The Problem With Spoilers

by Dayton Williams 

(This document contains MAJOR FF7 spoilers for all 3.14159 of you who haven't beaten it yet)

It has been popular recently to bash spoiler warnings. I recall two recent editorials which have ridiculed the idea of spoiler warnings. These individuals obviously feel spoiler warnings to be silly and obtrusive and would be better off without them.

They are in the minority.

For their edification, I will explain why I, personally, vehemently hate spoilers. I do not claim that my personal reasons will apply to everyone. In fact, I am rather certain that they will not, because my argument rests on my emotional reactions to my games.

My reaction to Aeris' death was this:

You idiot.

Other people write of crying for a half an hour after they saw it. Still others called it beautiful, calling attention to any number of details of the scene itself. Still others have cited Sephiroth slaying Aeris as their reason for hating Sephiroth.

I did not react emotionally to her death at all.

Throughout the whole City of the Ancients sequence, I kept thinking to myself, "PLEASE tell me this isn't the part where she dies." The only thing that was bothering me was how cliche the entire idea was; she dies because she went off by herself. That's the last thing you do when you're in that situation! Everybody knows that the reason half the people die in horror films is because they go off by themselves "for five minutes".

That's what was running through my head. Why was that? I knew she was going to die. The video game magazine I subscribe to ran a picture of the body and captioned it "Death in the family". I saw it as I was flipping through the magazine. I wanted to kill them. (I restrained myself.)

For me, spoilers absolutely ruin stories. They usually completely ruin the effect I might otherwise get out of a scene. Knowing that Aeris was going to die completely ruined it for me when she did. Scenes that would ordinarily have a powerful effect fall flat.

I don't like this. I try to avoid this.

And I find Mr. Gover's argument a little, well, silly. His point seems to me to be, in a nutshell, that people who don't want to be spoiled should not discuss games at all or go to forums where other people discuss games because they might be spoiled.

My response to that is, people who don't like standard conventions of gaming forums shouldn't go there in the first place.

I would imagine the likely response to this is "But I like coming here". Well, so do I. I enjoy reading the RPGamer letters column. I enjoy reading the editorials section. I want to be able to do so--because if there were no spoiler warnings, I would be much less freely able to read things and be sure I wasn't going to be spoiled.

Mr. Gover also makes the following point I wish to address:

Firstly, if your enjoyment of a game is based soley on the story, with all due respect, why not go read a book? Or watch a movie? Forty hours chugging through gameplay that you don't enjoy seems an awful waste of time.

This is exactly the point I raised in my editorial "On (Lack of?) RPG Difficulty" (that of "If a game is too easy, why bother making it interactive?") , only in a slightly different context. However, it does not apply in this case. He states that he played through Xenogears because he enjoyed the gameplay and the plot. Good for him. So what?

I played through FF6 because I enjoyed the gameplay and the plot. That in no way implies that I did not mind being spoiled in FF6. I played through FF7 because I enjoyed both the gameplay and the plot; but I would have appreciated the plot much more had the effect of a pivotal scene not been ruined by a careless magazine editor.

And this is my entire point--I dislike like spoilers. They greatly reduce the enjoyment I can derive from games. And an overwhelming number of RPGamers seem to agree with me on the issue, so much so that *SPOILER* tags have become a (generally) accepted norm.

Shouldn't this be enough?