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Tuxedo Catfish posted:reviews and criticism are not the same thing and conflating the two is a huge part of the reason why games criticism is so bad A big problem with videogame reviews and videogame criticism, either from a "professional" or enthusiast standpoint, is that we're dealing with videogames. This fact alone somehow convinces many people writing critiques or reviews to do their very level best at coming up with some amazing mental gymnastics on the fly, all to support an argument about the game itself, or the people who enjoy it, oftentimes flying in the very face of the actual product they are discussing. Whether it is about the quality of the game's controls, graphics, the plot or the characters within, there's an increasingly annoying trend for people to not actually review or critique the game that is actually in front of them, but rather what they wish that game was, regardless of whether or not they actually like or hate the damned thing in the first place. A game is "transcendental", "good", "mediocre", or "garbage", with very little in between these four basic states a game can ultimately launch in, and for places like Polygon or Kotaku, the actual quality of the game doesn't really matter all that much. To them, reviews or critiques of a game are becoming less about the actual game itself, and more about the writer flexing their thesaurus/that one semester they took a course on ethics/psychology/history any time in the last fifteen years. They are crafting The Story Of How They Came To Like/Hate Things About This Videogame. They are trying to sell you about themselves as a personality "in the biz" to their readers, or selling you the "brand" they represent. Almost as much as they are trying to sell you their review/critique. Discussion about a game, or aspects or a game, quickly go sideways when it starts to becomes very apparently that one party or all parties involved are convinced that people are wrong to agree or disagree with an opinion, or that there are people out there who suffer from the affliction of enjoying the wrong games and are just too stupid to know any better. It's "wrong" if a game is reviewed too poorly or too well. It's wrong to like Franchise A more than B, even if the reviewer in question never brings this up themselves you can expect fans to bring it up. This ultimately extends to attacks on genres of videogames and often the people who enjoy them, particularly when a disagreement gets heated. Some critics become so married to their own words that they outright state that the developers OR their readers aren't allowed to dismiss their criticism in any way without being "privileged" or just wrongheaded. Having preferences in videogames suddenly needs to be justified in other people's eyes, whether it is the latest visual novel or the new GTA. For a long time now, especially on Something Awful, but definitely not limited to it, there's been a disgusting trend of people who unironically and seriously talk about military shooters as "brown people murder simulators". As though I or anyone else who actually is one of those "brown people" they claim to give a poo poo about is supposed to be convinced that they do care about those poor virtual or real "browns", beyond scoring some sick burns on their favorite comedy website whenever the chance presents itself. It isn't just with first/third person shooters of course, they just happen to be the easiest targets. I don't think we can expect this to get any better, especially on the internet. It's so incredibly easy these days to just filter opinions you don't like and stick to sources of information that agree with what you believe. People do that with poo poo that actually matters in their daily lives, so it's not surprising that the act of discussing or critiquing videogames has found itself in a state little better than the sort of tribalistic bleating between people who watch FOX News or CNN religiously. fivegears4reverse fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 18:43
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:That's been a problem since forever with all kinds of reviewing, though; everyone brings their own personal lens filter. I mean, Ben Johnson and Milton criticized Shakespeare for having too much magic and fantasy and wildness in his plays ( I think it's alright for personal preferences to factor into any review, since that is basically inescapable. I do think it is the individual critic's responsibility to know when they are letting these things get in the way of actually reviewing the product on hand. For a recent example, Arthur Gies wrote a "non-review" of the new Star Fox, and the only reason we know it's not a review or critique of any sort is because he says himself that it isn't a review of the game. He hates the game SO MUCH that he refused to even "properly" review it, whatever that means, and he's let his statement stand on the matter. Of course, that's all ultimately just a load of poo poo. He's not championing integrity or anything of the sort with his rant, it effectively IS his review: "game sucks so bad I'm not even going to take the time to get the site to web 3.0 some fancy formatting on this article, much less put in the effort into THIS game versus any other game I've actually posted reviews for, ostensibly as a gaaaaaames joooooournalist" I think my biggest problem is the reviewer/critic themselves fully embracing the "role" of gatekeeper of the industry, pretending they are some sort of arbitrary watchdog (albeit one that ultimately does very little to influence the industry to the same extent that the industry/their audience influences them). Incoherence posted:I actually don't know what this paragraph means, other than the shot at "Polygon or Kotaku" (why is it always those two? and why does Kotaku come up here in the context of its game reviewing rather than its ongoing series of posts about creepy Japanese bullshit?). If I'm interested in the experience of playing the game, then I'm interested in reading someone talk about the experience of playing the game. There's a reason that the Game Review Rubric (graphics/controls/plot/replay value/etc.) fell out of favor. They get brought up since they are pretty much the most egregious examples of what I personally feel is lovely professional vidyergames journalism, reviews, and critique. Like Hieronymous Alloy says, the problems I bitch about in reviews or critique aren't exactly new, much less limited to videogames. As for the Rubric, I don't think it's fallen out of favor at all. It's just had items on the list edited in and out over the years, in favor of something less cohesive as a review or as criticism. quote:I'm not even saying that people who review a game only on its mechanics are wrong; it's a different perspective, and one I don't share, but if that's all you care about in a game then that's the kind of review you want to seek out. I don't want games to ONLY be reviewed on their mechanics. I want the mechanics of the game to be treated with even remotely the same reverence that drives people to write bullshit like "Sequel Three is the Citizen Kane of Videogames/Is Very Problematic And Here's The Essay I Wrote About It". When I bring up places like Polygon or Kotaku, it's because they exemplify the opposite to the extreme you think I'm pushing for. fivegears4reverse fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 19:39
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rkajdi posted:I think part of it is Polygon and Kotaku did think pieces about Gamers (as in the AAA stereotyped crowd) being over, and also was willing to take a stand against GG/for feminists. There's also a pretty solid streak of anti-intellectualism running through it, given lines like "flexing their thesaurus/that one semester they took a course on ethics/psychology/history". Nerd culture has a big problem with people finally looking at it critically, and a whole lot of nerds getting angry that it might somehow invalidate their tastes. You see similar things in comics and video games, where a mass of "normal" people end up raging against the PC/effete journalists. The act of criticism is not an inherent good beyond any form of reproach, no matter how much you might personally agree with what people like Arthur Gies or an anonymous gamergate shitposter have to say. quote:I also think a lot of nerds know the games they like are the Michael Bay/Zack Synder end of things, and are more than a little worried that people are starting to act like this might not be the alpha and omega of gaming. Effectively, they want gaming to stay in the kiddie pool, because it's better to be king of an anthill than just being part of a much wider hobby. Videogames have been, for a very long time, much more than just the Michael Bay/Zack Snyder "end" of things. You'd have to be pretty ignorant to not see it that way. It says a lot about you in general that your first instinct is to assume that people you disagree with in any way are ooooobviously fans of "low art", or are afraid that OTHER PEOPLE MIGHT LIKE VIDEOGAMES TOO. Every console generation since the NES has seen videogames reach an increasingly larger number of people around the world, across a variety genres. I'm not ignorant to the fact that gaming is more than just a hobby for a specific brand of "nerd" you've tried to evoke in your post, and I am okay with this. If all you've really got is to insinuate that I am somehow a supporter of gamergate, I can see how you'd actually think Polygon or Kotaku are a worthy hill to plant a flag on. Incoherence posted:Part of that is that there's a lot less cultural baggage with game mechanics than there is with storytelling, so it's harder to write thinkpieces about mechanics alone, and they tend to be less visible because they're less controversial. No one's going to write an angry response to an article about Overwatch's audio design. A lot of people can and do write angry responses to articles about objectified women, or even about "X is the best/worst game of all time". So, on the one hand, if you're trying to drive traffic, controversy is your meal ticket (the Gawker sites are all basically tabloids so Kotaku fits in very well here). On the other hand, we can't very well just pretend that baggage doesn't exist. For what it's worth as a post on Something Awful is concerned, I don't believe that thinkpieces are a bad idea inherently. I don't think for a second that we can't or shouldn't discuss underlying themes present in games, or other more serious topics connected to videogames. I do believe that there's been some badly written think pieces disguised as a game review, there's definitely been a fair bit of the Gawker-style clickbait that you can find just about anywhere. The articles that have bugged me the most feel like the sort of Gotcha! shitposting that come up from people like rkajdi: no actual attempt to engage with the audience intellectually, it's just someone speaking at you in as condescending a tone as they can manage, telling you that you're just wrong for not 100 percent seeing things the way they do. It's a lot like that whole "we're smarter than people who read GameSpot/IGN" bit you mentioned. I do think you'll find that people will write angry responses to just about anything when it comes to videogames; It wouldn't surprising me in the least to see someone freaking out over the sound design in Overwatch. People have sent death threats over other poo poo in videogames.
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Jun 3, 2016 22:15
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WampaLord posted:So don't read them? I think its important to not turn a blind eye to every little thing I disagree with, as such I'm still able to read your posts
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Jun 3, 2016 22:41
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I've been reflecting on some of the posts here, and I have to wonder: now that we have the possibility of seeing people review a game on Youtube, with all the live gameplay footage that entails, is there really a need for written reviews, as opposed to critiques? I know that if a game comes to me through other than "this is good" word-of-mouth, what gets me to play a game is seeing people actually play through the start of it, and their reflections as they play. Written reviews can be well done and probably aren't going away. Not every YouTuber out there is particularly interesting to hear speak about anything, much less a videogame. We still have articles written on websites for newspapers despite the fact that we have 24 hour news channels and the ability to get instant video updates of events outside of our own time zones. In some ways I think a written review/article can possibly do a better job at really describing why something does or doesn't work in a videogame. In other ways a video review or a stream of a game can do a better job than a bunch of text. I don't necessarily put a lot of stock in reviews either, in text or in video form, but I tend to read/watch 'em out of habit. I like seeing how other people have reacted to a videogame, even if I disagree with them. Guess I'm a weirdo though.
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Jun 3, 2016 23:06
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computer parts posted:Again though (and I'm addressing FC3 since you mentioned it), that goes back to the Starship Troopers problem - do you really need someone facing the audience and saying "the thing you just saw? That's bad"? You don't really need this with any form of storytelling. However, there's a lot of people out there who think that in order for Videogames To Grow Up, we need more of it. Sometimes this gets argued as being a necessary injection into franchises that otherwise have never really had much interest in sending a message to the player reminding them that bad things are bad. I think videogames can present some serious issues without necessarily needing to be as hamfisted about it as, say, Spec Ops: The Line. In practice, exceedingly few writers in the industry are capable of handling mature content without falling off the soapbox they're preaching from. It doesn't help that at the end of the day, a story to a videogame usually is influenced by the game itself. A dev team will more likely have a story edited to fit what they want to do with the game, rather than throw out parts of the game for the sake of a narrative. A good example of this is Uncharted 3, the narrative itself was basically wrapped around a bunch of action sequences the team wanted to put in their next game, and it shows. I'm not sure how this problem can be 'dealt with', and I'm not even sure this is a problem to begin with. Videogames that do or don't place a focus on their writing or overall narrative co-exist in the same market as is.
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Jun 4, 2016 22:19
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