Mon Petit Pont Faible, Obscurci Dans Le Brouillard

I'll be the first to confess that when I get passionate on a topic, I tend to obscure my own points. No issue exists in a walled garden, of course, and I tend to eagerly dredge all the trails around an idea and lace all around peripheral or overlapping issues, which sometimes doesn't serve my argument.

So given that Newsweek's N'Gai Croal has returned to the blogging stage at Level Up in order to join the discussion that reviewers like myself and Variety's Ben Fritz have been having around the challenging relationship between art and mechanics within the critical process, I think it's worthwhile, and probably necessary, to clarify my points a little.

When I observed -- okay, complained -- that reviews are arbitrarily critical of mechanical issues while downplaying the role of creative innovation in the perceived success or failure of a game, I most certainly never intended to imply that games that aren't fun should receive high scores simply because they tried something different.

Nor did I ever intend to suggest -- though I'll cop, again, to obfuscating my own arguments sometimes, as is the tendency of the excessively verbose -- that game mechanics, the backbone of an experiential medium, are themselves "minutiae."

Many of you raised this point aptly yesterday in the comments of my post about the Guardian's Keith Stuart's article; commenter juv3nal said:

No one is knocking Mirror's Edge (or, for that matter, failing to give Mirror's Edge credit) for its innovation. It's getting dinged for its failures in execution. As a consumer, I'm all for innovation; there isn't some automatic reaction that new or different = bad. It's just that poor execution is not excused by being new or different.

And Toups pointed out:

If anything, for future creators to learn the right lessons from the game, we would do well to have critics pointing out exactly where it fails.

And one would have to be quite dense to disagree, just as one would be hard-pressed to take issue with Croal's assertion that "mechanics matter... [and] mechanics are also improvable." Indeed, one could argue that we reviewers have a duty to be strict about flaws, as Toups says, because with the way our industry works, the Metacritic scores we contribute have a concrete economic and strategic impact on future creations.

But the primary function of a review is not to educate its creator; it is not a report card, although the rise of Metacritic scores as a barometer of industry behavior creates that side-effect. Nor is a review a control mechanism by which a few writers can influence the trends of the industry by elevating some traits and diminishing others according to their personal taste. Perhaps obviously, the purpose of a review is to try and tell consumers whether or not they would enjoy a game.

And as I illustrated at Kotaku yesterday, the large majority of game consumers do not currently read reviews because they don't find them useful or relatable. The disconnect between the consumer who reads reviews and the one who doesn't is just a precursor to the rampant disconnect between those tasked with communicating about games and those who enjoy playing games.

This particular chasm, I feel, is one of the largest obstacles to games attaining widespread cultural value beyond that of a plaything. And it's also one of the most addressable.

When I lament the lack of attention to innovation in game reviews -- and, by association, in our enthusiast culture -- I am not, as Croal suggests, insisting that creativity should receive "primacy" over effective design. We cannot award "A for effort"s. Although Ben Fritz's standpoints were tightly associated with mine in Croal's blog post, I think it's salient to note that he and I actually initially disagreed on one thing: He noted in his original response to me that he often finds that games often seem over-rated based on hype about their innovations -- and I concede he's right.

Either extreme is undesirable. I am, instead, hoping to engender an acceptance of a broader-lens view of games as experiences; I am rejecting the assertion that a medium with the power to be so subjectively affecting must be reduced to the sum of its parts; I take issue with the idea that there is a single mechanical checklist against which all games can be evaluated.

Most of all, I wholly repudiate the suggestion that "is this game fun?" has a yes-or-no answer applicable to all members of our increasingly vast audience. It's my belief that only in ditching that can we span the chasm.

Again, I didn't play Mirror's Edge, so obviously I am not speaking specifically in its defense. But interestingly, I've heard in conversations and emails with friends a raft of approval for the title that comes uniquely from people who rarely play video games. They think it's fun, they think it's different, and they feel it was worth their money, while those who frequently do play games -- and those whose work entails critiquing games -- sing quite a different tune. It'd be patently asinine to imply that one group is correct while the other is not, and perhaps in my vehement eagerness to encourage a more sophisticated, broad-ranging critical vocabulary for games, I allowed myself to appear as if I was making statements on which standpoints are valid and which are not.

That wasn't my aim, of course. It's never my intention to act as if I'm some voice that can assign correct or incorrect in such a broad, emerging field, which is part of why I almost always avoid calling out individuals. But the idea that the laws of game mechanics alone must determine a single accurate evaluation of a title that is universally true? I think that's wrong -- I'll say that plain.

In yesterday's discussion, commenter Dante said:

When we talk of 'classic' games we're nearly always talking of flawed but abitious ones, Deus Ex, Fallout etc. They're all attempts to do something extra-ordinarily different that stumble somewhere...

...Take the BioWare games, for instance; they've always had bugs and flaws, but they've always been narratively excellent. But while Baldur's Gate and KOTOR were numbered amongst the best of their time, Mass Effect was swept under the carpet, despite massive strides forward in presentation and combat.

On a slightly different note, we all enjoyed dragging out old review quotes about Silent Hill 2 that called it, basically, staid and unwieldy, while today it enjoys a seat on the short list of gaming's greatest survival horror titles -- if not greatest titles, period.

Incidentally, those poor reviews for SH2 equated to high 7s and 8s on the scoresheet back in the day, which often makes me wonder if reviewers these days feel obligated to pick out extra criticisms to avoid the old accusation of the "three point curve."

Dante is correct in observing that many of the games that history adores are overtly flawed, and that we adored them in spite of those flaws. We remember a favorite older title as an overall experience, and not as the sum of its "pros" column held up against its "cons."

I do believe that, since gaming is such a new medium, back then many of us were younger and not inclined to criticize so closely as players. The critical press, concurrently, developed a handy system that worked fairly well (remember the ranked categories in GamePro?) in an era when games were simpler and had fewer variables.

But in today's environment, the variables are too numerous to consistently evaluate systematically, and to add an additional knot, development is in a growth and experimentation phase in which it's actively trying to add more variables. At the same time, a wave of new audiences are are approaching -- or rediscovering -- gaming. They know nothing of our systems. They don't know what "ludonarrative dissonance" means, and they wouldn't notice it. Hell, maybe we ourselves would be unbothered by certain issues unless we'd had them pointed out for us and been told inside the internet echo chamber that they ought to ruin our experience.

Which is not at all to imply we need to "lower our standards" or fail to mention problems just because the median user would not be bothered by them. In fact, I'd wager we have almost an embarrassing amount to learn from the average consumer about appreciating a game as a holistic creation -- neither "art piece" nor "product," neither "mechanics" or "innovation." What I stumbled to convey by employing the word "minutiae" is the fact that we hardcore these days often have our nose pressed up so tight against the glass that we can't see out the window.

Ultimately, my original idea -- doubtless because I expressed it poorly, was assigned a "Red Light" by Level Up: "Reviewers aren't perfect, but attempting to police the discourse by insisting on the primacy of innovation over execution is not the answer," says Croal.

If I criticize or levy opinion on the process of reviewing, and the impact of the Metacritic score, it's because as a reviewer who contributes such scores, I feel it's necessary to engage my community in these kinds of discussions on what the focus of our work can be. Aside from the issue of whether placing "red lights" in the roadmap of discussions among reviewers is in itself "policing the discourse," I hope I've clarified, in the fashion of more words than was probably necessary, that "insisting on the primacy of innovation over execution" was never my intention.

Finally, I say this all the time, but it never seems often enough -- thanks to the commenters who contribute their thoughts here, those quoted in this post as well as all the others.

[Wholly unrelated note -- I don't usually link things like this, but since I'm responding to N'Gai Croal, I thought it'd be okay to do a petit homage: EGO... trip!]