The Escapist Bulletin: Modern Warfare 2 and its hysterical fans

A woman named Helen Hodsy has started a campaign on behalf of her colour-blind husband to get Infinity Ward to add an option to change the colours in Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer to make the game easier to play for people who suffer with colour-blindness, something that afflicts around ten per cent of men, and about half a percent of women.

The problem faced by people with colour-blindness is that Infinity Ward has used green and red to indicate friend and foe respectively, and as red/green color blindness is the most common form of the condition, it makes the game almost impossible to play online in any team-based capacity for most sufferers.

Where this whole thing gets too crazy for words is when disgruntled PC gamers started to compare this campaign to an earlier campaign to get Infinity Ward to add dedicated servers to the game. In their eyes, it was unfair that the colour-blind should be given preferential treatment while they were left to languish in the peer-to-peer hell that they had been consigned to.

Let’s be clear: PC gamers are entirely justified in feeling short changed by Infinity Ward, but the relationship between the two groups is that of customers disgruntled with a company; PC gamers, despite what they would have you believe, are not some oppressed minority, and their cause is not quite as righteous as they think it is.

When you break away all the feelings of indignation and all the anger, what PC gamers are actually demanding is that their version of Modern Warfare 2 be made better than all the others. Now to be fair, there is a precedent for this, as pretty much every other title in the Call of Duty franchise has had dedicated servers, but equally there's a precedent for Call of Duty games selling better on consoles.

The sad fact is that, except in the rare case of a PC exclusive title, PC gamers will be outnumbered by console gamers by several orders of magnitude and the only reason that things like dedicated servers still exist is due to conscious choices made by developers to spend extra money on the PC version, for a very limited return on that investment.

This situation is unfortunate, certainly, but getting worked up into frenzy about it is entirely the wrong way to handle it.

If PC gamers want to send a message to Infinity Ward, then they need to hit the company where it hurts: the bottom line. It’s all well and good for PC gamers to start petitions and stamp their feet on forums, but if they all buy the game anyway, as happened with Modern Warfare 2, then it’s all for nothing.