Sim City 4, your favorite game, also had it's Chirper with silly text messages down at the bottom of the screen.
And the wonky "3D" advisors jumping up on your face about teachers on strike.
It's been a long time since I played Sim City 4, so I had to dig up a SC4 Let's Play to do a proper comparison.
SC4's version of "Chirper"/news ticker is built into the UI. It includes a single line or two of small text. It's at the very bottom of the screen where you have to look down to look. It does not pop out at you or trigger sound effects. It's also relatively easy to ignore. Now, with that said, the Let's Play was most certainly modded, so I don't know whether SC4 came with sound notifications, but I don't ever remember the ticker popping out at me like some annoying kid who wants to be the center of attention.
I watched the entirety of the Let's Play and didn't see the 3D advisors even pop up once. Whether there are options within SC4 to turn them off or it was simply modded out, I don't know. I did watch the majority of the 30 minute lets play, occasionally skipping ahead 5 seconds at a time, but still nothing.
It should also be noted, that much has changed in the gaming industry and interaction between gamers and developers in the 12 years since SC4 was released. The growth of the internet as a medium of communication allowing the possibility of real time feedback between consumers and developers/publishers. In the past Developers/Publishers would produce games they think would sell (or that which they were hoping would catch on). Their only real feedback being the numbers coming back from the Sales Channels or whatever Focus Groups they organized. Today we have the development and acceptance of Early Access Games where with these games, gamers have the ability to influence the development of the game during development, rather than as some sort of patching process after it's been released. It is not a surprise that there are people who don't like the Chirper who want to make their voice known, especially when CO/Paradox have indicated that they are open to hearing the feedback based on the pre-release footage and images about the game before it's released.
For me, part of what "bothers" me is the fact that it's obvious CO wanted to implement some sort of Twitter/Social Media thing into the game, but didn't want to deal with potential trademark issues with Twitter, and so made their own that is pretty much otherwise a copy of Twitter, and called it Chirper, and the messages Chirps. It comes down to them creating something original, licensing Twitter for use in the game, or not implementing it at all. With that said, I was also annoyed by the stupid #, @ and other symbols that are used in social media in general. There is also the issue of the redundant and repetitive messages that pop up every time some event is triggered.
If modding allows the complete removal of Chirper, I'll be happy. I'm not opposed to the concept, but simply it's implementation, CO's design choice of Fake Twitter, and desire to not give us the option of completely turning it off if we wish. They have at least given the ability to disable the sound notification and popups, but I'd still like that last 10% of removing the bird itself.
