Rise of the Killers
How PvP Survival Games Relate to #gamergate and the Alt-Right
Written By: Chris Barney.
Video and Board Game Designer, Lecturer at Northeastern University.
Originally published at Perspectives in Game Design.

It may seem like a long way to go to get from survival games to the upheaval of today’s politics, but I don’t believe it is as far as you might think. I didn’t sit down to implicate all of us in the election of Trump, or to see how mad I could make the internet at me, but I have a hard time leaving questions alone and lately these have been coming up again and again for me.
Why have so many games recently have been either very very hard (Dark Souls), or survival games (Don’t Starve to H1Z1)? What is it about brutal difficulty and about the survival genre that we as developers and players are finding so appealing? How are we designing these games and why? Whom do we think we are designing them for? And who is actually playing them?
I found that I am of three minds about this. The first response that I came to was from my critic brain. My player brain then responded, and was corrected by my developer brain. I have tried to capture those arguments below.
The purpose of this post is to articulate that argument and generate some discussion about it. If you can read this and not just attack me because one of my brains is saying something you disagree with, I’d love to hear some discussion of the arguments in the comments!
Brain 1 (The Vicious Critic)
I have written a number of articles in the past year talking about aspects of games that I have had questions about.
The response to these articles has been predictable. People who don’t like the aspects of a game I was questioning liked the article; people who liked the game in question hated it, and responded as dictated by the Internet Trolling Accords of 2002. So on the surface there wasn’t much interesting going on, but the whole exercise got me to pay attention to what people were actually saying in the comments on Facebook and reddit and BoardgameGeek, etc.: which communities responded politely, and which with strange levels of seething hatred.
In general, I found that the closer I posted to the core of a fandom, the more angry the response was. In these cases I was not attacking the fandom, or saying terrible things about the game or IP that they loved. I was just asking questions and politely and gently discussing problematic aspects. Again, I didn’t find the responses surprising.
When I posted near a fandom, but not concerning it directly, the response was much more favorable. For instance, when I posted about Conan: Exiles in that game’s Facebook Group, I was told that I should go kill myself. When I posted about the survival genre in general in that forum, I was told that my article was interesting.
Also, the more clearly problematic the thing I was writing about, the more forceful the defense of the fans was. Suggesting that having slavery as a core mechanic in Conan: Exiles might not be a wholly positive design choice generated much more hate than saying that survival games were providing an environment where players were choosing to play ‘evil’ characters. Again, not a surprise. It is easier for people to distance themselves from generalities. When faced with specifics, defensive reactions are stronger and faster to surface.
The games I was looking at in these articles were all pretty hardcore survival games. Their target audience seems to be ‘core gamers’. Players who like difficult games. Players who are willing to play in hostile social environments. While I have not written about them, I also think that the rise of punishingly hard games may be related — in particular the Dark Souls franchise, which I love. Both this style of game’s tendency to drive away casual gamers, and the antagonistic nature of the PvP in the game, fit my thesis.
All of this seems to support the idea that core gamers are feeling threatened by criticism of their most comfortable spaces. I suppose I should state the obvious: that 100% of the hostile responses were from 20–40 year old white guys. Not all of the disagreement! But disagreement from other demographics was much more reasonable and focused on actual debate or discussion. My sample set is still small; I am sure that given time, I will irritate a more diverse group! But for the moment I am making people demographically similar to me mad.
So? We have all lived through #gamergate the past few years; this is not news. It’s troubling and for some terrifying, but it’s not at this point a surprise… so why am I taking the time to comb through it again? Well, for me the context here is important. The articles I was writing were about game design: not about whether a given game was good or bad or sexist or violent, but about why it was designed that way. I generated a little incidental wrath from fans along the way, and I wasn’t even directly attacking their fandom, just asking why the developers making the games that they liked were making the choices they were.
The articles ask those questions clearly, though I don’t know if I will ever see answers from the respective developers. At this point I feel like I am asking the same questions about a significant number of games, enough that it forms a pattern. I don’t know that it’s a pattern that shows conscious intent on the part of any developer. But intent may not be the point.
This is the point: We, as an industry, are often making games for the fans of our IPs and our genres, and for many of us the the fans we are choosing to cater to are ‘core gamers,’ by which I mean the people that were considered the primary gamer demographic a decade ago. The 20–40 year old white guys, many of whom feel their domain being threatened. We are making games that allow that demographic to indulge its worst aspects. We are encouraging communities to form around games and mechanics that they — and we — are uncomfortable to see stated clearly.
To go way back to Bartle, we are making games for the Killers.
We are in a very real way tapping into the same resentment and hostility that elected Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. I might think that was a bit of a stretch if one of the primary actors in #gamergate were not Milo Yiannopoulos. If he weren’t part the rise of Breitbart News, and if that publication’s head weren’t now sitting next to the President.
So when I hear developers and gamers defend the darker side of their games and their gaming communities by saying, “It’s just a game, it’s just for fun, it doesn’t affect the real world,” I am unable to agree.
At the very least, what we are doing as an industry is a reflection of the world we are living in, and there is a strong case to be made that it is having a direct and catastrophic impact on it.
Brain 2 (Player’s Rebuttal)
Hold on there Mr. Judgmental High Horse Game Critic Brain 1! First of all, games that you think are ‘too hostile’ are responsible for the fall of western civilization? Really? Give me a break!
I like hard games because I like to achieve difficult things. I like survival games because they give me a chance to feel like I can make something out of nothing. The world is a rough place these days, and it’s hard to get ahead in real life… to even know where to start. In a survival game, I know where to start. I pick up a rock. I start to build, and yes, if I see someone with things, I want I take them if I can. I can’t do that in the real world and I know that, but in a game like H1Z1 or Conan I can. It’s even expected of me.
Sure, games have meaning. Sometimes games move me; more often they make me excited, or mad. Mostly they make me happy. Yah, games are about things… metaphor, I get it. I graduated from high school too! But seriously, I grew up in the modern world of the soundbite and the internet. I know that there are media messages pushing at me from all directions. That doesn’t make me a mindless pawn.
You spend a lot of time attacking games that don’t toe the PC line. If you go down that road you are asking people to censor themselves. Games are art! I know you love to make that argument. If you are going to say that, then it has to be ok to make games about anything, even stuff that you are too uptight to want in ‘your’ games.
Also, games are a protected form of speech in many countries around the world, including in the US where we are writing from. So the law literally protects my right to play the kinds of games I want to play, and if you argue against them then you are going against both the spirit of that freedom and the laws that protect it!
Plus, you are trying to say that ‘core gamers’ are all 20–40 year old white guys! I mean, yes, I am… but there are TONS of gamers that like these kinds of games that do not fall into that group. And even if you can talk about players like me as a group (which we are not), not all of us like these kinds of games, and not all of us who do are the kind of jerks you make us out to be!
And then there is the fact that you just make things up. You say that games have an effect on their players… well where are your sources! Where are the studies that say that games change people for the better or worse? Why don’t you cite those when you make statements like that.
Also, even though you don’t seem to understand this: Games are not real! They are fiction. They are a place where we can go do things that we can’t in the real world. Sometimes those things are good, like saving the princess from the castle. Sometimes they are bad, like teabagging the face of the player I just killed in Conan… but they are not real. I don’t go around rescuing princesses in real life, and I don’t kill people and smack their dead faces with my genitals either!
Even if all that nonsense you spout about the effects of games were true, it’s not my fault I play the games I do. I play the games that developers make. Sure I can choose the genre, but if I want to play a survival game I am going to choose the one with the best gameplay, graphics and most active player base. You can’t hold me responsible for the design choices of the developers! Even if I had an issue with the Thrall system in Conan, it’s just one aspect of the game and if I want all the parts of it that are the best out there, then I just have to take the bad with the good. Even if I wanted to play games that you would approve of, I can’t do that unless developers are making them.
Brain 3 (Designer’s Rebuttal):
First of all Brain 1, you make a lot of assumptions about the developers of these games. And Brain 2, you have got it backward. We are not making games in a artistic vacuum and leaving you no choice but to play them! Development of a game is not all design and authorial intent. That’s true both for big AAA studios that have constraints set on their design by their publishers and investors, and for little indie studios that have just enough cash for one shot. Your game has to sell. That’s just a truth that all real developers face.
How do you make a game that will sell? You could just make the game you want to play and trust that there are enough players out there that are like you that everything will be fine. Or you can do research into what kinds of games are selling well to what demographics, pick a demographic and innovate within the constraints of what players have been shown to want. There is no shame in that, especially if you want to be around to make a second game!
So what games sell? Well big AAA shooters do really well, big epic open world RPG’s are very successful lately… but both of those styles of games require huge development teams and even larger budgets. So if you are a smaller developer, you don’t have those options. You can make a great little indie game and just not see enough return on investment to keep your studio afloat. So what kind of indie games are making the biggest splash? That’s right, open world survival games. Sure there are other options, but my god, games like Rust or H1Z1 have made a huge impact on a very minimal budget, and the communities around those games are ok with an early access model, making their development even more attractive. If you have a few more resources, then you are looking at games like Conan… $13 million in the first 28 days is a pretty persuasive argument!
Once you decide to go down that path, you have to compete with the games that are already out there. You have to judge what has made them successful, what their players are missing in those games, and you have to provide it. There is no malice or carelessness in those decisions. The players of that genre are not, by and large, children. They are adult gamers who want to play that type of game. We as developers are not forcing players into games that are turning them into bad people. Even arguing that we as developers are responsible for the actions of our players is ridiculous. Players are part of a complex ecosystem of games and media; no one developer has any real power over that. Making the argument that survival games are somehow different than the thousand other pieces of media that our players consume is naive at best.
Consensus:
As I try to think critically about games, I hear other players make responses like the one above all the time. I have other developers try to talk sense into me almost as often. When I argue as a player and as a developer, I am not just trying to set up those roles to fall before my critic brain: those are all arguments that on some level I empathize with. The arguments I make from those perspectives are genuine… but to me my own protests sound too strident, and my best arguments from those viewpoints are full of logical fallacy. As a critic, I’ve never tried to blame games for the state of the world. I don’t think that ‘all players’ or ‘all developers’ are covered by any statement I have made.
I do think games are one part of why the world is the way it is; perhaps it’s a small part, but that does not mean it doesn’t matter. Saying that we enjoy indulging ourselves in games is well and good, but saying that the things we do in a game don’t matter because they are ‘just a game’ is a hollow defense, neither justifying our actions as players, nor protecting us from the effects that games have on us. Saying that we develop the games that players want to play does not absolve us of our responsibility for our design decisions.
Games do matter. Making games matters, and playing games matters. I will not stop questioning the games I play as a critic, or expecting more from them as a player. I will take responsibility for the games I make as a developer.
Will you?
All we are is what we leave behind.
— The Flame and the Flood
