Moses. Cabbage Patch Kids. Superman. At first glance, they don’t appear to have much in common, but look a little more closely and you’ll find an unexpected thread tying them all together. The articles in this week’s Editor’s Choice issues are similarly disparate, with apparently nothing more in common than the general theme of videogames and a mastery of the English language. But they, too, share a central theme. At first, it’s tough to see any connection between stories about yapping miniature pinschers, censorship and black characters in videogames, but upon closer inspection you’ll find they all touch on the herculean task of trying to make everybody happy.
Trying to prevent your family from squabbling around the dinner table is hard enough, but keeping hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of gamers happy is a task so monumental that it’s a wonder anyone even bothers trying. A soundtrack that some find beautiful will offend the religious sensibilities of others. A character that inspires chuckles in certain players will be considered degrading by certain other players. What some point to as archetypes other will condemn as stereotypes. And on and on it goes.
Those kinds of issues will probably never be resolved – someone is always ready and willing to be angry about something, it seems. In the meantime, we turn our attention to those areas that lie within our ability to control, such a game’s ability to connect with players on a truly personal level – or at least not annoy them to the point they want to switch the system off.
Enjoy this week’s Editor’s Choice issue, which we hope has something to make everyone happy.
(Oh, and in case you haven’t figured it out yet, Moses, the Cabbage Patch Kids and Superman were all adopted.)
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