Post #3: Values of Free Expression

 

Values Of Free Expression

Through the history of the United States the ability for people to freely express how they feel about certain aspects of the nation has been a key piece of the foundation that the country was made on. As time has moved on more of these values have become more important as more and more of the world have realized the importance of free expression for the citizens. These values all have an importance but there are two that I feel are most important to us today and those are the idea of Stable Change and the idea of Individual Self-Fulfillment. 

Stable Change is the ability of the people to vent their problems which helps them decrease the likelihood of them turning to violent means which on its own is super important due to the large number of differing opinions we can now find in the world. This becomes even more important when considering Individual Self-Fulfillment however. Being able to express yourself in many different ways to create a new identity is the basis of Individual Self-Fulfillment so when you combine this ability to express yourself in various manner and the ability to be able to vent your ideas and state what you don’t like, you get and a compounding of both ideas with one another allowing not only for sole individuals to create an identity for themselves but allows entire groups to create an identity and move as a group.

Free Expression In Games

These two values can be found in many places throughout our modern culture in response to all sorts of topics. From politics to music preference, the ability to vent and express yourself has become a core aspect of what we can do within the United States. There is one area however that I feel that these values can be found extremely heavily and that is within the bubble surrounding games.

Games have created the ideal area for both of these values as they created a unique environment for people to be able to express themselves. First and foremost, most people love to vent about games, especially if a game manages to build up a large amount of hype around it.  It is human nature to like to state their opinion on something they spent money on, so when a game doesn’t meet your expectations or, even worse, falls below expectations you better believe they will let you know how they feel. 

The most recent major example of this Stable Change expression in the game industry was with the release of Fallout:76 in 2018 which had the failure of meeting the player exception, the full attention of the game industry, and the dubious actions of the games producer Bethesda caused players to have a large amount of problems that they wished to vent. As the tried to vent their problems they often found their voices being snuffed out or muted as the company tried to do damage control so in anger the player decided to put everything that Bethesda made to the torch by flooding the company's games with bad review, refund requests, and complaints which ultimately hurt the company more which is expected to be one of the reasons they sold to Microsoft in 2020. This a clear warning to other companies what can happen if you deny the players who buy your games the inability to vent then they will turn to other methods.

This failure of Fallout:76 however has also shown the values of being able to have Individual Self-Fulfillment. Even though the game came under a large amount of heat during its release, there was always a small community who even though the game didn’t meet their expectations still enjoyed the game and they also voiced their opinions on the things the game managed to do right. These people created a group identity by expressing where they stand with the game and as such managed to create a small cult following of the game that still lasts to this day.