Hi, my name is Robert Fearon and I have entitlement issues.

Yup, that’s right, issues. Y’see, I don’t think the world owes me anything. I don’t think I’m entitled to anything and when I think of all the things I dislike the most when it comes to personal traits, it’s folks who seem to believe that the world somehow owes them something for an arbitrarily decided reason. It kinda fucks me off more than I’m happy with sometimes.

I also think I sound like a broken record on it at times.

The recent cage match between Lewis Denby and Leigh Alexander on game difficulty got my cogs-a-whirring on the whole entitlement thing more. Not so much the articles themselves, more some of the responses. As any regular readers will be fully aware, I’m an advocate of making concessions and conscious design choices to make games more accessible. A few years back, good friend of Mersey Remakes Barrie Ellis of One Switch asked me why this was, it was an awkward time to ask that question as sometimes my life gets in a bit more disarray than I’d like and I tend to drift off for a while and forget stuff. I remembered this question today and I believe it’s long overdue an answer.

Right, you know this life thing? Occasionally in life you’re presented with a dilemma or a situation or something that can have two possible outcomes. For whatever reason, you choose decision one of this hypothetical unmentioned-insert-your-own-example-here scenario and the end result is that you get something out of it. No-one else does. You choose decision two of this hypothetical unmentioned-insert-your-own-example-here scenario and the end result is you may have expended a little bit more time, a little bit more effort and perhaps not coming out of it as well off as you could but a by product of this decision is that you’ve made the days of a few more people a little brighter for it.

To me, decision two is the one that will always trump out. Sometimes it’s a tad self defeating, sometimes it doesn’t work out, but better to have tried to make someones minute/day/life a bit brighter and fallen on your arse with mistakes to learn from than it is to just take the easy route.

Back to this difficulty thing for a bit…

I find whenever this discussion comes up in public, there’s one oft repeated argument. It might be phrased differently, it might have different reasoning behind it but it always boils down to the same thing. Entitlement. Or “What about me?”

I’m sure you’ve read this in some form or another across many forums, comments sections, articles and debates. It might come in the form of “Games used to be hard, I grew up on them, that’s the way I like them and you cannot take that away from me”. It might come in the form of “They’ve already got their games, leave mine alone”, there’s a thousand variants that can all be boiled down to someone essentially shouting “what about me” at the world, always done in a manner that implies that they are absolutely entitled to hold the superior position here. It could be that they’ve been playing games for 20 years, it could be that they believe only hard or obtuse games are proper games and everything else is Wii-fodder but it always comes down to “What about me?” at the end of the day.

Well, y’know, what about you? You guys, gals trotting this out – you’re not special y’know? More to the point, you’re not entitled to a bigger say than anyone else for an arbitrary reason. You’ve all got no more nor less right to be able to play games than anyone else. And that’s important, y’know? I’ve been playing games for over 25 years now and last time I looked I didn’t have a certificate of service that entitled me to have a bigger say in what games should be and if I did, I doubt it’d say “yeah, you can have games but no-one else can because you’re special. Love, The Gaming Police xxx :mwah:”.

It might possibly hold some water as an argument if accessibility necessitated an us vs them attitude but it doesn’t. It’s easy to make a game challenging and accessible. Ok, not easy easy, but certainly not as hard as some folks would have you believe. Considering that the industry was built on more accessible games, the ones that often get held up as examples as things that wot we should be doing by the entitlement crowd, it’s a laughable stance to suggest that it’s them or us here.

It’s frustrating and sometimes amusing to watch the muddles folks get themselves into to justify not wanting “them” to have games. It’s a nebulous them, of course. The “them” that become “everyone who doesn’t share my viewpoint on how I want to narrow the field of games down for my own selfish reasons”.

So, here’s my philosophy.

Fuck anyone with that attitude. Fuck them in the eye. They don’t have a right to demand what can and cannot be made and they certainly shouldn’t be seen as a barometer of what games could and should be because the only thing they care about is what they want.

Why make one person happy or able to play a game over more people happy and able to play a game? It feels like a no brainer to me. And the more people kick against the pricks and try to keep people out of gaming? The more determined than ever I’m going to be to put this stuff in. Should the situation arise where the tide has finally turned and these folks stop barraging comments sections with why some people can’t have games, I’ll still do it.

Given the choice, it seems like the right thing to do. More people happy? Fuck yeah.

Why am I an advocate of accessibility? I’ll take decision 2 in the hypothetical-life-scenario, that’s why. As great and wonderful as I think I am, I’m not the only person on this planet who deserves to be happy and have the things I want.

That and I love games and I want people to be able to love them just as much as I do if they choose. I may get antsy around entitlement issues but never let it be said I’m not human and ever so slightly selfish in my desires also.