Fallout 3: The Silent Majority

The Fallout 3 saga in many ways embodies very classic arguments and lines of conflict in gaming culture. We've got the old vs. new, the fan vs. the anti-fan, the optimist's "they'll come through" vs. the pessimist's "no, they will eat a crate of epic fail"... usually not actually representative of the positions held by many of them, but they're floating in the air, nonetheless. One such familiar point is the discourses about the actual act of purchase. On one hand, you have many critics lamenting that despite the game's numerous flaws or its perversion of the original vision, the public will lap it up and cough up the cash anyway. On the other, you've got many 'apologists' of Bethesda asserting that for all the whining and crying, the detractors will go and buy the game anyway - which, it's implied, will cancel out all of their arguments against the game. How exactly that leap over the shackles of logic is made, I wouldn't know. So, either way, is purchase the ultimate equaliser against the neverending squabbles of fandom? How often do the clamours of fans eventually reach the corporate world and deliver accurate, representative kicks to the backside, and how often are they contradicted by their own purchasing patterns?

Let's deal with this one by one. First, we have the point that despite flaws or controversies that are so very big in the context of the industry and the culture, it's dwarfed by that ever-looming mastodon - the, gasp, silent majority - who will step on your puny arguments like the strong hulk he is, and buy Fallout 3. Or something.

S. Majority, artist's depiction

In fact, although the silent majority is notoriously difficult to quantify and understand properly, its shadow appears everywhere. Developers constantly mention this amorphous spectre to justify their decisions, arguing that not everyone - in fact, a sizable proportion of the world - may disagree with the entire sum of those who do talk about video games. Journalists tend to agree, and even fans themselves acknowledge that this giant godzilla, with its bulging purse, will step on their puny internet arguments and march on, doing more to drive the industry and culture than their advances on the Internet ever will.

Usually, the analysis stops there. I mean, how can you talk about something you never see or hear? It's hard to know what will drive a silent majority to, as they very probably will, buy Fallout 3. Do they know about its predecessors, released in the late 1990's, and the controversies surrounding the new title? Do they realise the game is produced by Bethesda, and make connections to Bethesda's previous games? Will what the industry believes to be 'crowd-pleasers', such as spectacular, gratuitous violence (exploding nuclear cars in chain reactions, YEAH *queue metal riff*) bait this demographic just like that? Their digital footprint is virtually nonexistent. We don't know if a million people who buy the game will be disappointed, and a little more jaded, put the game on the shelf: we don't know what parts of the game they will especially enjoy, and make them keep playing. The strong focus on the Internet as a source of communication and networking in the industry means that even compared to other media industries (where this is hardly perfect either), the silent majority is less understood than ever.

So what impact does that have? Well... probably not earth-shattering, amazing epiphanies for the industry. I'm not going to fall into the trap of suggesting that. But as I suggested in Cliff and the Pirates, somewhere along the line, the displeasures and various experiences with games, and the prejudices and behaviour patterns they create, build up - even for a demographic which is defined by the fact that it can't be bothered to raise a storm on the Internet about that.

Remember the last buy you regretted? Yeah.

For one, I think it is very possible that the 'idiots' are getting fed up with buying whatever's hyped out on the market, whatever has the shiny Best of E3/GenCon/Louis the Hobo's Seal of Approval sticker on the box, whatever comes with that console package deal. After all, ignorance of gaming culture has to do with the level of committment in that culture, not a lack of intelligence. Isn't it logical to suggest that the more of a 'gamble' one perceives a particular purchase to be, the more piracy becomes attractive? Piracy at the moment is the most time/cost-effective option to ensure that a potential consumer who is not 'in' on the games culture does not end up feeling robbed. No, I'm not saying this is justified and we should all live in hippie-land with parrots and multicoloured pantaloons. But I think part of the reason piracy is so acceptable/widespread now is the fact that game purchases are seen as an expensive gamble - something which is closely connected with the function and status of game reviews, but I must save that tangent for another day.

What else? It's hard to say, really. As an involved gamer I am left to either scant anecdotal evidence about my aunt or some other relative, or my own wild imaginations of the mythic majority. But despite all the expensive market research that is surely going on behind the scenes, I sometimes feel like the industry as a whole is sort of moving about in the dark, tripping wires and pulling along things it doesn't quite know about.