Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Way We Talk!

All narrative art forms are on some level participatory. A novel requires reading. It requires investment from the reader, an investment which shapes the reader’s interpretation of the work itself. I can read The Road and come away thinking it’s a trite, overwrought work filled with florid prose and poorly thought out plot points and you can come out thinking it’s a seminal work on the nature of fatherhood and inevitability of one’s own demise in a world where human life itself has become completely devalued, and we can both be totally right. We can each read Charles Simic and come away either thinking he’s mind numbingly pretentious or profound and both have valid opinions. We can all agree that Yoshimoto Banana needs to get laid something fierce.

Narrative art is constantly shaped by an invisible reader figure. It’s one of the big mysteries that structuralism and post-constructivism revealed about storytelling – there is no story without someone to hear it. It’s part of a tacit compact between reader and writer, a critical nexus of human intellect generating a collective experience in absentia of actual human interaction. Criticism of each narrative medium is aware of this to one extent or another. The more kinetic the medium, however, the less aware critics seem to be.

Poetry, for example, is painfully self-aware that their medium does not exist without participants. Anyone who has been to a poetry reading can vouch for that. Without readers or listeners, poetry doesn’t exist. The very manner in which one reads poetry line to line is critical to grasping the meaning of poems. Amateur poets frequently forget this fact, and many an undergraduate’s attempt at opus has been laid low by a failure to heed the importance of line, a failure to recognize that one day a reader will encounter this work whose experience cannot be personally guided by the writer. Critiquing poetry is inherently tied to the experience of the reader. The manner in which you read a particular phrase, the manner in which you interpret it, is something that criticism demands by brevity or nature. You cannot discuss a poem without discuss the experience of interacting with that poem, an experience inherently tied to every single experience leading up to it.

But compare this to the discourse surrounding film. Film critics will rarely discuss the experience of actually watching a film, spare in a negative fashion. Aside from Kelly Wand I’ve never heard a film critic talk about the way an audience improved a film, or the way that previous films influenced their opinion of craft. Some critics, like Roger Ebert, do this to an often comedic extent, approaching each film they watch with a seemingly psychotic lack of self-awareness. Others, like Dana Stevens, hint at the impact that previous films have had upon them, offering us insights into the basis of their criticism which then dovetail into their “objective” discussions of film.

Games as a medium exacerbate this problem in an unprecedented way, a way that most critics seem uncomfortable with. Many critics come from backgrounds wherein perceived neutrality is the gold standard for discourse, and games make such neutrality impossible by shifting and developing through interaction. Some writers, like the many of the Destructoid crew, want to pretend that the divide doesn’t exist. If a game isn’t great to Destructoid it’s because the game is, on some level, shitty or wrong. The player has no part in shaping the experience. Others reviewers, like Tom Chick or Leigh Alexander, can become overly invested in their personal analysis. In these cases intimate knowledge of the critic is required to interpret their reviews at times, limiting the effectiveness of such writing. When I think about the way people review games I am reminded of the way I heard people discuss poetry as a student.

The similarities between the critical communities surrounding video games and poetry are fascinating to me, and would no doubt make both parties deeply uncomfortable (though it would likely make the poetry community, still coming to terms with its own role despite a four hundred year grace period where they were not the dominant narrative art form, much more nervous, I’m sure, than the young video gamesmen). It’s all good and well to say that games criticism should be more like poetry criticism, that critiquing a game should be more like critiquing any sort of a book than a film, but such proclamations aren’t helpful. Games are their own beast, and they require their own sort of discussion, so instead of tossing out generalities I want to talk about a few occasions I’ve seen in the past few years of games criticism failing in discussing culturally, critically or commercially significant games.

The first example that comes to mind is the discussion surrounding Defense of the Ancients and its summary clones, Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends. I started playing DotA during my first summer at home away from college. It was a way to keep in touch with people from college and to bring my two disparate social groups, my friends from high school and my friends from higher education, together. It was also a nuanced, deceptively complex game which demanded more attention from its player than most action oriented players were comfortable with and more nuanced tactical sense than most RTS players were comfortable with. It’s a game that should’ve fallen into nichedom, catering to a group of miscreants who want to remember games like Myth and X-Com, punishingly difficult affairs which rewarded intelligent, quick witted players with nerves of steel and plenty of determination, a rare group in today’s world of instantly rewarding games.

When I first became interested in games journalism I was a frequent reader of the Escapist. I consumed articles between asinine tasks at my first desk job out of college, licking my lips attentively each Wednesday to see if they’d gotten someone even moderately prominent to write an article this week. My hopes were dashed in a particularly noteworthy fashion when, one day, I checked the news feed on The Escapist and saw an article on DotA. When I clicked it open I expected a diatribe on punishing game play which rewarded endurance and passion. I expected an article about the merits of the game and the team play it encouraged.

Imagine my shock when I uncovered an article about how amateurish and unbalanced this fan-made mod for Warcraft 3 was. It was a discussion about long distance gaming using DotA as a hopping off point to kvetch about how bad games could draw people together. It was bereft of self-awareness. It was a New York Post review, something you’d expect to see in a small town paper that published op eds not to incite discussion but to up circulation. It was poorly written and didn’t seem to realize where it was or what it was discussing. It was about the author’s life without ever copping to it or even noticing it.

The article failed to discuss the context of the author’s experience, the author’s background as a gamer, the origin of his passion for gaming, where his desire to play this game with friends had come from. It was a discussion without any real information – a diatribe on how games bring people together without a shameful admission that it has as much to do with the game as the people playing it. The author’s knowledge of DotA’s antecedents, the pedigree and lineage of DotA’s creators, was all absent from the article. As far as the writer was concerned DotA should have had all the balance and grace of a Call of Duty 6.

Which brings me to the discussion surrounding Call of Duty 6, where reviews completely failed to acknowledge that the people making the game had done so with nearly unlimited resources using an engine built three years prior. When Modern Warfare 2 emerged it received glowing reviews, some would say ejaculatory. People praised the game as the greatest thing which could have ever happened to gaming rather than as a failed attempt at sequelage generated by people who had far too much time and money for the sloppy networking code and appallingly poor single player story they threw together.

This isn’t to say that Modern Warfare 2 is a bad game. It has serious issues, but the core game is an incredible experience. But the core game is 2007’s Modern Warfare. The things that make Modern Warfare 2 great, the interplay between shotguns, submachine guns, light machine guns, sniper rifles, and assault rifles, are all present in spades in the first Modern Warfare. The only arguable improvement over the first Modern Warfare comes in the form of the new leveling system and the distribution of Perks in Modern Warfare 2, something most reviewers failed to recognize altogether. Instead they approached it from the perspective of a dilettante, of someone who didn’t have to spend money on their own games.

They didn’t say things about the disruptive introduction of kill streak rewards which essentially broke the game, of the removal of lean-look control from the game or the way that rebalancing shotguns added a weapon which essentially ruined the previous balance between knives and close ranged weapons. Instead they focused on the way the new game was more marketable, the way it could sell more copies and commercially outperform its precursor, as well it did. To read all but a handful of reviews of Modern Warfare 2 is to read a celebration of a deeply flawed game which could’ve been far better if only the developers had listened to their audience.

In both of these cases of authorial experience, the essence of the author, were withdrawn for the sake of journalism, from a misapprehension that journalism means the denial rather than the admission of prior opinion. All of the critics who experienced Modern Warfare 2 had experienced the original Modern Warfare, but none of them wanted to admit that offending Activision would potentially remove their ability to receive future preview copies from the prominent publisher, a move which would fall well in line with Kotick’s aggressive, mercenary media personality and indeed in line with traditional publisher behavior with regards to what is derisively referred to as the “enthusiast press.”

So reviews of Modern Warfare 2 and DotA, big and small games alike, were released without concern for the experiences which informed those reviews or the effort which went into creating the games. Such a course of action would seem all but insensible if applied to any medium other than games, but it is accepted within the context of games despite the raw and indisputably experiential nature of games as an art form. A film critic who expected the same production values from an indie film and a Spielberg film would be laughed at, a literary critic who ignored the circumstances of author’s lives while comparing William Carlos Williams and T.S. Elliot an incompetent fool. But reviewers don’t like to talk about the resources that go into creating out fun, the raw effort which games like World of Goo require to create and the staggering resources poured into big budget sequels like Assassin’s Creed 2. Mass Effect 2 and The Path are compared without consideration for the effort which made them which, to any person with the slightest familiarity in either of the titles’ origin stories, would seem like nothing short of madness.

Exacerbating the problem is the manner in which game reviews all too often attempt to cling to ideas about objectivity. In reality criticism cannot exist within the realm of objectivity. Criticism is the description of an experience, wholly separate from journalism, the description of events. The two forms of writing are completely different, with different goals, techniques and rules governing them. But the majority of games writers don’t seem to recognize this. Their critiques are all too often lists of features followed up by de-contextualized value judgments. Terms like “epic” and “awesome” will be applied to the story of Mass Effect 2, but the same critics seem unwilling to discuss the way these events impact them. There are certainly people who work against this trend, perhaps the most prominent of them being the culturally indispensable Leigh Alexander who grasps both the difference between a journalist and a critic and the expertise to excel in both styles of writing with the skill and confidence of a much older author. But far more often games critics don’t treat their experiences with games as something to be discussed: they treat them as things to be quantified and commoditized: experiences which must be collected in under a thousand words and summed up in a single number or letter grade.

This falsehood of objectivity can kill the discussion of games. It lends itself to the creation of a consensus based on a sort of inscrutable hive mind which cannot deal with in depth discussion. A dissenting opinion is less likely to warrant careful consideration and more likely to elicit flames from whichever group of fan boys happens to be walking by. That most games journalists do not discuss games that have aged more than a few months further worsens circumstances. Open world darling and revolutionary Fallout 3 is absent from contemporary criticism of games like Red Dead Revolver, and most comparisons to older open world titles simply come in the form the acknowledgement that, why yes, Rockstar did make this game, thank you for remembering that they also made Grand Theft Auto. These twin factors of attempting to assess products in a cultural and intellectual vacuum and determine some sort of “objective” value for them leads to a frustrating body of reviews more suited to a consumer electronics buyer’s guide than the analysis of an art form.

In a very real way games are trying to shy away from their place in the world of narrative art. The criticism surrounding them is seemingly uninterested in literary theory or discussion, something which does not necessarily indict the intellect of the discussion participants but rather their background. For example an intellectual discussion I was once involved in on and industry blog regarding the nature of storytelling in games boiled down to a talk about sources of conflict utilizing generalizations most frequently taught in junior high schools to assist students in categorizing and comprehending conflict, categorical classifications such as man vs. man, man vs. nature and man vs. god. The participants in this discussion were all very intelligent individuals who either wrote about or worked on games as a medium. But if I were to discuss a work of literature in such terms I’d be laughed back to the sixties. I might as well bring up Foucault every five minutes in conversation. This issue seems to be partially rooted in the fact that many writers are uninterested in studying and analyzing games, and that many of the people who are interested in doing so and have had success doing so have no background in narrative theory or analysis.

There are exceptions, certainly, but the frequency which developers, journalists and visual artists step into the arena of writing about games should give anyone familiar with criticism pause. While there are certainly people who mix critical and creative careers in other industries they’re rarely the norm. Carrie Brownstein’s articles are a case in point: she has become an oddity, a journalist who emerged from a band with an educational background in sociolinguistics. Brownstein came to music journalism through a lifetime of studying and participating in cultural discourse. Compare this to someone like Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb, an industry insider who acts as a cultural figurehead and the focal point for discussions. Hyrb’s undergraduate degree was in communications, and his discussions are less about forming coherent opinions and more about attempting to shape or quantify public opinion. He is a mouthpiece for an organization who masquerades as the focal point for discussions, a Fox News reporter claiming to be a part of New York Magazine.

The strange educational backgrounds of games writer’s as well as the industry’s predilection to filter out those without a high tolerance for and ability to readily sort through marketing bullshit has generated a forum for discussion which is largely intellectually destitute. And while there are certainly people who promote real, intelligent, experiential discussions about how games make them feel, why they feel that way and the questions that these games raise for them, there are far, far more people who see games as a cool thing with the potential to make a lot of money. And we need those people, we need them to make sure that publishers and developers can work their craft and still be able to eat and pay rent. But we need nowhere near as great a number as we have today, standing in a throng crying the praises of AAA titles and ignoring or denigrating new and interesting releases as being, at best, “good enough.” Games criticism is, in its current incarnation, far from living up to its name.