Electronic Arts, the unmitigated king of unforced errors, made a woefully ill-advised tweet yesterday, and the company’s Twitter mentions have not known peace since.
They’re a 10 but they only like playing single-player games
— Electronic Arts (@EA) June 30, 2022
The tweet follows the convention of a popular meme that’s been circulating the bird app in which a person is described as being highly attractive, then listing something about that person that’s supposed to make them instantly unattractive.
In EA’s case, the quality that’s supposed to make the person unattractive is the fact they prefer single-player games. Now I get that there’s supposed to be a message here. I’m going to interpret this as a dig at the kinds of people who say they only play games that offer deep, introspective meditation on the human condition (aka the kind of folks who make playing The Last of Us or Bioshock Infinite their entire personality) while degrading the people who enjoy a game or two of Battlefield 2042 with the six or so people in the server at any given moment.
I get the joke.
But it’s real rich to the point of secondhand embarrassment to have Electronic
Arts make this joke.
And the developers who’ve worked on some of EA’s single-player games aren’t laughing either.
My company: unable to muster up the courage to say the overturning of Roe v. Wade is pretty horrific.
Also my company: with multiple teams making Single Player games https://t.co/PYtRLTBEqS
— Blair Brown (@BlairBroon) July 1, 2022
This is the company that shut down my studio and laid off ~100 great developers because we were making a single player game https://t.co/2SXhQtRGE8
— Zach Mumbach (@zachulon) June 30, 2022
EA is one of the largest video game publishers in the world. The decisions it makes have ramifications for not only itself but the industry. Surely, there are better uses of its time than punching down the one thing it has to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing, right? It also can’t be great to have the company that essentially decides if your studio lives or dies, glibly making jokes about how unattractive your work is. It has to feel even worse in the case of Respawn and BioWare, who are, right now, working on sequels and follow-ups to some of the best single-player work EA has ever published.
EA has acknowledged that maybe its joke was in poor taste, issuing a tweet saying the subsequent beating it took up and down social media to the point that Anthem was trending again was deserved.
Call me crazy, but I think the gaming community would be much better off if we just stop yucking others’ yums altogether.
