The Guardian article I cited earlier today doesn't just highlight the fact that innovation is penalized in game reviews. As most of you said, a game shouldn't "get a pass" on poor technical execution just because it tried to be creative.It may be that we could be a little more forgiving toward new endeavors because, as the Guardian said, something being done for the first time is far more likely to be sloppy than an old-hat formula that everyone's had over a decade to iterate on.
But that aside, a main reason that this obsession on hardcore mechanical issues bothers me is also that it illustrates the massive divide between "us" -- the sort of folk that play a lot of games, immerse ourselves in the culture around games, and read blogs like Sexy Videogameland -- and your average consumer, who when playing Mirror's Edge would probably be unlikely to notice the same things you do, and who may actually (gasp) be more interested in something different than something perfect. The IGN review of Mirror's Edge, for example, would not only be impenetrable to the average gamer, but it would also not necessarily predict his or her experience.
Anyway, my Kotaku feature for this month is up today, and it continues the discussion on the difference between the average gamer and the fanatical culturist. No, not the difference between "casual" and "hardcore," but the often disorienting fact that what we think of as a "gamer" actually represents a very small subsection of the vast community of real-world folks that enjoy video games.
I used music and music journalism as a parallel -- bonus points, by the way, to Kotaku commenter Dan who knew I was talking about Wolf Parade's At Mount Zoomer. Thanks Dan, and of course it's no Apologies to the Queen Mary (and if Spencer Krug wasn't already married or at least I think he is, I'd want to marry him almost as much as I want to marry Paul Banks, okay, geekout over).
So yeah, article. Check it out, please!
22 comments:
It was a good feature and something that I didn't realize actually existed. Then the more I thought about it, the more people I could put into the normal gamer category and remove from our particular subset. It's actually quite distressing. Thanks, Leigh for totally altering my world view and making the outside world an even scarier place to live in. :)
Great article Leigh. You really are one of the best video games writer to me.
That article made me realize something horrible. We are that guy. That guy that wears a beret and and a scarf in the middle of summer. That guy can name you a dozen movie directors from eastern Europe. That guy that will get the meaning behind a 10 minutes scene where you watch a tear rolling down a clown's cheek. That guy that makes everyone looks dumb in movie history class when he is name dropping directors only he and the teacher knows.
We are that guy but we don't wear a beret, we just walk around with a DS NOT playing "Imagine [something]" but instead playing Castlevania. We can name a few designers from Japan. We can talk about the philosophical criticism in Bioshock. We can talk for hours about the meaning of eggs in Metal Gear Solid 4. We know what "The Guild" is and who Felicia Day is.
That guy isn't just a "cinephile", he is something else. We are not just gamers. Like you said, we built another world.
Bruno -- I am overwhelmed by your praise! :D But your point stands, yes, and is exactly what I was getting at.
The article is a good read and something I've run into a lot lately. One of my closest friends plays games like mad, but avoids the critical scene altogether. A few days back I asked him what he was enjoying lately, and he said Mirror's Edge. I told him I heard the reviews were mixed, and he just said it was fun because it was fresh. Most of his recommendations tend to be spot on because he's just trying to have fun, not analyse it to death.
Sidenote: I get the opposite reaction when I tell people I study film. They always seem to get self-conscious. People try to talk in what they assume is "my level", even if I just want to hear what they think. When I venture opinions about games though, I'm usually seen as a nitpicker. I prefer the latter. ;P
I don't know. I think by and large reviews of something like Fallout 3 have not been shy about pointing out the game's faults (even among reviews which call it GOTY) but most are quite clear that the game succeeds (is fun) in spite of them. I don't think a review necessarily dissuades someone from buying a game just by being nitpicky. There's something else there, the bit where the reviewer *doesn't* say that the game is fun in spite of its faults.
I think your comparison to oblique music reviews really hit the nail on the head. For those of us who are heavy into "gamer culture" it can be hard to understand that our appreciation of games is based on long held assumptions and built on countless previous experiences. To exacerbate the situation, games criticism is even beginning to develop its own vocabulary, with loaded words such as "immersion", "innovation" and "ludonarrative dissonance" being thrown around.
Casual gamers see Guitar Hero and Wii Sports and immediately understand how these activities can be fun. How can reviewers make a game like Katamari Damacy or Animal Crossing appear fun without requiring them to invest time in experiencing it firsthand?
Brilliant as always Leigh. I've understood this for a while as I've tried to explain why I like games and what games are good and my friends respond with "oooook..." We really have built something here that most people don't understand.
It's too bad that no one outside recognizes the difference though. Anyone can tell the difference between a 'film buff' and 'someone who watches movies.' No one knows the difference between gamers and 'gamers' mostly because they perceive that games are shallow forms of entertainment.
Great article Leigh. I started to read it without seeing that you wrote it and thought "wow this is really intelligent and insightful." When I saw you wrote it I wasn't surprised at all. Keep writing, you've got some of the best stuff on Kotaku not to mention this blog.
What a delightful piece, Leigh. As I started reading it, I felt like I was curling up with a good book on a rainy day, even though it was on my laptop in a crowded coffee shop. Not sure how you pulled off that bit of magic, but I appreciate it.
Anyway, I think the problem afflicting the type of criticism we see over at Pitchfork and in a lot of gaming publications is that the writers themselves are no fun. There's a dreariness to it, which is ill-suited the subject.
There's the tedious checklist approach that reduces a game to nothing but a feature set. Or there's more cerebral writers who can spend 3000 words discussing a game, dropping names and applying various critical lenses, and yet get nothing about the game across to the reader.
Roger Ebert wrote something a month or so ago that I've been thinking about a lot. He said, "As the critic Robert Warshow wrote, 'A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man.' In other words, whatever you saw, whatever you felt, whatever you did, you must say so."
Not enough games criticism takes this approach to the subject, and I think it makes games writing more sober than it has any business being.
Too often, a review doesn't answer my two most important questions. "What was it like? Did you enjoy it?"
Probably doesn't help that the IGN review of Mirror's Edge looks to have been written by a senior in high school -- correct spelling and grammar but no substance or voice whatsoever. I agree with your appraisal of the enthusiast videogame press and the massive disconnect between them and the gaming population at large. Lots of friends of mine buy games, which doesn't mean they have any idea who Strauss Zelnick is or know about the "rule of threes." I wish they did, so I had more people to talk to about this stuff!
Great feature, I really enjoyed it and can relate. I am not as old as you I am sure, but I can consider myself a "culturist." Almost all of the gamespot employees are not "culturists" from what I have found out in my area, but to work there that isn't a requirement an never should be. And about the whole fallout 3 statement, I can back this up quite greatly. If you look at major gaming sites Fallout 3 is recommended in the holiday guides and highly rated, where as all of my friends in school and on xbox live haven't heard of Fallout 3 or have zero interest in buying it. This surprises me but then I realize kids who play a lot of video games don't always know a lot about the industry and game releases. Thank you for writing your article, I can completely relate.
Brett: "I am not as old as you I am sure"
...ouch, it stings! :D
Haha I am not saying you are old, I am just young by most people's standards!
Ace writing, Leigh. My of the Kotaku comments seem to serve as evidence that the 'culturalists' feel challenged by the idea that they may be most captivated by the ziggurat they've built around the thing rather than the thing itself. The music reference hit home as well, as I often experienced this kind of impedance mismatch with the drummer from my old band - he's an inexhaustible fountain of music minutiae.
Good read.
As a fellow "video game culturist" I'd appreciate SVGDL even more with a cool banner.
HA!
-J
Oh I will, I will, I am just lazy today ^_^
Fantastic article. You actually put into words what I've been racking my brain over for months. When I started as a Game Art & Design student, I was way guilty of falling into this "gamer = just like me and nothing else" trap.
It was during a Pitch Your Own Game assignment where I proposed a 1500's village-farmer-by-day, werewolf-by-night, Adventure RPG based around self-sustenance and social contracts amidst betrayal where you're compelled to befriend people as much as eat them, and survive one event-driven calendar year skirting a Church ready to burn you at the stake once they discover who you are; kind of an Oblivion meets Harvest Moon meets Persona 3 affair.
Everyone else proposed FPSes and MMORPGs and God of War clones. "Will the werewolf combat have combo attacks?" one student asked.
I was a little taken aback when my words, "y'know, like the calendar system in Persona 3," were met with blank stares.
It seems like a no-brainer in hindsight but at the time I thought these guys would effortlessly speak my language. They were unarguably gamers, though.
So for someone who wants to make games, recognizing this gamer divide is a strange feeling. Who am I going to be making games for, exactly? And how will the gamer culture dynamic change, if at all, in the next five or so years?
I'm only about halfway through Mirror's Edge, so there's room for my opinion to change, but I don't think the complaints about it are in any way esoteric. It's a game that makes it clear you should play it one way -- in a free-flowing, rapid-fire style -- and then spends all its time making it impossible for you to do that. Faith's momentum is her most precious resource, and she loses it so easily -- say, if her shoulder brushes the side of a fence. The collision is unforgiving, in the sense that you can miss your target by about a foot, in game-world measurements, and plummet to your death. This is a very difficult game to learn to play, which due to its very nature also makes it difficult to appreciate the things it does well. I try to remember how much trouble I had learning to play the Tony Hawk games, which were similar to this in a lot of ways, but I don't think it was ever this bad. Plus Tony Hawk gave you a lot more room to learn how to play it without having people shooting you in the face.
Also, if Joe Average Gamer is more receptive to innovation than reviewers are, how come he keeps buying Madden on launch day every year?
Very interesting points, Leigh. Never thought of it this way before. :)
Oh and off-topic: you mention in your FAQ that you're into Phantasmagoria II... Really? Been watching SpoonyOne play it on Youtube, and even though I find it fascinating to watch, I know that I wouldn't want to play it because of all its gameplay flaws (not its themes). It's like the CDi Zelda games: watching gameplay footage on Youtube is enough. :P
Lady Jaye (my childhood heroine!)
I was into Phantasmagoria II. Haven't played it in ages -- and oh lordy was it flawed, but I can't ever recall being more terrified. Back in the day, we had a different definition of "flaw," I think!
Anyway, it had some thematic stuff I really liked, and I was decidedly too young to be playing it at the time that I did. Traumatic.
Wow Leigh, you really opened my eyes. Before your article I never thought gamers didn't read reviews.
Although I can't help but think of myself when it comes to movies. Too often I read reviews and some pivotal plot twist is ruined for me. Since then I've been extremely wary when it comes to movie reviews and perhaps reviews in general because you never know what shaky principles the reviewer have.
I have to agree with Mitch though. Innovation does need to follow the one rule of games: Is it fun? After playing the demo of Mirror's Edge I can see his points are valid. Momentum is easy to lose and unforgiving *linear* paths (I'm talking about you, you damn horizontal bar swing to wall pipe) make it difficult to swoon to its flirtaous stylings.
What I find funny/stupid, is that while the reviews are only read by the gamers (as proven by the article :), still they are written to a reader who doesn't know anything about the game. Using the IGN Mirror's Edge review (which I forced myself to read (almost) all the way) starts with a description of the background story. Surely pretty much every reader already knows all this from preview articles and all the other produce of the hype machine.
(Edge is an exception to this, they assume, you have read the past issues. But then again, that magazine is on a class of its own.)
Being quite the music buff, and actually being quite a a zealot about it I can't agree with what you say.
First of all, music is more a taste thing. Yes there are things that are inherently worse than others (Mika springs to mind - not to mention the whole R&B section of the past decade) - BUT ultimately it is far more up to taste. Firstly because the range of music genres is far larger, secondly because there are a lot more albums per genre, thirdly because there simply is more innovation.
Music critics can only say if an album sounds like another and in which respect (if it's done before) - all other aspects are purely based on personal taste (I will not mention the Bob Mould scale here of melody, noise and intelligence) (oops! ;-)
Yes they can say - the guitar is good, the piano not.... but ultimately that again is taste. There are no unintentional false notes on an album as it is produced in a way that polishes all bad elements away.
I stopped reading music reviews when Pitchfork gave The Fragile a 2 or so. It is one of the best produced albums of the nineties/naughties... it is widely seen as one of the most innovative industrial albums of the past decade. How then can it get such a low grade? The reviewer didn't like it. Period.
How fair is that?
If at least they would have given it a 7 for doing things that hadn't been heard on that side of the music spectrum, I could have lived with it. Now, I couldn't. It was completely on taste.
Games however have a lot of things you can objectively review such as innovation, easy to use controls (how long does it take to learn how to control the character), longevity, colorfullness vs gritty, and a whole lot of technical stuff. On top of that, there is a whole lot of things to say which are wholely subjective (how immersive, how much fun, how beautiful, how well voice-acted, how good the spoken lines are etc. etc.)
And how many faults there are to a game (something, like I said does not happen in music).
The problem with video game reviews (And I've been reading them on and off since Zapp!64) is that they tend to go to things the average gamer doesn't give a toss about: pop-in, number of polygons on screen (... like I care?!), and much more sillyness.
What should the average Joe want to know: is it worth my money? (which is the reason they safely buy what they know)
how can they know that?
Like someone said before me: tell them if it's fun or not... and why. Stop the mumbo jumbo. Tell people why it is pretty, what sets it apart (or not) - if the music is appropriate, if the story reeks of cheese... and if that is important to the genre.
On a different note:
I know I am part of a sub-culture. I like it - though will never admit to it. But I never thought that all gamers were into the sub-culture... a common look at sales tells us it's not so... just as a look at the billboard tells us most people don't listen to good music, read good books and watch good movies.
People want disposable, junk-culture. Please understand that and just be greatful that there are others like you... and we've found each other for instance here (an orchestra starts to swell here) - being an elitist is not a problem, as long as you know you are. Knowing oneself is key to happyness... so now, go out and rejoice.... (was that too much?)
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