From 2017 until, well, now, I spend a considerable amount of mental energy railing against the Nintendo Switch. I say “mental energy” because I never got into heated online debates, and only very rarely got into in-person debates about the console. Most of my thoughts and opinions lived entirely within my mind, expressed to only a handful of people.
And yet here I am, in April of 2020, to tell you that I have had a Switch in my home for almost two months now.
And I love it
So what changed all of a sudden? How did I go from “railing” against it to falling in love with it? The quick and dirty explanation is that I am a human being, and like most human beings, I had some opinions that were hypocritical and poorly thought out. Once I identified this and reassessed, my mind was changed.
For those who want a lot more detail than that, read on.
A few days ago I made a post about the long and awful history of gamers using an inaccurate interpretation of “objectivity” in order to make bad faith arguments and ruin the quality of discourse. The timing of that post was not coincidence - my stance on the Switch for the last three years was the result of me engaging in the very hypocrisy I criticized in that post. I am not proud of that, but I thought it was important to explain the behavior before describing how I engaged in it.
When the Switch was first revealed, my initial take was that it was a cool idea, poorly implemented. Nintendo’s handhelds have a history of being underpowered, but also cheap, rugged, highly portable, and with great battery life. To my eyes, the Switch ran contrary to all these things - it appeared pricey, fragile, not terribly portable, and early impressions pegged the battery life as being dismal. I thought it was prepared for failure.
And yet everyone in their dog was straight up hyped for the Switch. They could not wait to get their hands on it. In my view, they were looking at the potential while ignoring the “facts”, and it drove me up the wall.
What I failed to realize at the time was these “facts” were not necessarily facts. Maybe some people did think it was portable enough. Maybe they were not bothered by its battery life. And maybe it actually looked cheap in comparison to gaming PC’s and $1,200 smartphones. Right off the bat, I was trying to convince myself that my opinions were objective facts, and that those who disagreed were “biased” or “crazy”. I really, truly had turned into this f*cking guy.
I remember seeing all of the pre-release announcements from various game studios, each promising to support the console. I have seen these kinds of announcements before. All they mean is that Company A promises to put out some game at some time on the new platform. It doesn’t mean it will be one of their premiere games, nor does it mean it will be out anywhere near the console’s launch window. Heck, it doesn’t mean it will even happen - EA went out of their way to pledge support for the Wii U before it launched, only to change their mind rather quickly.
And yet I saw so many people interpret these pledges of Switch support as some sort of guarantee as to the quality of its eventual game lineup. I could not believe this - how were these people so easily duped? Were they that ignorant of the “facts”? There I went again being a jerk.
What I failed to realize is that, in some cases, these gamers probably were ignorant of these “facts” - but they did not deserve to be judged harshly for that. Not everyone pays the same level of scrutiny to video game news as I do, nor should they have to. Furthermore, gaming gets bigger and more diverse every year. How many of these excited Switch-owners-to-be were even old enough or interested enough to pay attention to video game news when the Wii U was launched in 2012 (when EA and Ubisoft and others pledged loyalty to the Wii U just before dropping it like a bad habit)? I was looking at the world under the assumption that everyone else was also a thirtysomething man who has played games since they were four years old. This was ignorant on my part. It lacked empathy and understanding.
Eventually the Switch launched, and it only got worse for me. People were buying the Switch version of The Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy - games you can frequently get on Steam for single digit amounts of money - for full price. They were spending hundreds of dollars on accessories for their new device and were happy to do so. Any time a game was announced, they seemingly threw a fit if a Switch version was not confirmed.
For Pete’s sake, Breath of the Wild sold more copies on the Switch than there were Switches sold at launch. Everything about the console’s early months felt irrational and inexplicable to me. What in the world was going on?
As the time wore on, games journalists began writing about their time playing the Switch. They handwaved away or straight up ignored the problems I saw with the device. They praised features that I considered minor. Worst of all, these writers - all of them younger twentysomethings that lived in cities, took public transportation, and never went anywhere without a messenger bag - had the audacity to write about their experiences playing the Switch as twentysomehtings that lived in cities, took public transport, and never went anywhere without a messenger bag. Did they not realize that not everyone was like them? How dare they not consider another life perspective that they had no firsthand experience with!!
After all this frustration and pent up anger, I wrote a draft of a blog post in which I actually, literally wrote about how critics needed to assess the Nintendo Switch based on the “true, objective facts”. At this point I did every single wrong thing wrong based on my own advice.
What the heck happened to me? How did I let it get this far?
Like I said at the top of the post, the simple explanation is that I am human, and humans make mistakes like this. But that was not a satisfying explanation. There had to be more to it, and I needed to figure out what it was so that I could prevent this behavior from happening again.
As I get closer and closer to my 40’s, I have been trying to remind myself that, yes, time moves on, and I have to accept that. Today I may be part of a key demographic that companies want to pander to, but tomorrow I may not. The once-young and inexperienced game journalist who grew up, learned, and became a brilliant and insightful critic is eventually going to be driven out of the business and replaced with another young and inexperienced writer. History will repeat itself, and people will move on.
I keep telling myself these things, but there is a difference between telling oneself to adjust your thinking, and actually doing it. Doing it tends to be easier said than done. My initial reaction to the Switch was an example of this truth. I failed to remember that my own perceptions were driven by my own life experiences - my own growth - and that other individuals are going to have their own experiences, and their own growth paths, which are going to match my own far less often than they do not. Because of my failure to recognize this, I became insecure, even threatened, by the fact that my thoughts, opinions, and experiences were becoming irrelevant compared to bigger, more diverse, and (increasingly) younger gaming population out there. Insecurity leading to bad faith arguments about “objectivity” - to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite recent TV shows - I fit the profile.
I also determined that I was forgetting about a very important principle - namely, “It can be two things”. To put it another way, it can be true that Nintendo_ could_ have done a better job with some features on the Switch, and also be true that most users are fine with the features as they stand.
I can sit around and complain all day about the fact that Nintendo (or any other company) could have fit in more storage or memory or whatever into their device - maybe even for only a few dollars more per unit - but if it ends up only being a problem “in principle”, why does it really matter?
Think of it this way - the Game Boy could have been more powerful. It could have had a color screen. And if it did those things, it would have been the Game Gear. Would that have been preferable to the Game Boy we actually got? Just because something could have been more doesn’t mean it is always a good idea, nor does it mean that the experience it provides is truly “inferior”. Unfortunately, when it came to my early analysis of the Switch, I did not keep this in mind.
Oh, I should mention one other thing that changed my mind. In 2017, there were not many Switch games I was interested in. By 2020 that changed. It may have taken me less than a full paragraph to explain this, but it was probably the biggest factor in making the Switch appealing.
So there you have it. Long story short, I struggled to practice what I preached, I let myself be swayed by the worst behavior of the Internet, and as a result I acted like a jerk. My hope is that by identifying and correcting my behavior, I can do better next time. And hey, I finally stopped depriving myself of what is quickly becoming one of my favorite ways to play video games.
PS - This is only the first part of a multi-post series. Over the next day or two I intend to roll out some more posts explaining my thoughts on almost every aspect of the Switch, including comparisons to my earlier opinions. I don’t suggest you actually read all of it - I ended up writing way more than I expected - but getting it out of my head and onto the page has been extremely therepeutic to say the least.