There’s a certain question that makes straight men freeze with fear: “Does this outfit make me look fat?” Men hear this, and they are paralyzed in a moment of fight-or-flight panic, because they know, first, that they have to respond and, second, that there is no correct response. Women, so I’m told, often have the same reaction to being asked “Hey, honey, am I starting to go bald?”
The reason these questions are problematic is that they are sometimes not asked in earnest. Rather, they are the slippery tentacles of a chthonic and atavistic beast, feeling around for a tender meal. That meal is called validation. When that meal is replaced with something bitter and truthful, those tentacles can squeeze the life out of whatever they find, instead.
Those of us who play and comment on games are constantly surrounded by such tentacles. They come in the form of people typing the name of their favorite game in Google, and instead of finding a joyous community of like-minded believers, they find you. Or rather, they find your article. The one where you called their favorite game “a buggy mishmash of old clichés, retarded ideas, and adolescent wank-fest fantasies of gullible women in chainmail bras.”
When people discover that you don’t like their current obsession, they tend to get defensive. They deploy various arguments, again and again. Most of them are easy to ignore: “You must not be very good at the game” is a constantly-repeated refrain, or even better “You just don’t like (RPGs/Racing games/Sports games)”. The ever popular “You’re gay” never goes out of style, of course. And I’ve even heard, oddly, “You must not know anything about programming” several times.
But what I find more interesting, and more pernicious, are the arguments that rely on “Have you stopped beating your wife?” assumptions as to what the responsibility of a reviewer actually is. The most popular argument in this bunch is “This review is unfair because you didn’t finish playing the game.” That’s sometimes phrased in the marketing-speak of “This isn’t a review. It’s a ‘preview’.”
I’ve been putting off writing this article for a bit because I didn’t want to appear churlish and defensive myself, but then I noticed that Corvus’ review of the adolescent collect-loose-women-as-playing-cards RPG The Witcher was receiving this sort of criticism from grievously offended Internet wankers. That provides a good framework for me to talk about the issues without feeling the need to rise overmuch to my own defense.
The crux of the argument — and I am not being terribly liberal in my paraphrase — is: “How can you give a fair review of a game you’ve only played for 10 hours?”
Let me turn the question around: how can you not? If you haven’t managed to form a reasonably comprehensive opinion of a game in, say, 2 or 3 hours, let alone 10, it’s time to find a new hobby that is a little less mentally taxing.
There are a number of assumptions underlying this attitude that one is obligated to sit through every bit of content a game might want to inflict on you before criticizing it. Every single one of those assumptions is wrong.
The first assumption is that people who talk about or review games are necessarily interested in helping you decide whether to purchase the game. In other words, that the purpose of a game review is strictly utilitarian in nature. Some are. Many are not. It’s my opinion that analysis that approaches games as art, or at least as commercial art, tends to be more interesting than writing that approaches games as product.
The second assumption is that one must “finish” a work in order to have a valid opinion on it. I have walked out on several movies in my lifetime, and sat through more that I wish I had walked out on. I sat through every unbearable minute of Bad Lieutenant, but I promise you the last 90 of them served only to validate my belief that you are better off performing a self-appendectomy than watching it. The movie’s only redeeming quality was that by portraying an actual wank-fest, it managed to encode its own future criticism.
The investment required for most movies, however, is typically only a couple of hours, which means that reviewers can splurge a little and squander a couple of hours eating popcorn. Games are a stickier wicket. The Witcher, for example, promises (or, more accurately, threatens) “more than 80 hours” of boring, drawn-out gameplay. The idea that anyone — even someone who is being paid — should be forced to suffer through 80 hours in order to deliver the “It sucks” verdict that is obvious after 15 minutes is more than just wrongheaded. It is utter madness.
The third assumption is that what it means to “finish” a game is even definable. To take one specific example: I’ve been playing Mass Effect recently. My style of play is, to be perfectly honest, plodding. I can’t stand the idea of progressing with the main quest when I know that there is some irrelevant side-quest somewhere left unattended. The reviews I’ve read all focus on the interesting plot and decent writing, but I’ve noticed that the writing is (as one might expect), significantly better in the “main quest” than in the side-quests. I haven’t seen anyone comment on this yet. So my assumption is that various reviewers “finished the game” by powering through the main quest. That’s perfectly reasonable, but it paints only part of the picture of the game. My point is not that these reviewers were irresponsible bastards who cheated their readers out of a deeper understanding of the game, but that it’s not even clear what “finish the game” actually even means.
Pete today observed that for him, an interesting or useful review combines some amount of objective description of the game with subjective opinion. I agree with that summary. One wants the author to be thorough in exploring the text, but it seems to me that there is not, and should not be, any requirement of comprehensiveness.
If one is looking for interesting discussion and commentary on a game, then whether the reviewer has finished the game (whatever that means), is neither here nor there: writers can talk about what they experienced. And if one is only interested in a game as product, then “This game was so bad that I gave up on playing it” is, in my book, one of the most useful comments a reviewer can make.
Tying all of this up with a neat little bow, I will rise to Corvus’ defense: The Witcher is a misogynist fantasia created by people who hate and fear women. Anyone who willingly plays it is participating in the ongoing retardation of computer games as a medium, and is complicit in keeping video games, as art, in their extended adolescence.
That much is obvious on its face. And I haven’t even played the game at all.
Take that.
I think two or three hours is even too long. I’ve given up on games after 20 minutes.
Dude, I don’t need to eat a giant bowl of crap to know it tastes bad.
I hadn’t thought about “Bad Lieutenant” in years. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
I followed a lot of those links so really I’m replying to several articles here…
I cannot understand how people take games as seriously as they do. I mean, I’m literally taken aback every time I see the kind of knee-jerk responses to, for instance, the Oblivion and (especially) GT4 articles you linked to. How can someone be so deeply offended by a review that they actually tell the reviewer to kill himself? What is wrong with these people?
And then there are the Serious Gamers who maniacally insist that games are high art and see any suggestion to the contrary as treason because, you know, we’re all part of this United Gamers Front and we mustn’t show weakness. Fellas: I could pick a random book from my shelves and I guarantee that it would have better characterisation and thematic coherence than pretty much any game you’d care to mention. Seriously, my left nut has more literary merit than Tits III: The Bloodening could ever muster.
And finally, it bothers me no end that anything carrying the merest whiff of the intellectual is denounced as pretentious. Does anyone actually use that word in proper context anymore? Like, maybe when someone is putting on a pretence as opposed to knowing exactly what they’re talking about?
Bah, is what I’m getting at.
In other news: Following irate post, Italy reports chronic shortage of slanty letters.
Eli: I couldn’t work this into the post elegantly enough, but you should also read parts of this Qt3 thread where people complain about Yahtzee’s brilliant video review of The Witcher. “It’s not a real review” is, of course, invoked.
Ah, Bad Lt; I saw this at a Press Screening. It’s the one time that in the bar afterwards, no-one was quite sure what they could say, and much of the conversation focussed on the one journalist who had fallen asleep and snored loudly throughout, provided much needed comic relief for all.
“There are a number of assumptions underlying this attitude that one is obligated to sit through every bit of content a game might want to inflict on you before criticizing it. Every single one of those assumptions is wrong.”
I agree it’s crazy to suggest this, but there is surely some sort of obligation to be honest about how much was seen? For instance, if you gave up after 10 minutes, you should at least say something akin to “I could only manage 10 minutes of this execrable pile of offal before I had to stop”.
I find playing a demo of a game gives me a sufficient view of most (but not all) games and there are many games – including but not restricted to Halo: Combat Evolved – whereby the demo gave me a far more positive experience than the game itself!
“One wants the author to be thorough in exploring the text, but it seems to me that there is not, and should not be, any requirement of comprehensiveness.”
It’s tricky, and dependent upon medium as far as I can see. I expect a book review to be based on main body of the text at least, and a film reviewer should at least make it to the closing credits (if they can!) but for a game? Totally different situation. The play of the game is unlikely to radically change after the first third or quarter (with a few notable exceptions), and game stories are not yet of sufficient quality that seeing the ending to a game is likely to shift one’s opinion significantly.
I am struggling to think of another medium that one would not see something through to the end before reviewing, although I’m quite sure that the reviewers of “The Longest and Most Meaningless Movie Ever Made” did not sit through all 48 hours of the original cut!
Simply put, the general quality is discernible long before completion of any game, and games generally put the best up front (and those that don’t should think twice!) Rather than fans complaining about reviewers not looking at everything before making a decision, I would suggest the reverse criticism: if you played through everything, you are clearly in favour of the game, and your opinion is thus subject to bias.
Okay, that was a bigger ramble than intended.
Best wishes!
Eli: It is human nature that people will *kill* others who differ in any discernable aspect (race, creed, national origin, favourite deity, favourite video game). We can only wonder at our advanced state of civilization that blog comments limit the effects to merely *talking* about killing others.
Eli, you seem to be saying that certain forms of art are always inherently better than others. There are a lot of crappy games, but I still don’t agree with your argument. Any book off your shelf also has more literary merit than, say, a dance performance. Does that mean the book is better and the dance isn’t art? It’s apples and oranges. Yeah, Doom has no literary merit, I’m not going to disagree with you. But what if the book you grabbed was a Gor novel and the game A Mind Forever Voyaging? Or comparing an animated talking barnyard animal movie to Psychonauts?
In my opinion, video games are like most other forms of art; whether talking about books, movies, or games there are significantly more pieces of crap each year than shining gems.
Games are games. I play them to have fun, relax a bit, or challenge myself. I’m perfectly fine if games have no story at all; I don’t want some tacked on characters in Burnout or even in a majority of shooting games. As long as I enjoy ‘em, that’s fine by me. And every one else is welcome to their own opinions.
The thing is this. There are games that aspire to be evaluated as literary works. IMHO even the best of those fall way way short. But that’s a different topic for a different time.
Adam, you misinterpreted me. I don’t think any artform is objectively better or worse than any other – the simplest reason being that they all work in completely different ways. My problem is with Serious Gamers (I’m going to trademark that) who spend their time moaning about their poor misunderstood pastime and the immense artistic merit thereof, when the very great majority of games are as dumb as Marcel Marceau. And while I fully agree that most of everything is crap, I think that it’s much more difficult to find a smart game than a smart film/book/album/dance performance.
In summary…what psu said
Actually, now that I read your post again…what you say about “tacked on characters” is spot on – a lot of games try too hard to have gripping stories and believable characters, when the simple mechanics of the game would have carried it much better by themselves (*coughassassinscreed*).
For my money, Valve are the only big company who have really copped on to how to use the game form to tell a story. The usual suspects for great narrative in games are fine and dandy, but they still tell that story with borrowed techniques (exposition, cut-scenes) whereas HL and Portal rely purely on the strengths of the medium.
(And to clarify on one point…by literary merit, I basically mean “a good story told well”. “Artistic merit” is in my opinion far too nebulous a term to be used in any serious conversation.)
Ahh, that’s makes perfect sense. I guess for me, I don’t like boiling everything down just to one aspect. Other than interactive fiction, the story is only one part of the game to me. One recent game where I loved the story was Uncharted. It didn’t set out to be anything more than a pulp action romp akin to a B-movie, and at that it wonderfully succeeded. It wouldn’t hold up next to Nabokov or anything, but compared to other entries in the genre, it was great and I’d love to see the characters again. What was remarkable to me was just how natural the people and dialog felt in the situations; almost like Joss Whedon doing Indiana Jones. (As for the other aspects of the game play, I’d say the shooting was more fun than actually fighting CHUDs but the vehicles were less fun than actually riding on a jet ski.)
Now that I think about it more, perhaps the greatest thing about Uncharted was that it did NOT feature a “dark, brooding” hero. I’d kind of forgotten what that was like.
And on a side note, I’d wager that one reason it’s hard to find a smart game is similar to how it’s hard to find a smart _Hollywood_ movie. They’re both focused on the blockbusters and popcorn games/films. If I want something a little different, that’s where both the indie movie and indie games scenes branch out. Not always, mind you, and indie doesn’t inherently mean “better”, but there are some neat things out there.
Adam,
I think what we’re really dealing with here is just that the vast majority of popular art, regardless of medium, has always been crap. My personal favorite example of this is the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, that genius of his day, the man remembered forever for his skill as an author, Sir Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton. We don’t so much produce quality as select it. Which requires that we have a lot of material to select from – I’d be willing to bet that the ratio of crap to quality in indy games is as high as in mainstream games. It’s just when we think of indy games, we tend to think of indy games that have already been endorsed by enthusiasts.
Eli,
I think that one of the headaches we’re dealing with here is just your standard ‘new medium’ problem: people try to borrow from old media, and there’s still this Siliwood idea running through a lot of game producers that they’re producing novels. If I want to read a novel, I’ll read a novel, it’ll generally take less time than playing the game would.
I’m starting to think that we should think about games as sort of interactive museum pieces – this is the strength of games like Half-Life and Portal, and (to a lesser, but still significant extent), BioShock. There isn’t a lot of non-interactivity, and you have the option to ignore that material and continue your explorations. Being railroaded through a plot doesn’t make a hella lot of sense when the entire appeal is being able to control yourself through the world.
@ Adam
Actually I think it’s much HARDER to find a game that rises above pure formula than it is to find a movie that does. There are movies released that are meant to be Oscar worthy, that are meant to be thought of a praiseworthy and to bring a studio prestige, if not much money.
There are quality films made simply to appease a major star, so he’ll do the sequel of franchise. (Of course Daikatana didn’t work so well, so maybe that’s why we don’t see that too often.) An actor like Tom Hanks or director like Francis Coppola can make a great script into a movie simply because they love it and think it’s a good thing to do. There are maybe 4 game design guys who can do the same with their ideas.
And, as you mention, there are the “indie” films as well.
It doesn’t mean these films are all good, and we all know how boring certain “made for Oscar” movies can be, but you do get a sense that they’re at least trying.
I don’t know how many games are done that way. Can you imagine EA spending millions of dollars to prove to the public and each other that their games are worthier, made to a higher standard, and carry more artistic merit than Valve’s? This happens every year in Hollywood.
Where are the cool, interesting or worthy games supported by studious with the blockbuster hits? (Ok, Portal, what else you got?) Its utterly commonplace in film and publishing and scarcely seen in games.
Can you imagine certain periods in the game world’s calendar being thought of as “art” release dates, where the game studios proudly display something they think of as a cut above the rest? (And pray it breaks even.)
And while the games industry seems quick to claim a place at the table with grown up media, when did you last see a Hollywood A-List release that:
Had utterly poor lighting.
Had large stretches of unintelligible dialog.
Consistently pointed the camera away from the action.
Featured more than five 2+ minute plus monologues filled with nothing but tedious exposition.
Stopped in the middle of the movie and restarted at the beginning.
Stopped in the middle of the movie and didn’t restart.
Repeated the exact same scene over and over and over to increase runtime.
Featured tons of driving, riding, running or flying simply to increase runtime.
Kept cutting away to show the contents of the heroes glove compartment.
All this to say, “A” releases may be preposterous, tedious and trite, but they’re rarely buggy, broken, or unfinished. (I won’t say “unwatchable” cf “The Hulk”.)
I love games, but I hope the industry will actually grow up, rather than just talking about it. (And that doesn’t necessarily mean making “Berlin Alexanderplatz – The Game”.) As it stands now, it’s an adolescent industry – with all that implies.
>Being railroaded through a plot doesn’t make a hella lot
>of sense when the entire appeal is being able to control
>yourself through the world.
I disagree that this is the whole point. But that’s also a rant for another time.
> Kept cutting away to show the contents of the heroes glove compartment.
OK, that one in particular made me laugh.
@psu
I really want to see that rant – I’m not militant about it, but ‘games’ like Xenosaga have really lost their appeal for me recently.
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