If you frequent gaming news sites or message boards of any nature you’ve likely already seen the news of Soul Calibur IV’s special characters.
And you couldn’t be more… (a. Happy; b. Angry)
Apparently, you have to choose one or your opinion doesn’t count. I’m surprised by how divisive the addition of two belovedcharacters can be. On the message boards out there there are two acceptable reactions: elation or douchebagism.
And the conversation hasn’t even turned to console fanboyism yet. I can’t wait until that happens. I can already picture the ridiculous lengths fanboys will go to in deriving reasons why their version and character is better than the other’s. (Although picture Joe McHaloGearsOfWar defending how cool Yoda is when his preferred protagonist is masked badass Master Chief or the armored-sequoia-voiced-by-Bender that is Marcus Fenix)
I’m totally thrilled with their addition, and seeing as Yun-Seong (Yunsung in SCII) already had a weapon that was essentially a lightsaber as an alternate I’m not to terrible torn up over the fact that a katana can block a ligtsaber. Although I will be interested to see how they make Vader fight, in the original trilogy he fights like an ogre. I’m sure they’ll end up using fighting similar to how Anakin fought in Episode III, but here’s to hoping you can force throw random stuff at your opponent.
In actuallity this whole setup was to ask an almost unrelated question: why do people make and hold themselves to random allegiances to products?
This really only occurs on message boards, where anonymity leads to making baseless statements of little factual value.
I’m always disappointed when I visit a well populated message board. only to find that all of the topics degenerate after 2 pages into an argument over which system is the best. Is it so hard to discuss games without getting into a console fanboy argument. The only reasonable explanation is that there is a certain percentage of the population that goes online only to annoy others.
On almost every message board there is a group of people who post in threads expressly to derail them. They can turn a thread about Bioshock into a console war. Bioshock is only on one console; why are they talking about console wars!?!
The one thing I would love to keep on our message boards as we move forward and welcome more people into our community is this: the world of gaming doesn’t have to be binary, there can be gradients of opinions. Even though we are inclined to talk only in hyperbole there can be more than two sides to an issue. We should never let ourselves slip into the “Best ___ Ever!” or “Worst ____ Ever!” mentality.
Except about FF7. There are only two opinions of that game.
I think that the perception that message boards spin into dismal arguments over nothing, but real life doesn’t is possibly a mistake.
I assume that there are plenty of people walking around in everyday life that would get into similar arguments with me, or anyone, about virtually nothing. The difference being, in reality, I can tell immediately that the person standing in front of me is either crazy, looking for a fight, or just not worth it. Also, I don’t really walk around spouting off my opinion on everything, and those I do talk to are typically friends, if not at least acquaintances. These people tend to be similar and/or reasonable when conversing. I think in part due to the fact that you can walk away from someone and not talk to them again.
Contrastingly, a message board is designed to go and share your opinions and such. Also, on the internet, where you can’t see someone, can’t hear the tone or inflection of their voice, etc. it’s harder to write someone off as being a little too far out in left field. (Think of the commercials where the sweaty, nervous guy sits down next to someone on the bus and proceeds to try to run one an email type scam on them. It just doesn’t work in person.)
Also, I’m sure that there are people who troll on boards to instigate. It’s fun for them, and there is no threat of physical violence so there are no real ramifications. You can always make more accounts.
I’ve generally concluded that the message board in it’s native form is unusable by humankind if you hope to have any kind of intelligent and useful discourse. In particular the official Blizzard forums are a cesspool of trolling and baseless idiocy. However, another forum I frequent, elitistjerks.com, is heavily moderated, going so far as to give people infractions for poor grammar, use of “lol” etc. or just generally being a troll or making useless posts. It goes a long way to keeping their amazingly long threads useful all the way to the end.
In many commenting systems, there are similar measures in place to enable the community to moderate itself, such as youtube comments being hidden when they get enough thumbs down. I could envision a system going even farther than this, allowing the community to associate several scores associated with common forum pitfalls such as “Spam +3 Troll +7 Flame +25″ so that people could create thresholds beyond which posts and sometimes their respective threads would be shown in a subdued manner.