Deus Ex, Marathon actor Elias Toufexis doesn’t get why people root for games to fail: ‘Life is so short, man’

There are a lot of things Adam Jensen actor Elias Toufexis didn’t ask for, not the least of which is vitriol on social media, as he told PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield in an interview at GDC.

“I was working on Marathon yesterday, and I was like, ‘Guys, tell me to stop engaging on X,’ because I keep engaging and I really shouldn’t,'” he said. While he isn’t afraid of saying anything that’ll get him fired, he’s tired of a particular strain of outrage which mostly crops up on the everything app.

“I saw some guy like, I don’t want to get into specifics, but they’re just like, ‘I hope Bungie fails because of the woke leftist ideology.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m working with four white guys and two white women. I don’t understand this. Where are you getting this?'”

Toufexis said that he “welcomes” critique both as an actor and of the games and films that he’s in, but feels that some go a bridge too far. “I understand Bungie made a game, Destiny 2, that people loved, and then they kind of were like, ‘We’re gonna put that on hold and we’re gonna work on Marathon.’ People got upset about that. Cool, don’t play Marathon. That’s fine, speak with your wallet, that’s fine.”

In fact, his bone to pick is specifically with accounts dedicated to spreading outrage. “Life is so short, man. Just stop tweeting memes under things for six hours.”

“Critique the game? Critique my work? Totally acceptable. But there’s people that go on Twitter and post memes: ‘This is Concord 2, this is Concord 2.’ Why are you spending hours doing this … How do you hope something fails?”

He added that all the incensed online chatter was familiar to him from previous work, like Starfield and Star Trek: Discovery, both of which attracted criticism from right-wing trolls for their purported “DEI/woke” qualities. He noted the political angle taken by some of the outrage was “boring,” and a bit funny in the case of Star Trek—a notoriously political show from its very inception. “People just want to hate. I don’t really understand it,” he said. “It’s sad more than anything.”

He reckons the tide may be turning though, at least in some places. “I saw a review this morning from one of your fellow magazines, and it was a great review. And then under it—it used to be like nine out of 10 [comments were] hate—now it’s nine out of 10 is positive. One guy’s hate, and it’s all replies like, ‘shut up, shut up, shut up.’ So that’s good, and I hope that continues.”