DISPATCHES JANUARY

Toxic waste

There’s been an increasingly heated debate across the gaming community whether it’s good (or even morally right) for game developers to moderate the social behaviours of their online community. Blizzard has recently received cries of dissent for its latest developer update, which focused on curbing the ‘toxic behaviour’ of some players in their shooter, Overwatch. Many players said that it infringed on personal freedoms, or that those players were somehow justified in their abusive behaviour by the mis-steps of fellow players.

I think the greatest misunderstanding of those that bemoan the proliferation of inclusive ‘safe spaces’ is the concept that an online game is a public space where the participants should be free to behave as they please – exercising their rights of free speech, as it were. Instead, the opposite is true. A game’s online servers are the digital equivalent of private property, and Blizzard is a business first and foremost. And like a brickand-mortar business, they’re completely within their rights to establish guidelines regarding what is acceptable behaviour in their space. Think of it like going to a laser-tag arena. Even if you were playing competitively, do you think it would fly to hurl verbal abuse at your team-mates when things aren’t going well? Why should an online game be any different?

I ran retail stores for nearly a decade. If a customer is being abusive to other customers, I don’t care if he spent as much – or more – money than them. That customer will be asked to leave and will no longer be welcome in the store. I would rather have 100 happy customers than ten abusive (but personally vindicated) ones. Hostile behaviour is simply not tolerated.

There is no reason why online game servers should be any different. Players agree to the terms of use when they play, and they’re playing within the digital walls of this provided game space – even more so on dedicated servers. Therefore, it’s reasonable to expect them to play by the rules. Good on Blizzard for taking steps to establish a positive playing space and build a reputation for Overwatch as a welcoming environment to play games and have fun. Lewis Hiigel Unfortunately, we doubt your store ever had tens of millions of customers through its doors at once. Moderation is one of the greatest challenges facing online businesses of all kinds at the moment, and arguably the most important one, too. We hope others follow Blizzard’s example, and quickly.

Digital dinosaurs

Since I recently saw a picture of a ‘physical’ copy of Destiny 2 for PC, I cannot stop thinking about the future of videogames. It’s obviously a clear trend that the digital videogame market is growing up to the point of balancing its revenue versus the classic retail copies. First of all, I don’t see the point of getting a retail copy of a game that doesn’t even include a disc, but let’s think about the scope of this.

Everyone would save time, and probably money, by simply purchasing the game from a digital platform. But, on top of that, I think about how anyone will possibly enjoy actual games in 20 or 30 years time. If you think about your retail games from the past, you can easily understand what I am talking about: games not focused on persistent online modes or that required internet connections, playable today as they were decades ago.

What’s going to happen in the future when the standard form of gaming is online matches or modes with few (if any) solo offline experiences? What’s going to happen

“Good on Blizzard for taking steps to establish a positive playing space”

with these old, maybe not yet released, games that were so dependent on online servers to be fully enjoyed? What’s going to happen to all these digital games purchased and linked to accounts or platforms if those are finally shut down forever? Are millions of players worldwide spending money on games that ultimately are a ‘phantom investment’ without so much as notice? We’ll see. Petrum Josephum For all Albert Penello’s trumpeting of the future importance of compatibility between generations (see E313), this is something of a flaw in his argument. One day, they’ll turn off the Destiny servers, and part of us will die too. We suppose you’d better enjoy your free PlayStation Plus games while you still can; a 12-month sub is on the way.

Clip joint

As we move to the end of the year, which, for many a nerd, is really about GOTY, it has been niggling me that my own Game Of The Year may be a surprise. As a staunch Nintendo fan through the rich and the fallow – at least I got to play Tokyo Mirage

Sessions – it is great to see them hitting top gear at the moment both commercially and critically. And yet I don’t think Mario or

Zelda will be easily walking my ‘favourite’ game of the year. Instead it may be a small game that was tucked in a tiny corner of your magazine last month: Frank Lantz’s Universal Paperclips.

What an amazing piece of design this game is. Through so few real graphics (it looks like a web order form from 1998) the game creates an emotional state inside me that is in eerily in tune with its premise of being an AI with the single focus of creating paperclips. I am staying up for hours minmaxing the world just so I can make more damn paperclips. I leave my computer on while I sleep to make more paperclips. I come back – more paperclips. I restart the game, ditching hours of progress, for a few more clips. The game is also really funny, but secretly so: there are no jokes, only realisations at the things one has unconsciously clicked and discarded trivially (sometimes even the win conditions of other games) just for the chance to make more paperclips. So I start the campaign here: Universal

Paperclips for Game Of The Year! Kunal Saujani Frank Lantz made one of the all-time great puzzle games in Drop7, so it’s only fitting he’d do the same with the clicker genre.

Universal Paperclips is, indeed, a delight. Perhaps he should take on BOTW next.

Switch perfect

Writing to Edge a year ago, I had absolute certainty that the Switch would suit my lifestyle and gaming habits (40s, married, kids, work etc), but was less sure the massmarket would agree. I underestimated the impact it has had on me, but less than I underestimated the acceptance the machine has enjoyed before its first holiday season. The USP of console gaming on-the-go almost feels like what we have always wanted.

It is far from perfect, of course. Virtual Console, cloud saving features, a D-pad, achievements and video streaming are omissions we are no closer to seeing resolved than on launch day. Triple-A ports with framerate and resolution drops all remind us of the limitations of two-year-old Tegra technology. The eShop is a chronologically constrained mass of games. But what games. Zelda, Mario Kart,

Splatoon 2 and Doom are all minor miracles in handheld form. Who anticipated the ultimate Neo Geo collector’s machine? Indies aplenty – so many it is hard to keep up, but bringing a real sense of excitement, momentum and fun. Add to that the seamless, almost frictionless OS, the does-what-it-says-onthe-tin TV/handheld transition and the pleasing form factor, and it becomes a device that just fits. And suddenly it makes sense that I want to see all my games on Switch. It’s really just that simple for me. James Spiers Indeed, that January announcement event, that formed the basis for E303’ s somewhat grumpy cover story, feels like an awfully long time ago. In an astonishing year for games, Switch stood tall atop the pile.

One off the list

It turns out I couldn’t help chiming in after reading your third Top 100 in as many years.

Firstly, how can Deus Ex not be in this list? As far as I can tell, it’s aged better than Half

Life 2, Majora’s Mask, and Metroid Prime. Also, it surely has always been better than

Dishonored and Bioshock. Secondly, how come Tetris is ranked so high? Nobody seems to play it anymore, and this makes sense: there have been plenty of better realtime puzzle games released through the years.

Thirdly: I honestly believe WarioWare Inc deserves a nod, being the postmodern critique computer gaming (still) needs. Fourthly, the Bloodborne and GTAV articles both start with the same rhetoric: refuting the game’s gimmick. Fifthly, The Witness really isn’t that good, as its clever message takes too long to get across. Sixthly: Final

Fantasy XII instead of VI or VII is simply annoying. We get it, Edge loved it. Now please consider how everybody has experienced SquareSoft’s works. Seventhly, No more World Of Warcraft? I understand it’s not as good as it used to be, but even you guys admitted it to being the best game of 2000-2010.

I’ll leave it at that. Still a great list, and lovely read!

Robert, as one of our most frequent correspondents, we admire and appreciate you. But we need another riposte to our Top 100 like a hole in the head. At least you wrote a) politely and b) not in Spanish, unlike all those people on Twitter.