Sacred Cows

[Wolf Kanno]

I could just let you read this article to know what I'm getting at, but those who can't be bothered, to paraphrase, a sacred cow in fandom is anything that the fans feel is beyond critique. In other words, bashing it will automatically get every self-righteous member of the community to come to it's aid.

Now this is not a thread about listing which games you consider sacred cows, I am more interested in discussing the phenomena that creates this mentality. While I placed this in the general gaming forum, feel free to list other examples if it will help clarify your reasoning.

[Bolivar]

I think one reason why Anita Sarkeesian got as much backlash as she did early on was because she opened up with a Miyamoto anecdote, about a pretty troutty decision he made regarding gender in the Star Fox series. Obviously there are much, much more deep-seated issues at play as far as why the gaming community overreacts to her the way they do. But I wonder if that set the tone early in the first video with the initial backlash she received and for how a lot of people were going to take her videos and ignore pretty much everything else she was saying going forward. Even without this incident, I think Miyamoto is generally someone who is beyond reproach, as I've noticed on different boards that anyone who criticizes him or his creative stewardship at Nintendo is routinely ganged up on.

As far as what creates this phenomenon in this instance I don't know, but I think EoFF might be a case study, in how there are very few threads lately about new games outside of Nintendo. I know that I've had to go outside to other forums to discuss the latest blockbusters for quite some time now. Spuuky commented once that it seems like people around here don't even want to discuss the biggest RPG releases anymore. I think in an industry that has come to represent them less and less, people cling to Nintendo and it's familiar franchises to kind of make sense of what else is going on. And trying to impugn the reputation of Nintendo or the decisions of its principals is a big no no. I think thats why a lot of journalists have turned to the Wii U's failure for the bread and butter of their click bait articles lately - it works.

As far as sacred cows in general, it's it's a very dangerous problem to have. One reason keeping the gaming back from being taken more seriously is that gamers tend to value consensus while shooting down dissent. It needs to be the other way around if you want to have meaningful discussions that progress the discourse about the industry.

[Freya]

SACRED COWS ohhhhh I was reading that as scared cows. This thread was very different.

[Shauna]

The internet is bad at taking criticism of a thing someone likes as a personal insult to themselves, which is why things cannot be criticised. The notion of liking something despite its flaws is unheard of.