The gaming community is a very demanding sort. I know, I'm part of it. And I have often been guilty of being over-demanding when games are concerned. Nowadays I am more patient with games, and I am also more selective, which in turn means that I get disappointed much less often than I used to. When it comes to Role Playing Games (RPGs), there are certain things I expect the game to have. I don't usually expect that I will need high reflexes with RPGs, and I expect there will be at least some reading involved.

I came upon this contributor's article at Gamespot's weekly Gamespotting editorial column a couple of weeks ago. I'll spare you the details of his ramblings; you can read the whole article for that. But suffice to say that from reading the man's words, one can be sure he is no RPG lover, that's for sure. After reading this editorial, I first decided the man was a jerk. Plain and simple. But then I went back to it and changed my mind. The man isn't so much a jerk. He just doesn't love RPGs. But then, if you don't love RPGs, why write about them?

The problem comes from today's misconception about RPGs. In this day and age, it seems like everything must have an RPG element to be complete. There are a lot of games that get thrown into the RPG pool because they have evolving character stats, or because there are some dialogues thrown in here and there. Here's a guy who adheres to the notion that a quest should be completed by just walking in the general area where the quest NPC is located. Here's a guy that values the story of a game as much as the toilet paper he has to buy every few weeks. While on the RPGDot boards we debate about whether stories should be deeper and more involving in RPGs he comes in and says that there should be no story at all.

Is he really stupid? No, not really. He's just slightly confused, I think. The man loves action games, perhaps other types as well, like RTS (Real Time Strategy) games. To a certain degree, he would probably enjoy a good action adventure game. But RPGs are not his thing. But since Diablo was once called an all-out RPG, and since he enjoyed it so much, he came back to the world of gaming and played the next big RPG expecting it to be like Diablo. It wasn't. And so for him it was crap. Now he complains about it. And if you were to ask him to comment about the state of the RPG genre in computer games today, I wouldn't be surprised if his answer would be that apart from a few gems like Dungeon Siege and Diablo 2, the genre is agonizing...

My question is: why play a certain genre of games when you know to begin with you won't like it? Why rant about it? Why not simply shrug it off and move on to the next title? The worst thing you can do to a game is to not talk about it. If you rant about it and complain, even scream out your discontent and try to warn others about it, the only good you will do is make people curious. Developers want you to talk about their games, in a good or even a bad way. Thrash me or compliment me, but TALK about me.

After reading this guy's article again, I started wondering about its meaning. It sounds as if some people want to be fed RPG games because RPGs are a trend. But they don't really like RPGs, they just like the idea of playing trendy games. And the worst thing is that there are games out there to feed their hunger, slapping the name " RPG " on the box for good measure, effectively confusing the market altogether. And when these people put their hands on a real RPG, they don't like it, and rant about it...

Everyone has a right to complain. But when one genre of game doesn't appeal to us, maybe we should think twice about criticizing it. How can we as gamers make a good judgment of quality about something we inherently don't like? The answer must be that we can't. And this means we must be careful about our criticisms. They must be constructive and well thought out, not chewed and spat out after crying to be fed.