I like independent games, I really do. At a time when large studios are milking game franchises to the last drop, and churning out an endless stream of derivatives of popular games, one almost feels like leaving them to their millions and encouraging the smaller developers who manage to achieve great things with only a fraction of the majors' budget. Mount & Blade, for instance, easily one of the last great games I played, was started by a couple in Turkey, only to be joined by a modding community that refined the game until it became worthy of a mainstream release, with an expansion now in the works.
Unfortunately, it's all too easy to list all the concerns that come with independent games: sloppy coding, amateurish graphics, even a certain form of elitism (reminiscent of that surrounding independent films, but here technologically oriented), and, perhaps, a nagging impression that should the developers strike it rich, they might become as despicable and unimaginative as the mainstream studios outside of which they are currently thriving.
Yet, apart from that elitism mentioned above, independent games and insufferable communities are rarely thought to go together, while the mainstream is always blamed for opening doors, that ought to have remained bolted, to the proverbial Great Unwashed; to wit, the frequent claim that World of Warcraft ruined MMORPG's by simultaneously popularizing the genre and raising the bar for other games. Conversely, the communities of independent games, it is perceived, are so exclusive and tight-knit that they would quickly ostracize anyone who should fail to maintain basic rules of decency, especially if moderators and even the developers themselves uphold them.
This, I thought, was a standard rule until I played Haven & Hearth, an independent MMORPG currently being developed by two university students in Sweden. A bad game? No, not by a long shot, even in its current alpha state; but it harbours a bad community that, if left unchecked, will end up ruining its immense potential. What is to blame for it? The sandbox format of the game, and some of its untested mechanics, certainly enable the worst in online human nature. But perhaps the real reason is that the smaller the asylum, the easier it is to overrun it, especially when the developers, in addition to being outnumbered, clearly think they have better things to do than try to rein in their game's players. Quoth one of Haven & Hearth's developers: "Am I the only one who kinda likes the community? You know, on the whole?"
I wish I could be of the same opinion. A recent example of the game's fine community at work was the discovery that one or more players had placed pavement in the shape of a swastika; and when the matter was brought up on the game's forum, someone tried to justify it by citing its original meaning as a sign of good luck. I have to concur with a later poster, however, who drew out a knowledge of probabilities that would put to shame many an Ascot bookie: "Odds of a person creating it for the lulz: 99%. Odds of a person creating it as a good luck symbol: 1%." That's because, as a film once pointed out, "Nazis are a barrel of laughs".
Worse, very few people who commented in the thread seemed to take the matter seriously; and what devastated me was not the belief that a hate crime had been committed, but the sheer insensitivity displayed by those involved. To them, nothing is seemingly beyond bounds, and anything is good "for the lulz", no matter how offensive it might actually be. And, as with anything good for the lulz, the Haven & Hearth community demonstrated that it thinks this makes a wonderful running gag (a quote from this last thread: "He's doing it to offend you, and it's working"; now there is more virtue in not being offended than the opposite). After all, nationalism and online games rarely get the opportunity to mix, right?
Recently, the users of a Russian forum started playing the game en masse, creating lag of a magnitude heretofore unknown. This led to forum threads with the appetizing titles of "Declaration of Russian Jihad" and "Massacre in Bitardsk and Stalingrad", rife with juicy quotes such as "against my better judgment, I'm making a post here to inform WV [a German group] that they've killed a Canadian while apparently on the hunt for Russians." Mindless ethnic saber-rattling at its most repugnant, which brings to mind the old racist goings-on in Shadowbane after that game went free. There, it was for server domination; in Haven & Hearth, it's all about the smoothness of one's gaming experience.
Because lag, apparently, isn't something that can be lulzed about.
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