i will never stop singing the praises of my local library system

THE VAULT IN OUR STARS

An Opinion Piece on How Bethesda Survives (And How You Can Change Them!)

A/N: I wrote this op-ed for funsies. As you may know, I am known to warm myself at a corporate dumpster fire from time to time, but this one is especially close to my heart. I may replace with an actual edited version but for now, just enjoy it in its raw & unpolished glory. If you’re a Bethesda fan, you’re used to it anyway.

           In the words of Todd Howard, “I read on the internet…that sometimes it doesn’t just work.”

           Indeed, after just over two weeks since its 14 November release date, Bethesda Softworks’ release of survival multiplayer sandbox “Fallout 76” has more than merely failed to impress most of its players. The game has garnered an infamously low average score of only 54% on popular game journalism site, Metacritic. It fares no better on Youtube, with dozens of popular influencers obliterating the high expectations of even the most devoted fans of the Fallout franchise; but this will not be another essay to dishonor the multiple technical, immersion and storytelling woes that plague beleaguered “Fallout 76”. That’s for another essay.

           This criticism is one that many previous public complaints have touched on, flirted with, but seldom fully explored while caught up in the disappointment they had in “Fallout 76.” Specifically, this essay is leveled broadly at Bethesda Softworks LLC, the video game publishing division responsible for “Fallout 76”, as well as ZeniMax Media Inc., the parent organization of Bethesda and many other well-known game developers such as Arkane Studios, id Software and more. The upper management of these companies is removed from all but the finances of their industry; they are abusing both their content creators and consumers to calculated effect, remaining foggy at best on the aim of the products their teams are producing and out of touch with the end user’s interest.

           What more can we say against corporations of this staggering size? Corporations and mergers, time and again, continue to exploit art production and consumption then shrug off the backlash by driving screws into their overworked employees and letting them take the fall with the public. Unless we look at past events, this trend of blame shifting isn’t obvious. It’s hard at the moment to see that Bethesda Softworks’ colossal failure to recreate their previous endearing successes with fans in “Fallout 76” didn’t happen overnight.

It is for this reason that I sit on my soapbox today, somehow about to make an analogy of the gaming marketing industry by using Hazel and Gus from good ol’ John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars.” Never did I imagine I’d see those concepts together, but here I am smashing them together like this is fanfiction(dot)net. Don’t get too excited, though, because none of the wholesome aspects of Hazel and Gus make it into this analogy; no, this essay is all about the essence of what happens when you take a beautiful thing and strip it to the bare bones. Being a gamer in today’s culture of parasitic marketing is roughly akin to being desperately in love with a dying cancer patient. With their pants down and tumors exposed, Bethesda is giving us a rare glimpse into exactly what has made them cancerous: a lack of Vision (not to be confused with Activision.)

You see, Bethesda doesn’t have a vision. If you asked Todd Howard today what Bethesda’s vision was, his response would essentially amount to “get bigger, bigger than we’ve ever seen before,” and you would never be quite sure if he meant to say it would be the games, the bugs, or the pocketbooks that would be getting “bigger.” Bethesda has no vision because they are blinded by what I like to refer to as the survivalist mindset, cancer that has spread through their higher management and public faces so quietly for so long that Bethesda has only just noticed it rearing its ugly head. They have ventured through the past 20 years producing games that fans would merely refrain from harshly criticizing. If only they had seen their culture of undiluted survivalism in time to integrate it into “Fallout 76.”

To see the birth of this cancer that is killing Bethesda, we will travel back in time to 31 October 1998, when “The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard,” along with its related title “An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire,” were both resounding “commercial failures,” according to Stephan Janicki of Computer Gaming World. These two disappointments brought Bethesda to the edge of bankruptcy before ZeniMax Media swooped in and claimed them as a subsidiary in 1999. In the following years, Bethesda Softworks knew they had to succeed, or they were done in the eyes of both their corporate overlords and their fans. This is when the panicky, survivalist mindset set in. Feverishly they worked until, in 2002, they released “The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind,” and Todd Howard was relieved to find that “It just work[ed].” Upon the laurels of Morrowind, Bethesda skipped happily into the sunset, bringing us many more beloved titles like “Fallout 3,” “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Legendary Edition,” and “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Special Edition.”

But they never grew out of that survivalist panic. Like cancer, it festered in the background, that burning fear of “commercial failure,” which is a euphemism for rejection by their fans. Bethesda’s near-death experience had scared them. Their aversion to conflict and attempts to please every consumer instead of maintaining a focused design and lore quickly made them the endearing dweeb of game developers, merely slapped on the wrist for repeat performance flaws that would break the fans of other developers. “Cute” bugs in coding dating back several releases, consistently shipping products with technical difficulties unbecoming of a $60 price tag, multiple rerelease announcements and story-writing so poor that it’s common for players to joke about blatantly ignoring the main plot of the game, often for hundreds of hours, in favor of the things Bethesda did capture: exploration, immersion, and lore.

That brings us to the jokes. After Skyrim-related content pervaded their 2017 E3 press conference, it began to dawn on Bethesda’s corporate half that all those Bethesda memes were laughing at them, not with them. Shaken by flashbacks of Tiber Septim’s conquest of Hammerfell in “The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard,” Todd Howard and Bethesda’s upper management knew they couldn’t sit by idly and allow for history to repeat itself. They couldn’t accept hearing rejection from fans, even if it meant directly ignoring their feedback. Tunnel vision set in in the wake of more Skyrim jokes and criticism over their Creation Club microtransactions. The cancer was consuming them and the only way to heal their fracturing friendly persona and silence their critics was to get bigger, bigger than we’ve ever seen before; but at E3 2018, two decades after their initial “commercial failures,” their realization came many years too late and they didn’t snap out of their survivalist mindset in time.

Their bigger-than-we’ve-ever-seen-before came in the form of “Fallout 76”, not an ambitious venture objectively but very ambitious for Bethesda Game Studios Austin Branch, formerly known as BattleCry Studios LLC, who had never coded a project using Creation Engine, which Bethesda has been using exclusively since 2011.

But wait! say the studious fans of Bethesda. If Creation Engine has only existed since 2011, why does “Fallout 76” have bugs dating back as far as Morrowind? Creation is based off a much older engine called Gamebryo (known as NetImmerse until 2003). A much older engine that has successfully supported huge multiplayer games, most notably the critically acclaimed “Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.”

If the core of Bethesda’s Creation Engine is a game engine that can create an enjoyable multiplayer experience, then why can’t “Fallout 76” do the same? Well, spread this funny honey on a biscuit, baby, because the answer is more cancer!

The fact that Bethesda has recurring bugs dating back over multiple releases suggests that, rather than taking time to address technology advancements, Bethesda’s survivalist mindset has grown upon Creation Engine like a tumor, strapping framework on top in half-baked layers, as quickly as possible, reducing the flexibility and independence of asset files into a fragile, unstable, monstrous whole.

I genuinely do not believe that Bethesda Game Studio Austin’s game developers were incompetent or lazy. Since the “Fallout 76” announcement at E3 2018, many have suspected disorganization in Bethesda’s management as they encountered a truly new set of obstacles for the first time. No one knew what “Fallout 76” would become, not the end users and certainly not the management of Bethesda Studios that for years had ignored the desperate need for ease-of-use coding with conservative couplings (files dependent on other files). They threw BGS Austin, a relatively new team that was inexperienced with designing Creation Engine worlds, into a hyped AAA release with an enormous fanbase; and what it became was an unacceptable byproduct of that insidious culture of corporate survivalism. Bethesda officials became so concerned with what the public thought of them that they never thought to check. They fixated on getting bigger than we’ve ever seen before until their creation became confused and codependent. They obfuscated what brought fans to Bethesda in Morrowind and kept them coming back through every hiccup and every rerelease: the fun to be had in exploration, immersion, and lore, but most importantly, the Vision.

Oh, what a situation Bethesda finds itself in now! Even though they’ve finally seen a backlash from setting profit margins before considering their team’s capacity, many feel this call-to-god moment has come too late. Losing the reverent trust of large portions of their fanbase, they must either find a way to fix their cancerous, bloated Creation Engine or risk losing their Bethesda aesthetic by developing a costly new engine to proceed. Bethesda knows this, and they desperately hope that no one else does because they also realized that by promising not only a decade-anticipated new “Elder Scrolls” release but a new game franchise as well, they’ve already allocated most of their resources. They can’t go back on their promises now without a complete “commercial failure” from fans already stretched thin by “Fallout 76;” now more than ever they need all hands on deck. There is little time and money left to dedicate to the enormous undertaking of designing a new game engine from scratch, much less the even more arduous task of unscrambling Creation Engine, now so distorted that their employees don’t know how to fix it anymore or they would, just to stop seeing memes about Skyrim and floating Scorched Zombies. It’s hopeless. It’s arguable that they deserve help after insulting fans with the lack of focus and attention for “Fallout 76,” multiple buggy rereleases of a buggy title from 2011, and the general sense of not understanding what made a compelling story. They do not deserve sympathy for the vague unease of having to create your own purpose, a job which Bethesda has shifted to its fans to avoid facing its fears from 20 years of trying to please everyone for their own pride and not in the spirit of their consumers.

Bethesda may not deserve our help, but many still believe that The Elder Scrolls does, that Fallout does. If you’re one of those people, there is something you can do, and it’s to ignore the cries to boycott all Bethesda products “forever.”

Bethesda owns the intellectual property to The Elder Scrolls and Fallout; and while Bethesda is an abusive, frustrated company with—seemingly—a vision of self-destruction, they do still care what you think because of their all-consuming fear of the Redguard. But ZeniMax Media owns them, even the neurotic Todd Howard, and ZeniMax Media has only ever cared about your money. You cannot refuse to agree to buy the game you want Bethesda to make and still expect it to arrive, but you can refuse to pre-order their games and indulge in microtransactions for as long as it takes. The game industry’s security and stock values are heavily dependent on fan loyalty, digital merchandise sales and pre-orders. This money gives them their security blanket in case they create “Fallout 76.” Wrapped in their blankies, the management of Bethesda and ZeniMax Media will keep their narrow vision and continue to use their development teams as bad press sponges unless they experience some genuine fear of “commercial failure.” If consumers reject their vision, they will change their vision for money; because Truth is, the game was rigged from the start.

American Online and the Dial-Up Generation

By Mike Vinopal

I'm about to turn thirty-five and I belong to the last generation that knew a time before the internet. I belong to the Dial-Up generation. I remember American Online and the sound of the dial tone that preceded a series of fax machine sounds. An electronic cacophony that felt like a symphony back then. I remember crossing my fingers for a successful connection, the "You've Got Mail" refrain, and the excitement it would bring. We would wait hours for a picture or video to download and it was exhilarating! It was the internet!  The information superhighway!  Cyberspace!

Dial-up was like the Ford Model T. Innovative for its time. Perhaps clunky and cumbersome looking back, but a wonder nonetheless. Dial-up was the snowball that never stopped growing. Broadband's father.  Wifi's grandmother.

I was in high school in the late nineties and watched America Online go by the wayside. Cellphone popularity soared. Started saving peoples' numbers. Didn't have to commit them to memory anymore. Not too much dialing-up these days. Some of those cellphones started having cameras and eventually a rudimentary form of the internet too. Texting started happening more as I started college, so phones started having keyboards and more internet. Then phones were iPods all of the sudden. Before I even got on the iPod train, they were sort of obsolete. Then there was MySpace and Napster, followed by many more of their ilk. The world was changing fast and the snowball grew.

I've watched Smartphones become a universal component of everyday life in most developed countries around the world. Limitless information at your finger tips, pocket-sized and all mixed together. The wonderful and the shitty. The kids born in the last 10 years will never know a world without Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, Hulu...it makes your head spin! They will never go to a Blockbuster Video. They watch and read news reports where tweets are regularly included. Facebook statuses are submitted as legal evidence in the modern age. They are reading and spreading both information and misinformation in vaster quantities than ever and the snowball continues to grow, as does the shadow it casts. 

So it begs the question, should etiquette and how we conduct ourselves on social media be discussed?  

Internet culture has grown well beyond its teens now and I think we'd be better off as a society if we could all talk about some general rules of etiquette, much like what is expected at a dinner table. Most of us engage in social media at this point, so we shouldn't be surprised when inevitably while engaging in what passes as socialization these days, that we would encounter differences in opinion. However, it is rare when discussing polarizing issues in that forum that common decency or respectful discourse are displayed, where as in person, you'd most likely get both. Mostly because the majority of people don't want to look like an asshole.

And yes, this makes us petty and cowardly. We are a click culture where, as Don Hall so aptly puts it, the "Rage Profiteers" are able to manipulate the masses with misinformation and distraction. And so we argue amongst ourselves in cyberspace and we get nowhere. 

We are back to writing on cave walls. Our emojis and status updates are modern hieroglyphics. We are surely growing backwards and forwards at the same time while technology advances and our socializations regress. 

This stuff will be on the Internet forever. A digital time capsule for future generations filled with cat videos and memes. Endless selfies and ducklips. Could be worse.  Tweet fights and hate-filled comment wars. Yeah, that's worse. So we must ask ourselves, "What do we want our legacy to be?"

I know social media is here to stay and that people will continue to quite literally live their lives inside these forums, but let's all agree, if we're going to continue to make this virtual world the main place where most modern socialization takes place, let's do it with some manners and some grace.

Because social media isn't all bad. It's easy to demonize it and scapegoat the medium for all of the world's problems. And sometimes we need reminded of the beauty and potential of such powerful, all-consuming technology, like I was at the October installment of Literate Ape's monthly artistic debate series, BUGHOUSE!

To give you some background:

Bughouse Square (from “bughouse,” slang for mental health facility) was the popular name of Chicago’s Washington Square Park, where orators (“soapboxers”) held forth on warm-weather evenings from the 1910s through the mid-1960s. In its heyday during the 1920s and 1930s, poets, religionists, and cranks addressed the crowds, but the mainstays were soapboxers from the revolutionary left. In today’s almost absurd partisanship and polarization, Don Hall and David Himmel believe Chicago is the place to reintroduce the concept of a true dialectic in opposing views and BUGHOUSE! is just that.

At the time I saw the performance, I was working on the first drafts of this piece you're now reading.  Annalise Raziq and Joe Janes were debating the question, "Has social media made us more narcissistic?" and Joe's piece really struck a cord with me and what I was writing about so I've included some of my favorite quotes here.

 "We are writing our biographies in real time. And when we die we've left a way to be remembered that's better than a tombstone. I can visit my father, my uncle, and live through their pictures and read their words, their own words. I get to be with them as they were."

"Facebook is just another way we cave people write on walls."

"We share our lives on Facebook.  Was there some other thing we're supposed to be doing on this planet while we're here?"

No, I guess there isn't, Joe.

And that snowball keeps growing. So again, we must ask ourselves, "What do we want our legacy to be?"

Listen to Joe Janes' performance referenced in the article above in full, as well as the rest of the performances from that night here. 

Subscribe to the podcast and catch the next BUGHOUSE! Monday 12-7-17 at Haymarket Pub & Brewery. Get full event details here.

American Online and the Dial-Up Generation

By Mike Vinopal

I'm about to turn thirty-five and I belong to the last generation that knew a time before the internet. I belong to the Dial-Up generation. I remember American Online and the sound of the dial tone that preceded a series of fax machine sounds. An electronic cacophony that felt like a symphony back then. I remember crossing my fingers for a successful connection, the "You've Got Mail" refrain, and the excitement it would bring. We would wait hours for a picture or video to download and it was exhilarating! It was the internet!  The information superhighway!  Cyberspace!

Dial-up was like the Ford Model T. Innovative for its time. Perhaps clunky and cumbersome looking back, but a wonder nonetheless. Dial-up was the snowball that never stopped growing. Broadband's father.  Wifi's grandmother.

I was in high school in the late nineties and watched America Online go by the wayside. Cellphone popularity soared. Started saving peoples' numbers. Didn't have to commit them to memory anymore. Not too much dialing-up these days. Some of those cellphones started having cameras and eventually a rudimentary form of the internet too. Texting started happening more as I started college, so phones started having keyboards and more internet. Then phones were iPods all of the sudden. Before I even got on the iPod train, they were sort of obsolete. Then there was MySpace and Napster, followed by many more of their ilk. The world was changing fast and the snowball grew.

I've watched Smartphones become a universal component of everyday life in most developed countries around the world. Limitless information at your finger tips, pocket-sized and all mixed together. The wonderful and the shitty. The kids born in the last 10 years will never know a world without Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, Hulu...it makes your head spin! They will never go to a Blockbuster Video. They watch and read news reports where tweets are regularly included. Facebook statuses are submitted as legal evidence in the modern age. They are reading and spreading both information and misinformation in vaster quantities than ever and the snowball continues to grow, as does the shadow it casts. 

So it begs the question, should etiquette and how we conduct ourselves on social media be discussed?  

Internet culture has grown well beyond its teens now and I think we'd be better off as a society if we could all talk about some general rules of etiquette, much like what is expected at a dinner table. Most of us engage in social media at this point, so we shouldn't be surprised when inevitably while engaging in what passes as socialization these days, that we would encounter differences in opinion. However, it is rare when discussing polarizing issues in that forum that common decency or respectful discourse are displayed, where as in person, you'd most likely get both. Mostly because the majority of people don't want to look like an asshole.

And yes, this makes us petty and cowardly. We are a click culture where, as Don Hall so aptly puts it, the "Rage Profiteers" are able to manipulate the masses with misinformation and distraction. And so we argue amongst ourselves in cyberspace and we get nowhere. 

We are back to writing on cave walls. Our emojis and status updates are modern hieroglyphics. We are surely growing backwards and forwards at the same time while technology advances and our socializations regress. 

This stuff will be on the Internet forever. A digital time capsule for future generations filled with cat videos and memes. Endless selfies and ducklips. Could be worse.  Tweet fights and hate-filled comment wars. Yeah, that's worse. So we must ask ourselves, "What do we want our legacy to be?"

I know social media is here to stay and that people will continue to quite literally live their lives inside these forums, but let's all agree, if we're going to continue to make this virtual world the main place where most modern socialization takes place, let's do it with some manners and some grace.

Because social media isn't all bad. It's easy to demonize it and scapegoat the medium for all of the world's problems. And sometimes we need reminded of the beauty and potential of such powerful, all-consuming technology, like I was at the October installment of Literate Ape's monthly artistic debate series, BUGHOUSE!

To give you some background:

Bughouse Square (from “bughouse,” slang for mental health facility) was the popular name of Chicago’s Washington Square Park, where orators (“soapboxers”) held forth on warm-weather evenings from the 1910s through the mid-1960s. In its heyday during the 1920s and 1930s, poets, religionists, and cranks addressed the crowds, but the mainstays were soapboxers from the revolutionary left. In today’s almost absurd partisanship and polarization, Don Hall and David Himmel believe Chicago is the place to reintroduce the concept of a true dialectic in opposing views and BUGHOUSE! is just that.

At the time I saw the performance, I was working on the first drafts of this piece you're now reading.  Annalise Raziq and Joe Janes were debating the question, "Has social media made us more narcissistic?" and Joe's piece really struck a cord with me and what I was writing about so I've included some of my favorite quotes here.

 "We are writing our biographies in real time. And when we die we've left a way to be remembered that's better than a tombstone. I can visit my father, my uncle, and live through their pictures and read their words, their own words. I get to be with them as they were."

"Facebook is just another way we cave people write on walls."

"We share our lives on Facebook.  Was there some other thing we're supposed to be doing on this planet while we're here?"

No, I guess there isn't, Joe.

And that snowball keeps growing. So again, we must ask ourselves, "What do we want our legacy to be?"

Listen to Joe Janes' performance referenced in the article above in full, as well as the rest of the performances from that night here. 

Subscribe to the podcast and catch the next BUGHOUSE! Monday 12-7-17 at Haymarket Pub & Brewery. Get full event details here.