Other Communication
That kind of indiscriminant complaining is what gives these types of gaming communities a negative connotation. There are, however, a few that do offer constructive criticism. This constructive criticism positively affects developers and the video game itself.
From my observation in the past month, there was a major design concern among the community in Guild Wars 2 in its new content. Players were finding that a feature was inadvertantly incorrectly advertised, and they did not find the feature fun in the game. Mason iterates that video games are made for players to have fun, so this was a problem concerning many players. There were a handful of players that explained why the feature should ne changed, and only a couple days later, ArenaNet responded in a public address that they were going to update the feature to be easily accessible like advertised.
This constrictive criticism and communication between player and developer helps to make both the game's developer and the game itself better.
Photo by Facepunch Studios
from Garrysmod.com
There are negatives to communication in video games as well, both online and offline.
This is something I feel Ready Player One did not protray accurately, and I was unable to find any good scholarly sources depicting this. Because of this, I decided to do my own research by observing a few different gaming communities on Reddit throughout the month of November 2015.
In this research, I realized that every single time a new patch was released for an online video game, there was some kind of uproar over it. A group of players was always upset about some detail about this patch or new content. In most cases, this was not even constructive criticism; it was just a group of players angrily yelling at developers. This was seem on numerous occasions on /r/DestinyTheGame and /r/GuildWars2, specifically.
I found that this communication between players, in the end, did nothing but agitate the community further. After one of these posts became popular, there were inevitably a few more to follow in the following days.
Ideas can be communicated from player to player and from player to developer through certain player-made modifications as well.
This "mod scene," as told by Walt Scacchi, is essential to a player's creativity in games. Players are able to make these mods for certain games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Half-Life 2 in order to change or add anything to the game they wish. These mods can even be complete overhauls to change the game into an entirely different game.
One example of this is Garry's Mod, which is a physics-based mod for Half-Life 2 allows players to build or do nearly anything they wish. Scacchi labels this as the "modder's mod" because it even accepts its own mods to add fuctionality to it.
These mods allow for communication between player and developer in many ways as well.
A popular mod adding even a small feature to a game could easily be seen by the developer of the game and implemented as an integrated feature in the next game in the series. This has been seen very recently (November 2015) as Bethesda Game Studios released Fallout 4, which contained many features that modders implemented in their previous game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
This communication between player and developer is very similar to constructive criticism in that it shows developers something that is wrong with their game, but it does so in a much slower and indirect way.
