When It Comes To Perfect Dark, We Shouldn't Be Asking About The Game
Yesterday news broke that The Initiative, the studio Xbox has tasked with relaunching Perfect Dark, has been haemorrhaging staff for the past year. Around half the developers have left the project, including a significant amount of senior staff, and folks, that’s not good. Let me repeat that: it’s not good. You’d think that would be obvious, but some of the discussion I’m seeing around this very clearly not good revelation has been extremely disappointing and yet another reminder of the shallow, uncritical way many of us view video games.
I’m using ‘uncritical’ very deliberately, because much of this response has been from critics. It’s often tempting in our line of work to look at what GamersTM are saying and get annoyed at it, but it’s usually best avoided. Most people who play video games as their primary hobby are nice, normal people who just happen to partake in one of the most popular activities on the planet. America’s Pastime isn’t baseball anymore, it’s Call of Duty. There is a loud cohort of gamers who make playing video games the biggest, perhaps only, facet of their identity, and these types tend to overlook any negativity around their favourite games or studios, fight on the frontlines of the console war, and are often part of a 4chan/Discord/Reddit circle where racism, homophobia, and sexism is normalised. They’re also often teenagers, so getting annoyed that a few hundred people on the internet can be pointless, even if it’s occasionally worthwhile to dispatch them with a quick rebuttal.
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In the case of Perfect Dark, even if you overlook the GamersTM for whom the only news worth paying attention to with any video game is the release date, the
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