There was a contingent of folks that latched onto any idea MMO was an influence and beat 4E like a redheaded step child with it. Seems silly today, but at the time MMOs were seen as the enemy of table top gaming. Some folks still have bad memories of those days.
Exactly.
It was treated as a truism--as a foundational, bedrock, "we hold this truth to be self-evident" thing--that
anything whatsoever of video games ever, for any reason, being even
remotely involved was proof positive that the thing in question was horrible, anti-D&D, the purified expression of "not only is this
not D&D, it is actively hostile to anything D&D was or could be, and thus it
deserves our hatred."
That was repeated. For years and years and years. Hell, in some places
it still is repeated. The wounds have never had the chance to close, because they're constantly re-opened, intentionally so.
My theory for why this is the case is, basically, that video games were seen as soulless corporate-mandated trash, and thus could not possibly be D&D. MMOs were particularly reviled, because in being "Massively Multiplayer", such video games (already the enemy, that part was given!) must also be
lowest common denominator, the worst, meanest, vilest form of pandering, AND that the gameplay experience thus produced must be nothing more than "spamming buttons" and "waiting for cooldowns", entirely and overtly devoid of any form of creativity, imagination, richness, or joy.
Hence, if you could "prove" any connection between 4e and video games,
especially if you could prove that it was connected to the Great Sat--er, Great
Adversary, namely
World of Warcraft, then you had conclusively and objectively proved that 4e wasn't just flawed, wasn't even just bad, wasn't even just not deserving of the name "D&D", but was...well, as I said above, actively hostile to anything D&D was and could be, and thus
deserved to be hated by anyone who loved anything at all about D&D.
Part of the reason I make this argument is that you saw
exactly the same argument made against 3e before, but because MMOs were still in their relative infancy in 2000, as EQ had only launched the year before, it was another Blizzard property that got the comparisons:
Diablo. The complaints are nearly identical in structure, differing only in which game is invoked. That, to me, indicates that the real meaning of the argument was never about any
actual relationship between the complained-about edition and the video game used to vilify it; it was about
finding a way to prove the prejudice against that edition as the only thing a
true fan of D&D could conscience.
And with 4e? It worked. That single argument was one of the greatest successes of "the" Edition War. It turned almost everyone I knew who played 3e against 4e.
Even the people who played and enjoyed World of Warcraft.
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As for the interview, I haven't watched the thing. But I am inclined to take
@Joshua Randall's interpretation with a grain of salt. As much as it frustrates me to hear the
constant, never-ending, insistent comparisons between 4e and anything programmed for electronic computer, the fact is, they'd have been fools
not to at least think about it. I would need to hear Perkins' actual words to know for sure, but I don't think he would be the type to disparage 4e as merely a soulless corporate product shat out for mass-market consumption. He did too many good things in, with, and for 4e for that, not least of which is Iomandra.
It would be very, very, very nice if we could actually have a discussion about "What has D&D learned/what could it learn from video games?", including 4e. I don't think it's possible. There is far, far too much temptation for people with an agenda to torpedo the discussion by crossing that line, invoking the "well any trace of video games is
AN EVIL VIRUS OF SATAN!!@#!@#!@!!~!" More seriously, it's far too tempting for folks to threadcrap such a discussion with something like:
"Nothing, because obviously there's nothing to learn"
"Well, the only edition that did failed"
"Everything it's learned from video games was bad"
"God I hope it hasn't learned anything from video games, that would ruin it"
"Video games have only stolen from D&D, so there's nothing there to learn that D&D doesn't already know"
etc., etc.
