The Hogwarts conundrum

 Whatever do we do about a situation called Rowling?

I have to hand it to Hogwarts Legacy, not only has it proven to be a much more enjoyable game than my nagging doubts tried to tell me over the past year, it has skyrocketed to the top of a moral balancing act that I never once foresaw it having a take in. The conundrum of whether or not the game deserves to be in the targets of everyone and their mother is now moot, because the die has been cast and the hunting rifles drawn- now those who play need to keep up their guard lest they become clay pigeons. And that is no idle comparison, as am I soon to divulge in this here dip into the world of 'moral accountability', as I believe the appropriate term to be. And of course, I care little for either extreme of this diatribe- consider this a space for safe and judgement-free observation of both sides gathered for bloody and brutal war over their keyboards.

Now I won't go over the specifics, we've done that enough. So to generalise and expediate: J.K. Rowling is considered problematic and thus so is this game that is based on the property that made her the richest author in the living world. (I cannot speak to the resplendent riches of the literarily denizens of the golden fields of the Duat or murky pools of Hades.) As such many people are making a very staunch stand not to support the proliferation of this game, nor those who choose to play it, from loud individuals on Twitter to actual established review sites. Now in the lead-up to the game coming out there was much discourse about the extent of these 'boycotts', some seemed to think their side the authority on the matter and those of the other persuasion to not only be fundamentally misaligned but also small and forgetful in scale. Both were wrong.

Hogwarts Legacy pre-ordered and sold absolute gangbusters as far as initial and preliminary results are telling us, as the call for Boycotts and blacklists just seemed to melt into the excitement over a title that so many Pot-head millennials had for a not-mediocre Harry Potter style game. (Sorry 'Order of the Phoenix' on Wii, but facts are facts.) And yet the opposed did not let their choice not to purchase the game bounce harmlessly off the, from their perspective, insultingly healthy sales figures. Instead their number has... somewhat dropped the moral high ground in favour of... actually threatening people? Okay, of course the crazy actions of a few shall not and should not paint the opinions of all, or in this case even the many, but neither does that mean we shouldn't arch a brow and ask where these sorts of wild offshoots might have spawned from in a movement that originally just wanted to limit the amount of money that J.K got her hands on.

I'm speaking of course about the website which was created, though it is currently shut down, where people tracked down streamers and influential figures that have played Hogwarts Legacy and collected them in a list in order to harass these individuals. Now in their warped and twisted little logic trains I can sort of follow what's going on here; they see the proliferation of Hogwarts Legacy gameplay as a direct attack against the Trans community, and maybe even solely as an attack, rather than a celebration of a franchise they love. I also imagine there's that layer of dehumanisation between the public and content creators taking an effect here, where people fail to really empathise what it would be like to be on the receiving end of a harassment hitlist. All and all, I wouldn't call this the proudest moment of the anti-Hogwarts Legacy crowd.

Apart from that the discourse has been largely what you expect, verbal discharge all over social media with the vitriol and disgust regularly shared against an audience that seems either oblivious or discordant with their prescribed titles. Because here's the thing: for the most part players are seen as unrepentant transphobes who rally their hatred against the community in the act of downloading 'the wizard game' as they call it. Whereas for the most part people seem utterly uncommitted to the discourse and just like the game. Either that or they're intentionally goading on the masses in order to take advantage of the flurry of attention and clout. Because there is no resource quite as valuable in the modern age as liquid clout, now is there?

What I have had course to review as a result of this situation is my own lines in the sand when it comes to gamers engaging with products that I deem to be harmful to the larger ecosystem. Though I'd never go to the extremes that some of these individuals have, I do cast a judging eye on the millions who keep the Fifa games in furs and cotton year after year, all the while being served a topic emblematic of laconic and lazy 'bare minimum' iteration. What makes my prejudice any more earned and worthy than that of the Hogwarts Legacy Witch hunters? Afterall, in both cases we're just talking about people who want to enjoy games and care nothing about the vitriol around it. Well in my personal example the answer is actually frightfully simple. I'm selfish.

I could care less what sort of low effort garbage the masses rush to, they can play whatever they wish, but the second their purchasing decisions starts to effect me; then I have a problem. We all saw the way that the runaway success of football games, lionized by an uncaring audience who haply consumed their 'gruel' called 'content'; bled it's practises all over the rest of the industry. Season passes, random loot crates, franchise-mania. A lot of the most insidious and pernicious snapping tendencies of the gaming corporate titans got their beta test on the football turf. When I say that people who support Fifa are spitting at the general art of games whether they mean to or not, I have empirical as well as circumstantial evidence to back up my claims. That's as far as my personal vendetta goes.

The Hogwarts situation has been much louder than anyone could have rightly predicted, and I think that might be because of how ubiquitous the game appears to be becoming. Everyone is playing it and everyone seems to be having a fun time, which is further enraging those who believe they have a moral commitment to trash on the game because they believe that they are losing. So what do you do when your side is losing? You get more viscous, you drop those constraints of polite posturing that were holding you back, and you become something less. Something feral. That is what I believe is happening within the world of Hogwarts discourse. All we can hope is that the depths have already been reached, because otherwise we know how low the Internet can sink when they're driven on by that unshakable force called 'moral virtue'.