If you get a forum reply from someone claiming to be Fallout co-creator Tim Cain, I'll tell you right now, it's more likely to be from a Nigerian prince than the real Tim Cain. Cain is too unhappy with the way gaming is discussed online to ever visit a forum again.
He explains in an April 22 YouTube video with the educational title, "Why I Don't Post On Forums Anymore." You can watch the entire thing below, but the short of it is that gamers have become mean old dogs.
Decades ago, "I used to post on [discussion system predating the World Wide Web] Usenet sites all the time," Cain says. "I'd post about my D&D games. I'd post about Fallout in the '90s, when we were doing that. All this slowed down about 15 years ago and pretty much stopped."
The issue, Cain explains with displeasure, is anger seems to now dominate forum conversations. "They're anger-forward," he says. "It was always the case that there were some people on the forums who were venting. I get it. I mean, way back in Usenet, you can find people who were upset because they couldn't get Fallout to install." Still, Cain was able to talk to these grumpy people and figure out a solution that both of them were happy with. Now, he thinks it's nearly impossible to come to an amicable understanding like that.
"It just seems like a lot of people want to hate things," Cain worries. "That's what they like. They seem to like hating things, which confuses me." Cain argues, "That kind of environment, I don't think is conducive to getting better games."
"I used to have these great conversations with people on forums," Cain remembers wistfully. "Now that's all gone. It's all boiled down to, 'This is stupid, this person's lazy, this is all woke.' And it doesn't lead anywhere." So Cain gave up on collecting feedback from forums. He says, "I just tapped out. And, that's sad. Because those conversations are now lost."
I've been frequenting forums for only a fraction of the time that Cain has, but even I've witnessed online conversations become more rude and less creative across my lifetime. The takeaway must be, then, we should all exercise our ability to understand the person on the other side of our screens is, indeed, a flesh-and-blood person. But they're probably not Tim Cain.
