Backers on the Back Burner

You’ve almost certainly heard the news by now. Oculus VR, the company behind the ever popular and impressive Oculus Rift, was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. (More precisely, for $400 million and $1.6 million in stock options, but who’s counting.) That is, if you can’t recall, twice as much as they dished out for Instagram two years ago.

The reaction has been, unsurprisingly, rather scathing. There have obviously been some good ol’ jollies to be had along the way, but it’s been overwhelmingly and purely negative from much of the Internet. Markus Persson—better known as Notch and creator of Minecraft—even announced that he’s canceling a deal with Oculus to bring Minecraft to the Rift.

An interesting question to ask, of course, is why, but the more important one is to ask is it justified. The reason is pretty simple: people are feeling cheated. Even if you weren’t a backer or even a fan of the virtual reality device, it’s easy to understand why you would take this news negatively if you were in a supporting role of the Rift’s meteoric rise.

For those that don’t remember, the Rift started out as a Kickstarter project. They asked for a measly $250,000 to bring to life a developer kit for this farfetched dream, but they instead got $2.44 million. That includes $10,000 from Notch’s own personal savings (not that he can’t afford it being 99% phat stackz now, but it’s an important part of the story).

Then, once they were imbued with legitimacy, hype, and fans, Oculus secured another $92 million in venture capital over the course of two rounds of funding during 2013. This enabled them to build an HD version, travel to give talks, and build better developer relations. Important steps to becoming a real, honest-to-goodness hardware company.

And that’s what many of the Rift’s backers thought they were doing: jumping in on the ground floor of a company they thought would do big things. Most of that statement is true, actually. They were there are the beginning, yes. Oculus is doing and probably will do even bigger things as well. But the jumping in part? Not so much.

The sourness from much of the Internet over the acquisition by Facebook seems to stem from the idea that they, by giving money to the original Kickstarter, gives me ownership over some part of Oculus’ enormous (and, let’s be honest here, ridiculous) success. Others thought they were explicitly giving money to keep the company as independent as the day it was born. Maybe some truly don’t understand the difference between crowdfunding and investing.

Regardless, the net result is the same: they feel cheated. They aren’t seeing a single dime of that $2 billion of Zuckerbloons, and for folks like Notch, they “did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition.” And yet that’s exactly what happened.

Because it’s a fundraiser. Kickstarter is a fundraising platform, much like the ones that involve selling candy to your neighbors and quickly and poorly washing cars in your high school’s parking lot. When you make that exchange of either overpriced candy or terrible custodial services or even just freely giving away cash as a donation, you never expect to see anything beyond your immediate and discrete return.

You don’t expect to conduct a song at the orchestra’s concert during the tour you donated to. You don’t expect to be at the top of the pyramid at the cheerleading tournament you got the school’s team to. You don’t expect anything in return because you understand the transaction is nothing but a donation.

That is precisely what Kickstarter is. It’s even stated on Kickstarter’s About page: “Backers are supporting projects to help them come to life, not to profit financially. Instead, project creators offer rewards to thank backers for their support.” That’s it. Every project on the site is a busker with a hat in front of their tap dancing cat and every once in a while, people throw money in there.

There’s obviously much more to the psychology of the response here (including distrust of Facebook and general disdain for change), but the crux of it is that. It’s that people feel used and abused because they gave to something—helped put in a brick on the foundation of something so grand and important—and only got a pat on the back.

We really don’t know much to understand where this is headed (Instagram has been, more or less, left to its own devices, but Facebook does have a pretty good track record of tinkering with its own products and then shelving them when they don’t fit into their expansive vision), but this and failed project and scams and grifters are good healthy lessons in the crowdfunding world. We are not investors. We’re just people with some loose cash and an overdose of naivety.

What Video Games Do

I wake up each day knowing that a certain portion of my time will go to just reading. Well, that may not be accurate. Consuming is more like it as sometimes it’s a video or a song or an infographic, but the point is that doing so is pretty much a guarantee. Each day, my Twitter feed will overflow with links and pictures and YouTube clips of things I never knew existed. My Facebook feed with become inundated with photos from the previous night’s outing and videos of an embarrassingly drunk karaoke night. It’s pretty easy to just glaze over with the incessant deluge of information and stimuli.

At this point, I usually only perk up when I see links from particular people or, more often, when I see the same link multiple times. As was the case yesterday, this Tumblr post made the rounds on multiple tweets and Facebook updates (yes, despite being over a month old in its original Tumblr form). It’s a series of GIFs that depict a bit from Irish stand-up comedian Dara Ó Briain‘s 2010 This is the Show DVD. Here’s the text if you’re clicking-averse (and here’s an extended clip from his Live at the Apollo set):

Video games do a thing that no other industry does. You cannot be bad at watching a movie. You cannot be bad at listening to an album. But you can be bad at playing a video game, and the video game will punish you and deny you access to the rest of the video game. No other art form does this! You’ve never been reading a book and three chapters in the book has gone, “what are the major themes of the book so far?” And you’ve gone, “well…I don’t know…,” and boom. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” You’ve never been listening to an album and after four songs, the album has gone, “dance! Dance! Show me your dancing is good enough to merit this!” And you go, “is this good enough?” And the album goes, “no,” and stops.

Perhaps a bit overly dramatic, but he certainly gets the point across. Video games is one of the few (perhaps the only) art form where you can actually be bad at it and be commensurately punished for it. Regardless of your ability to critically analyze a song or dissect the scenes of a film, you can experience the product in its entirety on your first go-round. Even art in the form of paintings and statues and whatnot can be seen without lapse even if you have zero knowledge of abstract or modern styles. You may not be able to appreciate any of these things on a deeper level and wring meaning from where there may be none, but being a shoddy art critic never stops you from looking at the whole of the Mona Lisa.

Playing a video game, however, is a wholly gated experience. Each nugget of pleasure and pain must be forcibly mined with your own hands. Even exploratory titles which push the boundaries of the definition of “interactive” (such as Dear Esther and Datura) are dependent on your ability to navigate an open environment. Stumble on that block and you might as well not even play.

And that is necessarily true. Anything less in the realm of player-game response and you no longer have a video game; you have an animated movie. Video games are an interactive art form, and failing to interact with it is a failing as a player. This doesn’t make you bad at video games because you can’t complete it but instead makes you bad at it because you can’t do the one thing intrinsic to the art form. Watching a movie requires you to watch and listening to a song requires you to listen, so it’s not much of a stretch to say playing a game requires you to actually play.

Which, I guess, invites the question: do you need to play the entire game to appreciate it? Or, perhaps, what parts of a game are appreciable?

A game is made up of many different elements and is perhaps most similar to movies in this regard. A song is a song and a painting is a painting, but films—just like games—are comprised of songs and art and actors. Games, however, go beyond that and include gameplay mechanics, implements of computer science and artificial intelligence, and so much more. Each piece can be praised and derided separately (this is a good song, this voice actor is terrible, etc.), but only their gestalt can be the final product. The sum total is paramount.

It’s an interesting thought, to be sure, because then not only is tangible progress within the game restricted but also appreciation outside of the game. Your failing as a player extends to your failing as someone who can apply critical thought to the product and the art form as a whole. So video games are not just unique in that you can be bad at playing them but also bad at appraising their overall worth. Whether you understand a Terrence Malick film or can see past the swirling colors of a Pablo Picasso, your evaluation of either are comprehensive in your current state. Given guidance or some choice literature on the topics, you can expand your understanding, but that adds to your worth as a film and art critic.

There is no such shortcut in video games. You cannot intuit the overall value of a game from reading about it or from watching it. The interactivity—the literal motion of you pressing a button or moving a joystick—is integral to your understanding of it. It’s how the choices you are forced to make and actions you have to take in The Walking Dead shape up the story, predetermined or otherwise, in your hands that personalizes your experience. It’s how having the tangible execution of story beats in Spec Ops: The Line makes the hard turns in the late story hit all that much harder in the end.

It’s what makes games so difficult to penetrate, but also makes it so worthwhile.