Digging Deeper: Digital Homicide and Bad Media

I make no secret of enjoying terrible media; what once was a guilty pleasure has become both an ironic and an earnest interest, fueled by the internet. I'm not alone in my love for the gleelfully earnest works of Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau, Neil Breen, and the various forgotten directors featured in Mystery Science Theater 3000. There are regularly scheduled screenings for The Room in cities all over the U. S., and the Game Grumps's Let's Plays of Sonic '06 and Sonic Boom still hold some of the highest views on their channel. And yet, the attitude towards Digital Homicide is vastly different. To call them "controversial" would be incorrect, since they are so universally reviled. YouTubers don't giggle when playing their games like they do for others, however bad they may be, but instead scrunch their noses and sigh sardonically. And when I played their games myself, I was more offended than amused. So what is it that denies the Romine brothers their pass? What sets them apart from the likes of Tommy Wiseau, whom people seem to adore?

The knee-jerk response, for me, is to blame their litigious attitude. (Just one day after I posted the DigiHom DtRH, they suddenly went on the legal offensive against a number of their critics on Steam. There will be a follow-up video once the dust actually settles) The blatant hatred for their detractors is obvious, and this has done little to assuage the belief that James and Robert Romine are a spiteful pair of men seeking to remove negative criticism that could damage potential sales. This visage of the slimy businessman is supported by their brag during their "discussion" with Jim Sterling, where Robert stated confidently that they had made money on their games and that Sterling's videos had a negative impact on their business, which seems to paint them as developers who are just trying to turn a quick buck at the expense of their buyers.

This visage is undermined, however, by the attitude that the Romine brothers have taken against Sterling and their detractors. While the lawsuit itself attacks Sterling specifically for damage to their name and business, the way they have portrayed themselves to the media and their rhetoric in the "discussion" shows that they see themselves as underdogs whose creative works are under attack by big, nasty critics, and that they have the guts to fight back; in other words, they truly believe that their games are legitimately creative, and not just moneymakers. The brothers repeat ad nauseam that their critics simply weren't spending enough time with their games to give a reasonable review, and that if only people would pay more attention, there would be an enjoyable product buried somewhere in the purchase, enough to warrant a "positive" review.

Is it possible that this belief in one's own ability makes it uncomfortable to tease their works? This seems doubtful; there are plenty of delusional artists whose awful works are still a joy to play, watch, and lampoon. Tommy Wiseau's innocent belief in his six million dollar "drama" doesn't stop people from congregating in theaters to guffaw alongside one another and shout the poorly-delivered lines at the screen: "I did not hit her! I did naaahhhht. O hai, Mahk!" Similarly, Augusto Bulow believed in his game Bad Rats and its humorous characteristics, though people are laughing about it for entirely different reasons.

So if it's not their business or creative practice that sucks away the fun, then what is it?

There is another, lesser-known game developer to whom we may draw a comparison: Derek Smart. In the 1990s, he created a game called Battlecruiser 3000A.D., fashioning himself a rival to Chris Roberts in the space sim genre. (Chris Roberts is responsible for the popular Wing Commander series) When his game became mired in development hell and was released half-baked, people took to forums to air their grievances. Derek Smart, a forumite himself, began viciously attacking and arguing against these irked forum participants, somethings threatening them. This practice earned him the pejorative title of "Internet Warlord." (There may be a DtRH in the future on him) As the game's controls were largely unintuitive, most of the players would go onto these forums looking for help and inevitably see Smart's aggressive posture, making them feel even more uncomfortable with the game; now, not only was the game befuddling them, but the creator himself was attacking those who were struggling to play it. This situation is quite similar to those who encounter Digital Homicide--during his discussion with Jim Sterling, Robert Romine attacked Sterling for not seeing the ammunition counter amidst the confusing clutter in the overlays. This would immediately make any potential player self-conscious about playing the games, as this would make people worried about "playing it right." Those players with concerns or feedback about the game on the Steam forums would see an almost immediate response from the brothers themselves, usually with angry and offensive rhetoric. Though developer interaction with the community is generally a good thing, this may not be a good way to go about it.

But even in the absence of these things, there is one factor that I haven't addressed yet, one most people seem to forget: the games themselves. I don't see anyone two decades from now pulling out The Slaughtering Grounds for a good laugh or two--as I mentioned before, when I played their games, I was amused for a few minutes before just getting angry. There are a million things to criticize: clunky controls, recycled assets, oppressive sound effects and music, unclear user interfaces, poor balancing, etc. etc. (There's also something to say about the lack of artistic integrity, but I'll talk more about that next week) In my mind, what makes these games so soul-crushingly awful is that there simply isn't any content to play. Though the Romine brothers purport putting considerable effort into the coding, the games are empty shells. In The Slaughtering Grounds, all one does is run around a boring setting for fifteen minutes shooting generic zombies before doing it twice more in other settings. Temper Tantrum's levels are mostly the same with more enemies added. Medieval Mercs never sees a significant change in gameplay between difficulty levels, and the mechanics are insultingly simple. To put it differently: more game time does not mean more content. Compare this to Sonic Boom, which continually shows the player more bland environments with more awful mechanics using more clunky controls--it's an amusement park of terrible gameplay elements, and it's fun to strap in and mock them all as it takes the player on the tour. Similarly, the more one watches Neil Breen's films, the more ridiculous things the viewer finds. But with Digital Homicide's games, everything wrong is obvious up-front. There's not discovery, nothing to keep the player coming back for more. It's just... empty.

In the end, it's not the brothers who killed the fun after the fact. It's just the games themselves.