The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

On Progressive vs. Normal Criticism

Erik Kain of Forbes Magazine says that on the topic of GamerGate, I understand it among the best.  Which is high praise, as he’s been fairly plugged into the controversy from the outset, and is actually reasonably sympathetic to some of the undertones of the cause, where as I am mostly a caustic chronicler and critic of the subject.  I’ve slowed down my writing on it quite a bit as the cause has started to flatline and I’ve discovered that I could be using that free time to instead do more productive activities such as watching paint dry, but anyone who wants to know what he’s talking about may want to look for articles with the GamerGate tag.

That being said, I do disagree with him a tad.  He describes GamerGate as the natural evolution of animosity between the games press and their readership.  To wit:

Mostly it’s about a toxic relationship that’s formed between the video game press and gamers themselves, one that’s been bubbling and brewing for years, not months.

This dynamic, this hostile relationship, exists outside of #GamerGate as well. I think a lot of gamers who want nothing to do with the hashtag—understandably, considering the bad press it’s gotten over harassment—are still upset with the gaming press (as are some members of the press and many developers and PR people.)

But I think that’s not entirely fair to the dynamics of what’s going on.  What we have is not really indicative of the games press as a whole.  Most of the games press writes a fair amount of the lukewarm pap that recycles publisher buzzwords and shoves them back down our throats.  For the most part, no one gives them a second glance.  Its a subset of games writers, those whom we will call artistic and cultural critics, who seem to provoke such a strong reaction.  And on the flip side, we have a subset of game fans who seem to take any one writing on any given site as proof that that whole site, or even further, the whole games media, has been corrupted by feminists/progressives/SJWs/whatever.

As an example, IGN, Gamespot, Polygon and Kotaku all wrote dozens, if not hundreds of articles on every possible angle of Shadows of Mordor when it came out.  One of those was the very silly ‘kiss vs kill’ article about the tutorial.  That article was an attempt to actually look at the craftsmanship of the game in a new light, in a way that might actually grow the craft.  It was not a very good attempt, and I don’t think it succeeded – which is no big deal.   But in this case, you were led to think this was the norm – that most games writing was actually analysis like this.

This is not at all the case, of course.  Most of the articles talked about the sick graphics, the incredible killer combos, the brutal death scenes, where to find all the easter eggs and paid lip service to the pretty-cool-but-really-unnecessary Nemesis system.  Just like all the old magazines did when they were printed on tree pulp.  These articles represent 95% of games media coverage, talking directly to gamers in their own language, and they rarely raise an eyebrow.  That tiny 5% though, the people who decide to try to write about games with unusual perspectives are the ones who cause outrage.

That 95% that doesn’t is also, frankly, not particularly useful to me as a craftsman.  Let’s face it, at this stage in my career, I’ve just about seen every possible description of awesome combos, sick graphics, etc humanly possible. The artistic and cultural critics who rile up GG also tend to make me think the most.

When I think about the game reviews and writing I’d like to see more of, it’s in general stuff that is more analytical.  I really like Extra Credits’ take on the subject of game reviews.  Watch it from about 2 minutes in – key thought:

“There’s no critique, only review.”

Film in general does a much better job of using criticism to elevate the art AS WELL AS telling the peasants whether they should shell out their hard earned cash.  This is kind of the opposite of what I’ve seen the momentum of GG pushing towards.  I keep seeing people pushing for ‘purely objective’ reviews, which leaves all commentary at the door and grades the game’s quality purely.  This is a review scheme that is more suited to a car or a dishwasher than a piece of art.  This is pretty clear when someone actually tries to WRITE a purely objective review, such as those who did so ironically for this joke website,  or those who did so apparently seriously for newly forged MRA/GG leaning site Reaxxion.

(Ironically, GG-fav Milo’s hilariously… Breitbartian … review for Dragon Age is a non-objective cultural criticism piece – the sorts of writing GG claims to hate — only this one comes from the other side of the usual culture divide ).

So what we have is a small cadre of cultural and artistic critics who write quite unlike the status quo, and a subset of gamers who give a shit what they say.  It’s hard to say how unique a problem this is to the games industry.  There are many film critics who have focused on progressing film as a medium artistically and culturally.  Most of them have total disdain for Michael Bay-type mass market pap, and to the people who buy tickets for them.  But there isn’t a whole lot of people going around arguing that the Pauline Kaels and Roger Eberts of the world are going to somehow destroy the medium.  And I’m assuming that Michael Bay is still cashing some pretty big checks.

In the real world, most people stick to media sources that they, you know, actually like. If you don’t like film critique, you’ll probably never care who Pauline Kael is.  However, games has a culture where the criticism is cross-pollinated by outrage.  People who are far outside of Polygon and Kotaku’s normal readerbase are directed to go there because OMFG BURN THE HERETIC!  And the sites have learned that having some disparate opinions and unique worldviews on games people are passionate about are effectively clickbait.  People like Erik make the mistake of thinking that, no, all gamers think alike, and therefore all gamer writers are talking down to them.   Despite the fact that numerous sites, including IGN & Gamespot (the market leaders) keep giving us triple helpings of exactly the ‘old’ style of journalism we’ve grown accustomed to.

Meanwhile, Polygon and Kotaku ACTUAL readership just keeps climbing, because it turns out there is quite a sizable market of people who WANT to talk about the artistic growth and cultural impact of the medium, and think that Polygon is doing just fine.  We live in a world where everybody games, and that means that there are a lot of different opinions and levels of passion on the discussion of them as well.

19 Comments

  1. Vhaegrant

    Well said.

    I’ve never understood the inability of some to appreciate that other people may look at things differently. It doesn’t mean they are wrong just that they have a different outlook and want something else from their entertainment.
    If it makes creative think more about their craft and encourages diversity then that is a good thing.
    Unfortunately, as games can be an expensive business, it follows that the ‘95%’ are the audience to be courted. Without really recognising that the ‘5%’ may actually open up into a far larger audience base.

    I’m not a great follower of Gamergate, aside from this site which I followed from the old Blog and Damion’s attachment to MMOs. I mentioned previously that I’d stopped reading pulp magazine reviews a long time ago and barely go to the web equivalent, relying instead on You Tube clips and waiting a week or two to see what the general reception is like.

    In the end you find a reviewer or two that you can attach some level of association to. What style of games they like, will they mark down certain aspects that you like, etc… As long as this is consistent it allows you to build up a relationship with a reviewer. In much the same way you can build up a relationship with a film critic. I find this far easier to keep track off on a You Tube feed than looking at the little hyperlink nametags at the top of written reviews.
    Besides with such a visual interactive medium I want to see the game in action, I want to get a feel of how long the load-screens are, how nauseous the colour schemes are, or how motion-sickness inducing the movement mechanics are.

    Of course I’m not naïve, I understand that the industry sees these outlets as a potential marketing device. Reviewers that want an early look get tied into NDAs and limitations on what they can write. I wasn’t that shocked by the ‘Shadows of Mordor’ revelations.

    When it comes to critique of games rather than reviews I try to find opinions that vary from mine. It is far more useful to challenge your the views you hold rather than just sit in a like minded group and agree with every one.
    I also think that there is far more to learn from a ‘Bad’ game than a ‘Good’ game. When you find a mechanic you like there is always the temptation to copy the feature, whereas finding an aspect you don’t like challenges you to think of ways in which you would handle it differently.

  2. Rimsin

    So how do you explain whole Mass Effect 3 ending debacle and huge divide between crtics and writers and playerbase ? I’ve never seen it being put on progresive- reactioanry scale tbh (maybe someone did idk). This animosity must be a real deal, and it reachas further then GG.

    • JubalTheLion

      Rimsin, regarding Mass Effect 3, I see some superficial similarities, namely that you had an outraged mob and a press with no idea how to engage with it (not that anyone does know how to do so).

      However, that’s kind of where the similarity ends. The issue wasn’t too much criticism, but a lack thereof. There was little talk about the ending, its quality, what it meant for someone who played the series, or why said people could be upset about it.

      Also, as Kain was firmly on the other side of that one, he might have brought that up for personal reasons rather than for relevance to the topic.

      • Rimsin

        But this appears time and time again, not as huge as with ME3 ending no. Critics and writers lay criticism and player base may only follow. If player base lay criticism, that means players are spoiled and entitled. Sure, there are situation when voice is unified: buggy games on release, obtrusive DRMs, but only because press already think it’s their idea in the first place. When something is coming from player base, like ME3 ending, critics are extremely weary not get associated with players, even if they are not satisfied with it and write a piece about it, they will always put a specific disclaimer “I’m not one of those entitled masses”. I certainly don’t see it with sports journalists or movie critics. Gaming audience lays heavily on the thought of game writers. I read movie reviews but where I live these movie critics very rarely or almost never put the thought (or to be more precisely put a pen or a key) to cinema audience: it’s out there, it may behave like this or like that but it’s no point to constantly position yourself towards it in your writing, kind of thing.

  3. Sinnach

    Kain tries entirely too hard to rationalize this as a natural reaction with two understandable, nearly equal factions. The problem with trying to portray this as pushback to critics and journalists is that no other media encounters the same sort of reaction.

    Sports media and political personalities easily have just as contentious a relationship as video game critics. Coverage is regularly swept aside as biased, corrupt shilling. Articles and outlooks are often dismissed out of hand because they don’t conform with readers point of view, and authors mocked or ostracized with extreme prejudice because the reader sides with a different team or political party.

    And yet it is almost unheard of for journalists in those venues to come under the degree of harassment and attack that video game critics have suffered, let alone the sustained and publicly supported vileness that permeates GG. Saying that the two don’t have a good source of discourse only goes so far in explaining the unique type of ugliness on display recently.

    This is going to drive GGers nuts but I think the primary difference between the revulsion some liberals feel towards conservative journalists (or vice-versa) and the revulsion GG feels for Polygon and Kotaku writers is entitlement. Politics and sports and close-fought battles that cause fans to come to grips with failure. Gamers simply don’t. The customer is always right, and traditional gamers are the customers. Political and sports coverage isn’t always going to be favorable, isn’t always going to take the reader’s side. Gaming coverage almost always has, and is just now beginning to adjust as the playerbase and demographics change.

    ..That’s without wading into the weeds to plug the dozen of other holes in his titanic. Feminism has a strong toehold in gaming? Really? Video game journalists are ‘perceived’ as being too close to the media? Why is it that only small, indie devs gets whacked for their close ties while AAA is given a free pass? Meanwhile, “there’s a perception that harassment of women might take place”? I’d say that’s a concrete reality now.

    • bob

      not really cutural commentary has ideological edges always. the difference might be games are mostly a mass medium where

      I think the primary difference between the revulsion some liberals feel towards conservative journalists (or vice-versa) and the revulsion GG feels for Polygon and Kotaku writers is entitlement

      i don’t know, one problem is this criticism doesn’t really come from a cultural middle (Like most political commentary) but one where the edges are emphasized. if you look at the revulsion conservatives feel towards someone like olbermann or liberals towards rush you’ll see the difference isn’t entitlement, there is no difference. Polygon and Kotaku and lots of blogs combine the idea that critical anaysis is good and the idea that the only correct vision is this hard left cultural vision and these two things dont follow (and indeed since films are an older medium with a more varied history this distinction is much easier to see)

  4. Owesome

    I think that the claim that the gaming press unanimously sided with Casey Hudson over the ME3 controversy is revisionist history.

    IIRC a lot of pixels were spilled over the quality of the ending taking both supportive and critical stances. The gaming press was more critical of the conduct of the game’s more fanatical critics, sure, but IMO saying “death threats and stalking is inappropriate” is hardly an extreme position to take.

    • Melissia (@MelissiaKuromoi)

      Gamergate seems to disagree with that, in my experience. I’ve gotten a rape threat in the past from them just for tweeting that almost word for word…

  5. Ricardo Lima

    Hes more rigth than you realize Damien there are the reasons so many are prone to belive one side over the others. The mutual distrust and dislike grew over years.

  6. Ricardo Lima

    And Damien how much impact the bad fan reaction around Swtor launch and Me3 ending, has with your perception of GG?

  7. Mike Damman

    I think a big reason why gaming media members can have such a dismissive attitude towards community driven controversies like the ME3 ending has to do with the environment they are in on a daily basis. Have you ever tried to join a game forum community? In any sizable one, there is no end to the griefers, the chronic complainers, the drama queens, the perennially banned… Nearly every discussion has someone hyperbolically crying foul over some news article or perceived slight to their favorite game. A games writer is spending upwards of 40 hours a week glued in to gaming websites, reading comments and forums, receiving PMs and emails, hearing this stuff and brushing it off because it’s nonsense.

    So something like the ME3 controversy comes along. From what I saw, plenty of critics regarded the ending as crappy. It’s unfortunate that a series with such a compelling build up and interesting characters duds out in the end, but oh well. On to the next game.

    The response from the community, though, isn’t just about the ending being bad. Large swathes of gamers claim it ruined the whole game, ruined the trilogy. They gripe at the sites for reviewing the game positively when the ending clearly destroyed the whole experience. They petition Bioware and call for class action lawsuits because the developer betrayed them. Also it’s EA’s fault because isn’t it always? All of this because the end decision and cut scene didn’t hold up to the high bar that had been made for the series.

    The games press calls these people entitled whiners because so many of them were being entitled whiners. You see people doing this every day on these gaming sites, and all of a sudden people across all the sites have one unified reason for it. And it’s not to say it makes them “bad” people. Many of them are just kids. They’re glued into games, lost in a sea of forum posters, and trying to be noticed. As we’re starting to see, many are also adults who have decided to use various internet communities to vent whatever frustrations they have directly towards others. And again, you have games press members who are used to seeing this every day, and have likely honed a thick skin and a snarky attitude themselves over years of being gamers on the internet. One or two “entitled manchildren” calls slip out and the rage grows and directs itself at the writers themselves. We all know where it goes from there.

    • John Henderson

      You know what most game community boards lack?

      Decent moderation.

      You know what the most prolific writers on the subject of their chosen entertainment form hate most?

      Moderation.

  8. Punished Gamer

    Most of the games press writes a fair amount of the lukewarm pap that recycles publisher buzzwords and shoves them back down our throats. For the most part, no one gives them a second glance.

    Quite the opposite. Kain’s entire point was that this kind of promotion is the real driving force behind the animosity between gamers and game journalists. Journalists have been aggressively promoting increasingly suspect products, and ignoring gamers who complain. Review scores have long since become notorious, and the active hostility on the part of games journalists criticizing the consumer-base has only increased in recent years.

    The bad blood has been a growing problem for some time. It’s the root of everything, especially the distrust in the recent blowup.

    ts a subset of games writers, those whom we will call artistic and cultural critics, who seem to provoke such a strong reaction.

    I would agree with this. Cultural critics do provoke a strong reaction among gamers. But there are reasons, contemporary, historical, and diplomatic for this, which do not involve gamers somehow resisting an inclusive or progressive message innately.

    Firstly, the aforementioned bad blood. You cannot as a media outlet promote a stinker in one article, insult your readers in a second, and then promote cultural criticism in a third. You’ve used up your credibility in the first, your good-will in the second, and by the time you hit the third your readers have no reason to believe you are sincere. In my opinion cultural criticism would have gotten a better, or at least softer reception, if its writers sat next to trusted reviewers on game sites. No-one’s done it to my knowledge, but if you put your cultural critic up next to Geoff Keighley, your message is in trouble.

    Secondly — and the majority of cultural critics simply do not appreciate this — video games have historically been under constant attack for “cultural” reasons for almost their entire history. Drugs, sex, violence, school shootings, murder, and now misogyny and transphobia, etc. Gaming has endured arguments against its existence for at least 30 years, and every time gamers had to fight off those who wanted muzzles put on the medium. To stride into gaming with new calls for cultural change and still expect a warm reception is the height of naivete.

    And to be blunt, the recent petitions for GTA V bans have to some extent justified those gamers who scented danger several years ago.

    The final reason is diplomatic. Again, if you are selling a message that video games are problematic or sexist, you need to be very careful not to insult your audience by saying or implying that they are problematic or sexist. But on the whole, cultural critics are pretty terrible at this — often directly stating that gamers are in some way sexist. This is insulting the vast majority of gamers who are not sexist, not misogynist, not exclusionary, and turns them off the message pretty quickly. And whatever about their explicit written works, the critics who let their hair down on twitter or associate or support others who directly insult gamers, don’t help the message at all.

    And what really doesn’t help is attacking anyone who objects to criticism as reactionary, or backward, or cisgendered, or an MRA, etc. This happens a lot when these matters are discussed and it drives away moderates pretty quickly and only annoys gamers even more. Cultural criticism has a following which seems determined to discredit it, and probably has done so in gaming for a generation or so. This is a huge problem, because no matter how positive and even necessary the message, Gamers and developers are going to be “reaching for their revolvers” every time they hear about culture for most of the next 10 years. I can honestly see the entire idea of “games as art” being shunned as too heated of a discussion due to events of recent years.

    One last thing: The language and framework of cultural criticism is extremely US centric. However, gaming is and always has been an international pastime — albeit with a large US presence. Personally, I had never heard of the terms “cis”, “MRA”, “Social Justice”, “third wave”, etc, before all of this and almost everything I know about them comes from my experience during Gamergate. I suspect I am far from alone. Learning about all of this while gamers have been compared to terrorists and ISIS, has been a surreal experience and at times a journey through insanity. I would recommend that a cultural studies major in search of a interesting topic could do worse than interview a few non-US gamers who have been involved in all of this. It’s probably the closest you’ll ever get to documenting a “Big Canoe” moment in your career.

    • John Henderson

      The idea that American gamers can’t handle an insult seems to be at the core of what you consider “interesting.” I think a lot more people like to complain about taking offense than actually take offense, and I also think a lot more people complain about “journalism” than actually recognize its role and seek it out.

      To put it another way, if someone describes a disagreeable or loathsome individual in a post on the Internet, unless they’re saying that it’s you personally, you don’t *have* to take offense at the characterization. But if you exhibit those characteristics and you don’t like how it sounds, then maybe the problem is the person in the mirror, rather than the one holding the mirror.

      Journalists are the ones who hold the mirror.

    • Easy Mode

      “Quite the opposite. Kain’s entire point was that this kind of promotion is the real driving force behind the animosity between gamers and game journalists. “

      But that doesn’t jibe with the reality of Gamergate. When GG supporters complain about journalism, they are usually complaining about games being criticised too harshly, not the pandering promotional reviews of AAA games.

      They mainly seem to be bothered by games being “marked down” by criticisms that they think don’t have any place in a game review, and claim they want it to just be about the technical factors like graphics – a viewpoint which only bolsters the “lukewarm pap” factor by favouring cookie-cutter AAA games with large budgets over more interesting games.

      “The language and framework of cultural criticism is extremely US centric. However, gaming is and always has been an international pastime — albeit with a large US presence. Personally, I had never heard of the terms “cis”, “MRA”, “Social Justice”, “third wave”, etc, …”

      There’s nothing US-centric about those terms, with the exception of “MRA”. The prefix “cis” is Latin, and is used in many areas of science. “Social Justice” is not a concept unique to America, nor is “third wave (feminism)”.

      However, “Men’s Rights Activism” is largely concentrated in the US. It does exist elsewhere, but seems largely to originate in Mens’ complaints about child custody battles in the US court system, and to a lesser degree things like “Affirmative Action”.

      But Gamergate itself is very much a US-based thing, so it’s to be expected. The very nature of Gamergate complaints mirrors the current political landscape in America, and you can see with the involvement of folk like Breitbart, there’s a lot of similarity with groups like the Tea Party and other neo-conservative reactionary movements.

      But as for the other terminology, just because you haven’t heard of it before, doesn’t make it US-centric. It just means it’s an area you haven’t studied. Those terms are in wide use globally in the relevant fields.

  9. Greg

    Bioshock and Red Dead Redemption spoilers below.

    My main issue with a lot of the cultural criticism is that it usually doesn’t seem particularly useful or relevant. Anita Sarkeesian in particular annoys me, because her entire act boils down to “these tropes involving women appear in media,” and then she basically claims without qualification that this is inherently bad. Many also seem to apply the same tools used for literary and movie criticism, but games are fundamentally different as an interactive medium, at least in my opinion.

    Bioshock can be seen as a sort of criticism of Ayn Rand’s works. It basically takes the concept of an absolute lack of interference and we see technology running out of control. What made it different for me was “would you kindly.” The game takes you along through a series of events, and you follow the waypoints, because that’s what games teach us to do. At some point in the middle, the main character finds out that he doesn’t have any free will, and beats a man to death without the player being able to do anything.

    From a literary perspective, it’s just some character finding out that he has no free will. It’s relatively unimportant, and it might even have to be fairly obvious. As a player, it really hits you; you held the control, you moved the character, and you generally had all the agency a player has in most FPS games. You run through a sequence of thoughts sorting out what it means that you never questioned what you were doing. It’s not some random character’s will that’s been subverted, it’s your own. It helps further the notion that even in absence of governmental interference, people won’t simply be free to do as they wish.

    Something similar was the end of Red Dead Redemption. The whole story is a sort of redemptive tale; a man trying to live his life well is dragged back into a world he thought he’d left behind by events beyond his control. He tries to work through a series of obligations to get back to a normal life with his family, doing many violent and somewhat frightening things along the way. After it seems like he’s succeeded and he’s living the life he wanted to live, the authorities still raid his farm. The final bit, where you pop out from behind cover, it immediately goes into deadeye mode, and you see that the overwhelming number of enemies means there’s no way to succeed, as a player, you feel the futility of it.

    The theme throughout the entire game was that ultimately, you can’t undo things you’ve done. Redemption is a goal, but sometimes, it’s one that can’t be attained. You had the controls, you were able to aim, you knew the mechanics, and you as the player, failed, because it was impossible to succeed. In a movie or book, you could see it as a flaw of the character, not as an inevitable outcome. Interactivity can, at the very least, change the impact greatly.

    As far as taking that stuff out of reviews, I still think it’s a good idea. It looks like there’s at least some shadiness between publishers and reviewers at times. There can be incentives to either downplay or upsell certain attributes of a game due to entanglement with commercial interests. If critique is separate from review, I just feel like it can be more independent. That’s the one thing I like about Anita Sarkeesian; her format is basically independent of commercial interests. I just also think she’s bad at social criticism, and that she wouldn’t have ever been taken seriously if not for the vitriol against her.

    • Greg

      Damn. I bad grammar. Biggest problem with being a day-drinker on Sundays and still interneting.

    • A person

      “My main issue with a lot of the cultural criticism is that it usually doesn’t seem particularly useful or relevant.”

      Headshot.

      There’s nothing inherently wrong with “cultural criticism”, but there’s something very wrong with most of it as it actually exists. For the most part it’s thoughtless and reactionary, endlessly recycling the same formulaic canards without any close examination of source material.

      Close reading is something most self-styled cultural critics (in gaming) don’t do at all. They do the opposite – extremely broad readings where the specific content is barely relevant. Their critiques often read like they just copied and pasted a critique of a totally different game and changed a few words around. They rely extremely heavily on stock phrases, stock criticism and endlessly remixing the same dozen or so words.

      If you want to provide a critique of a work, cultural or otherwise, you must first experience and try to understand the work, then engage with it at a certain level of specificity. The vast majority of VG critics simply don’t do this at all.

  10. bob

    i think the film comparison is more useful and double edged than the author thinks. The problem is that people get annoyed when works of art are held up to ideological standards not artistic ones. Thus while Ebert criticizing transformers explains part of the hostility it doesn’t explain the relevant part. The better analogy is people attacking the dark knight for being “fascist” because it’s politics were somewhat less than fully leftist or elevating bad movies because they tell a good progressive story. These scenarios seem to be the real equivalent to the better targets of gamergate and the demands of an objective reviewer (a bad term but one which is easily comprehend-able if you try). one can like better criticism (say kotaku) while hating the uniform cultural assumptions of the reviewers. in fact isn’t that the argument for things like affirmative action on the left? the answer is for incorporating more right leaning cultural critics (perhaps something like a righty version of slate
    http://themoderatevoice.com/26174/the-flight-and-foibles-of-culture-11/)

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