Why democracy is flawed: Ryu vs The Nameless One

During my daily plod through my emails and what not a few weeks ago I came across a rather interesting bit of junk mail. It was from Gamespot, I think, and it was titled “Vote for the greatest computer game hero of all time”. Curiosity sufficiently piqued, i decided to visit the site. I discovered that it was in the preliminary, knockout rounds. Various heroes of games, past and present, were displayed with such titles as “The Master Chief vs Bub and Bob” and “Mario vs Bonk”. They all had their histories and image galleries, and below a brief description of each was a long, long list of comments.

I was quite happily surprised at the line up of names both long forgotten and world famous. Of particular note was a mention of the Nameless One. For those not aware, the Nameless One was a main character in the game Planescape: Torment. This game was a perfect example of “a great work of art”, easily an equivalent of the Mona Lisa, Forrest Gump, and War and Peace. A game that is in all respects a masterpiece with the unfortunate setback of, as is the nature of the medium, not being timeless.

Matched up against the Nameless One was Ryu Hyabusa, from the Ninja Gaiden series. A character certainly older than the Nameless One (his exploits going all the way back to the Sega Megadrive), but due to his constant updates into the modern form, he has become a much more known figure, as the younger console generation have come to know and enjoy him as a central figure in their games.

As the voting was yet to be counted at this stage between these two figures, all I had to judge with was the plethora of comments left at the bottom of each of the columns. After reading for a while, I had a strange epiphany. Under the Nameless One column, you get comments saying how good the character is, and commonly you will get a person who had enjoyed and played the two games, but added that the Nameless One was indeed better. What struck me down however, was the other column containing those that were supporting Ryu. Of the 300 comments (and I did look at just about all of them), not one of those comments suggested that they had played both games.

Whether Ryu is better than the nameless one is irrelevant. What is important is that every single person voting for Ryu had no knowledge of who they were voting against. This to me is a massive flaw in the Democratic system. Taken into real world politics, we as people are allowed to vote about something with little or no knowledge of who the teams we are backing are all about.

Therefore, I believe that to have a fairer democracy, or perhaps even a true democracy, the applicants MUST be made aware of not only who they vote for, but more importantly who they vote against. You never know, you could be, as the people that voted on Gamespot did, voting against a masterpiece.

P.S. Bub and Bob beat Master Chief. I hope you’re fucking happy, Drew.