up with one lucky purchase. Literally hundreds of thousands of people will have to agree the product is worth a purchase sometimes to even break even. The minority, while having good points to some of their arguments, can never be a focus to a business.

In this respect, books and movies are no longer art either. In fact, most commercial movies haven't been for decades now. Although I suppose anyone can hit "Record" on their iPhone and make an amatuer flick, or write a book, but games are at least a bit more labor-intensive. I'm sure there are a few diehards out there though who've churned out a makeshift authentically literal "indie" game which could fall into the same category though.

 

[CritialGaming]

I hate to sum up my opinion with three words at the front, but it's almost essential to do so.

Least Common Dominator.

Why are most games about killing, violence, and beating someone? Power Fantasy. People like the experience of being unbeatable to all.

Why do people like multiplayer so much? Same reason. Power Fantasy. Some will say that it's because they like to be challenged, and some people do just like that part of it. But in the end, it comes down to wanting to beat someone and win.

Why does the runaway unforeseen hit tend to influence gaming culture for years? After the success of Call of Duty, 'Doom'-clones went to the way side. After minecraft dominated the world and created the Video game billionaire, every game had a bit of crafting in it.

Why are most game characters white males? Majority of game players are white males.

Simple fact is this: You can not sink in the overwhelming time, the long hours and the missed schedules... not to mention the metric ton of money into a project to appease a minority. This is a business. And it's why games will never truly be art.

Art literally needs one person to appreciate it to pay off. You hot glue a can to a tree and frame a Mannequin trying to chop it down with a Barbie, the entire world will call you a pretentious douche and will tell you to get a real job. One Billionaire off his rocker looks at it and sees inner peace and gives that Artist 50 million dollars for it... Well, he might be a douche, but he can buy and sell your family.

Video games have a set price. They don't make up with one lucky purchase. Literally hundreds of thousands of people will have to agree the product is worth a purchase sometimes to even break even. The minority, while having good points to some of their arguments, can never be a focus to a business.

Gonna have to say that you are a big off-base on this.

You can't call every stick figure art (though it is technically), the same way every movie, book, is labeled in that way. And I don't believe Video Games, Movies, Books, or Television shows are always out to be artistic. They are out to be ENTERTAINMENT, calling entertainment art is trying to label it something that it isn't trying to be.

Don't get me wrong there are games, books, and films that do try to be art. And a lot of those things succeed in that. But just because a movie like "Schindler's List" is judged as art, doesn't mean "Tranformers 14" does. The same thing goes for a game like "Limbo" is art versus a game like "Ride to Hell: Retribution".

Entertainment is entertainment, and artistic value from said media is only a bonus. Like Icing on a cake, it's great if it's there and it works. But sometimes the cake is just a fun Twinky and nothing more.

 

[Mechamorph]

Generally no. The vocal minority tends to be hobbyists for whom gaming is a passion rather than just something they do for fun. In general most entertainment media have similar audiences save for the niche markets. Listening to the vocal minority tends not to pay off and companies are out to turn a profit. To paraphrase the old saying "even if the critics hate it, if it sells it is a success". People who arrange boycotts and yell online have been proven time and again to be inconsequential to a game's bottom line, why would a company pander to those folks rather than the people who buy their games? Trying to please people who either are never going to buy your game or are at worst a small fraction of your customer base tends to be bad business and I think companies are getting wise to that by now. For many of them I do believe that they do listen to more technical complaints (ie bugs, a HUD that's obstructive, control schemes that are counter-intuitive, etc) and give only half an ear to story complaints unless it's a story-driven game.

 

[McElroy]

Entertainment is entertainment, and artistic value from said media is only a bonus. Like Icing on a cake, it's great if it's there and it works. But sometimes the cake is just a fun Twinky and nothing more.

There is always artistic value in works of entertainment (yes, I know you already kinda said that). Sometimes the sum of it just happens to be barely above zero. Like it's one of the pizza toppings, but sometimes that's raisins, sand, or some other stupid shit instead of pineapple. Games being or not being art is more of a question about artistic vision - can game mechanics controlled by the player in a number of ways be art.

 

[CritialGaming]

Entertainment is entertainment, and artistic value from said media is only a bonus. Like Icing on a cake, it's great if it's there and it works. But sometimes the cake is just a fun Twinky and nothing more.

There is always artistic value in works of entertainment (yes, I know you already kinda said that). Sometimes the sum of it just happens to be barely above zero. Like it's one of the pizza toppings, but sometimes that's raisins, sand, or some other stupid shit instead of pineapple. Games being or not being art is more of a question about artistic vision - can game mechanics controlled by the player in a number of ways be art.

The problem with the "art" argument with video games. Is that unlike a book, movie, or a painting; video games are ultimately incomplete pieces of artwork.

No I'm not talking about DLC, and extra add-ons. The video game is never delivered to the same two players in the exact same way. You look at a painting and everybody sees the same fucking painting. But two different people will sit and play a game in different ways, and thus they experience this media differently from each other.

Look no further than Breath of the Wild, a game were some people are just utterly blown away by the beauty of the whole package, and where other people are fucking enraged by the mindbogglingly stupid gameplay designs. Yet BOTW would be classified as art, because the players in both those examples had emotion reactions to the experience provided by the game.

Art- the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or EMOTIONAL power.

Now under the strict definition, every game, every movie, every book, all is technically art. Even if you hate something like Twilight, hate is an emotion, and thus Twilight is art. People often tie the word art to the word good, and that just isn't the case. Art is art good or bad.

After all some guy literally throws paint at canvass and sells it for millions of dollars.

I think the trick is, separating the pretension from the truth.

But back to gaming. Are video games art? Yes. But they are some of the most unique piece of artwork in the world because no two people will experience the same video game in the same way. Emotional response aside, everyone who watches a movie is watching the exact same thing, the exact same way. But with a game that identical experience is nearly impossible. Which makes gaming unique.

And when you apply all of that to the topic at hand here, you realize the sad truth.

Everybody watches movies. But not everyone is a film buff.

Same here. The vocal minority are the video game buffs, we know everything about the medium that we love. But the majority of video game players just wanna blow shit up, or solve some puzzles, or 360 no-scope. To most people video games are just things to play, not to analyse, or judge, or debate, or apply some SJW agenda to.

The ultimate answer to the OP is a hardy, "No."

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

Gonna have to say that you are a big off-base on this.

You can't call every stick figure art (though it is technically), the same way every movie, book, is labeled in that way. And I don't believe Video Games, Movies, Books, or Television shows are always out to be artistic. They are out to be ENTERTAINMENT, calling entertainment art is trying to label it something that it isn't trying to be.

Don't get me wrong there are games, books, and films that do try to be art. And a lot of those things succeed in that. But just because a movie like "Schindler's List" is judged as art, doesn't mean "Tranformers 14" does. The same thing goes for a game like "Limbo" is art versus a game like "Ride to Hell: Retribution".

Entertainment is entertainment, and artistic value from said media is only a bonus. Like Icing on a cake, it's great if it's there and it works. But sometimes the cake is just a fun Twinky and nothing more.

You're sort of arguing my point. So if you are, I apologize. I must have not made myself unclear.

My very point is that video games are entertainment. That's why I said it wasn't art. Art can just be created to be created. Enjoyed and thought of fondly. And if it comes to it, it could be sold to anyone to recoup the cost of the production, or sold for a great fee to make the artist rich.

Video Games don't have that luxury as Entertainment. It must go to a wide variety of people, like I said, to make it worthwhile in the business side of things. That's why the vocal minority will never have as much sway as the Least Common Dominator.

In this respect, books and movies are no longer art either. In fact, most commercial movies haven't been for decades now. Although I suppose anyone can hit "Record" on their iPhone and make an amatuer flick, or write a book, but games are at least a bit more labor-intensive. I'm sure there are a few diehards out there though who've churned out a makeshift authentically literal "indie" game which could fall into the same category though.

In my mind, you're right sadly. There's plenty of beauty in both, and things that can make us grow as humans. But I've always believed that art exists for itself and for the emotions of those who experience it. It has nothing more, nothing less than those two factors.

When you try to profit from it, it becomes a commercial venture. And while there's nothing wrong with making money from your skill, it ceases being art at that point. Even the paintings I referenced before become nothing more than goods once money changes hands. But instead of needing thousands to buy into it, Paintings, sculptures, and the like just need one person to buy it to break even for the artist.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

^^Yeah that's probably the best way to sum it up. There are plenty of products that can have loads of artistic elements, but they're all ultimately still products. True art just "is", and don't pay no mind.

 

[MCerberus]

All collections of opinions are collections of minorities.
Historically the "vocal minority" is tied to a "moral majority", something that has never existed. ever.

In other news, the classic "Dudebro" gamer is actually dying off. Mobile, especially base builders, has taken over introductory gaming. CoD mainly serves core gamers of the teenage and dad variety, who are broke AF or time-starved and thus go with the safe bet where they know what they're getting, still realizing there are other options. It's the same effect that keeps Bayformers going and Age of Ultron pulling in more cash than Logan.

Side note - where is this idea that DA:I and now ME:A are financial failures coming from? Unless you mean a "Squeenix failure" where they didn't sell 3 copies to every person alive

 

[sageoftruth]

Exactly. Those people you talk about are the same reason why hot chicks in skimpy armor will never go away. Because diversity in gaming isn't a world that most people understand, nor is it something they even care about. They WANT the hot chicks, they want the big guns, they want their GTA's, CoD's, MAddens, etc. And it is NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER NEVER going away.

The quicker us neckbeards realize that, the happier we will all be.

I agree. It applies to more than just games too. The number of people with an intense interest in something will always be outnumbered by those with a casual interest. I learned that myself after reading a cookbook that opened with a tirade against people who settle for fast and convenient food in stores, rather than learning to prepare their own food. As someone who likes Five Guys just as much as the finest French Cuisine, I felt like I could relate to the casual gaming crowd for once. In the end, I thought if I can't be bothered to seek out the highest quality foods, why should I expect others to put in the extra effort to find the best games?