In on the killzoner

Above: PSXExtreme editors hunt for cowardly Edge dogs.

I spent several hours with Killzone 2 over the weekend. It's good. I like it. In fact, the best thing I can say for it is that when I wasn't playing it, it still occupied a lot of my brainspace. I still have more to play before I can review it properly, but, yeah, good game. Yet I couldn't get that PSXExtreme editorial out of my head. You know, the one that said:

We all know that Guerilla's title is one of the best FPSs ever made; anyone who knows this industry and has a functioning brain will admit to this. They may not like it, but they will admit to its quality. This is what good reviewers do.

And I'm wondering, what else would good reviewers do? They'd probably talk about an unstable multiplayer experience, one which is reportedly costing people significant time and progress when it crashes on them deep into a match.

They might note a lack of campaign co-op, which wouldn't be a big deal if the campaign didn't saddle you with an AI partner for nearly its entire play time. As these things go, the AI is pretty good, but strategy and flanking maneuvers are nigh impossible. Live co-op would be far preferable.

While we're on that subject, how come playing the game demands that you heal your fallen comrades over and over, but they're unable to return the favor? Not that it really matters, since the checkpoints are so close together. But it's the principle of the thing.

(And one cheap shot: Why does the healing beam resemble a 1950s ray gun? It makes me laugh every time. It looks like a prop from a black-and-white TV show, where a guy in long underwear is fighting a robot made out of cardboard boxes.)

While admitting to Killzone's quality, they might point to areas in which the quality falters, such as the massive clipping issues on the train level. First, my wounded partner fell through the floor into an unreachable area. I could not heal him, and we could not advance. Next, I walked through a wall and was trapped (though well defended!). I had to blow myself up with a grenade in order to try again.

Finally, a good reviewer might point out that Killzone 2 doesn't have an original idea in its head -- not in terms of storyline, art direction, combat dynamics, level design, and so on. It looks and feels like a mash-up of almost every good shooter that's come out in the past few years. There's an aesthetic and narrative that borrows freely from Gears of War, an approach to killbox-style firefights that hails from the Call of Duty school, and a duck-and-cover mechanism that owes a lot to Rainbow Six Vegas.

None of this is to disparage Killzone. If you're going to steal, you should steal from the best. Barring any unforeseen catastrophes, I look forward to writing a positive review. No, this is to disparage, once again, the above-mentioned editorial, which has only become more nonsensical now that I've actually played the game. What good reviewers do is call a game like they see it, warts and all.

Request hour: The hardcasualist's lament, review scores, and underrated games

Tyler echoes the hardcasualist's lament:

I don't play games that often. I own a Playstation 2, and own exactly zero games for it since I lost Guitar Hero. Other than that, I'll pull out the rare old favorite for the PC, play some web-based game, or load something on my iPhone. Occasionally there's a game I really want to play (Rock Band 2!), but to lay out the cash for a current console and a game or two is just not reasonable. Basically, the bar to entry for an extremely casual gamer is way too high.

Never mind that, I'm not even sure I'd be able to figure out how to play some of the newest games coming out before getting frustrated and giving up.

What should the video game industry do about us old fogeys who have more interest in games than Windows Solitaire, but not enough to go buy a PS3? Are there PC games that are more than browser-based time-wasters but don't require the latest and greatest hardware? Or are mobile devices the next gaming platform? Or what?

I was going to say that Nintendo had people like you in mind with the Wii, but that's actually not the case. The Wii was made for lapsed gamers, not people who were priced out of the next generation. There is still a large segment of people who want the graphics and the "hardcore" experiences of the PS3 and 360, but aren't willing to commit the capital. And let's face it: the so-called casual market, the one that plays Peggle and Bejeweled, is another group of people entirely. There's kind of a donut hole here.

But: the PlayStation 2 is actually still getting quite a bit of support, including Rock Band 2. You just can't download new tracks. And some noteworthy PC developers, like Valve and Blizzard, make sure to support lower-end systems, which means you don't need a cutting-edge system to play Left 4 Dead or World of Warcraft. Additionally, the Xbox 360 is rapidly approaching a true mass-market price point, so before long it may be a perfectly reasonable expenditure.

I think the most interesting part of this question is in the middle, though, about trying to learn how to play some of these new games. It's a real problem. I remember experiencing a moment of panic the first time I ever held the original Xbox controller, thinking "This is too much." But ultimately, playing games is work. They ask a lot of you. It's a matter of how much effort you're willing to put in to get out what's there.

I think the trick is to know what kind of complexity is right for you. For example, I'm fine at handling all the button combinations necessary to play a first-person shooter, but you can't streamline the interface of a strategy game enough for me. Think about it this way, too: you're a fan of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but those certainly weren't easy to learn.

Danilo Vujevic really asked:

Do critic review scores actually mean anything?

A score can be helpful, but it's not the whole story. I make no secret of my love for Metacritic: it's an excellent way to get a snapshot of conventional wisdom. And it's often right. Games with a Metacritic score of 90 or above, in many cases, are games that I think are fully deserving. Having said that, I'm usually more interested in the score that goes completely against the grain. I'd rather read the dissenting view of a game like Fallout or Grand Theft Auto than another one that calls it the greatest game of all time. And I'm often intrigued when a game's Metacritic spread spans 40 points or more. So I guess I'd sum it up by saying that scores do mean something, but you're doing yourself a disservice if you rely on them exclusively.

Matthew Gallant asked:

What games do you feel are critically underappreciated? Games you loved that were overlooked by both bloggers and the gaming community at large.

I would have said both Yakuza and The Darkness, but at least in my circles those both seem to have gotten a little more attention recently. I still think they're both underrated and overlooked in the world at large, though. Both games have excellent stories starring fascinating lead characters, and showcase strong play mechanics. The Darkness, in particular, didn't get nearly enough credit for how well it executed its basic gameplay. Snaking along the ground as a tentacle before lashing up and eating an enemy's heart just never got old.

I'd love to dazzle you with some out-of-left-field pick from years ago, but my tastes have always run to the mainstream. Most of the games I'd pick are probably not under-represented in the hearts of people who read gaming blogs -- games like System Shock and (surprise!) The Secret of Monkey Island. But maybe you'd be surprised to learn of my deep, abiding love for FreeCell, the free Windows pack-in.

To be continued on Monday.

Know it when I see it

We talk a lot on the Internet about an ideal for game reviewing. There's no shortage of helpful suggestions out there on blog posts and in forums, which often contain many correctly spelled words. One of the articles of faith among a certain anti-establishment type is that reviewers should complete games before reviewing. I agree with this, generally.

But.

What about when a game just seems bad? How much time and effort are you supposed to put into something that seems disastrous from the start, hoping maybe it'll get better? I'm not talking about games that are slow to get started. It took me a good 4-5 hours to surrender fully to Far Cry 2, which turned out to be one of my favorite games of 2008. Near the beginning of Fallout, I was scratching my head about some of the quest objectives, but 40 hours later that seems irrelevant. Both of these games, though, showed enough of what was good about them to keep me interested until I was fully engaged.

No, I'm talking about games that start off bad and show no signs of changing tactics. Games that seem to be systemically flawed, whether you're talking about bewildering design decisions or rudimentary errors of execution. The kind of game that, if you'd rented it from GameFly, would have been back in the mail the next day. These games are easy to identify right from the start. I've played a lot of games that seemed good off the bat before descending into mediocrity, but rarely have I played the game that seems terrible and winds up being genuinely good.

It's times like this that I have to remind myself that this is work and not play. That's easy to forget during the good times, when I can't believe some sucker is paying me to play Left 4 Dead. I probably am not going to complete this game (what game is he talking about, anyway?), but I am going to continue playing it even though my sanity would have had me stop long ago. Sometimes I envy film reviewers, because a bad movie is rarely going to be longer than two hours. Two hours in a video game might not even be long enough to finish the tutorial.

I am curious to know what you guys think: How long do you need to play a game to know it's bad? The tautology I've used in the past is "long enough to know it's bad," but I'm looking for an estimate of real hours. One hour? Two? Six? Ten?

Reviews symposium: Partly, badly realized

Let's all welcome Shawn Elliott back to Blogistan. Hopefully they're not working his fingers to the bone at 2K Boston, and he'll have plenty of time to favor us with some posts. In the inaugural post at his new blog, Shawn posits a series of questions about the ethics and practices of game reviews. It's interesting stuff, and fodder for serious discussion. (Just like a LiveJournal meme!) I figured I'd go ahead and answer his questions. Maybe some of you will have reactions of your own to share in comments.

Question 1: How much is on our minds before we begin playing any given game for review purposes? Will we imagine a range of probable scores that a heavily marketed, highly budgeted, and hugely anticipated game will get? What when the game is branded "budget" or is the work of a lesser-known, less-storied studio? If so, how closely have actual scores correlated with our assumptions?

As little as possible, if I can help it. Generally the games we opt to cover at the Phoenix are high-profile ones, although it's nice once in a while to seek out something a bit more obscure. Even so, I try to avoid reading too much preview copy, or knowing more than the bare minimum about a game before I play it. That seems like the best way to be fair. Sometimes a little foreknowledge is unavoidable, though, such as when playing a sequel or a game from a distinctive development house. I think that's okay, particularly if you mention it during the review.

Question 2: Ought reviewers settle on a score before, during, or after writing a review? How consistent are our practices with our prescriptions? Have we, for instance, revised a score after writing our reviews, even though we advocate against it, and if so, why?

I don't know how much it matters. Most of the time I assign the score before I write the text, although there have been numerous occasions in which I've changed the score after writing the review. Usually it's a matter of a half a point, but it's happened on both ends of the scale. I've written reviews and thought, "This sounds like a 9.0 instead of an 8.5," and I've said, "This sounds like a 4.0 instead of a 4.5." Sometimes the process of writing a review can clarify your thoughts about a game in a way that thinking about it cannot. Reviewers ought to do what works for them. (I don't see why you'd advocate against changing your score, either.) If the review and the score don't seem to agree, one of them should be changed.

Question 3: When possible, do we look at the scores that other critics give to the games that we're reviewing, as we review them? If so, are groupthink or iconoclasty potential problems?

Never. Never. I go out of my way to avoid reading other reviews or looking at a game's Metacritic score until after I've written my own review. Whether you think you're impervious to this kind of influence, it's got to stick in your mind at least a little bit if you disagree with the masses. Why take the risk? 9 times out of 10 it seems like my score is right on the Metacritic money, but that 1 other time is where your integrity lies.

Question 4: Often times we will have repeatedly played and/or previewed games in development prior to reviewing them. Does this familiarity with a particular game's developmental process influence the scores that we assign to the final product in the way that a professor will take into consideration her students' limitations and proven potential when she evaluates papers at the end of the semester?

This has never come up. In fact, I'm still angry at Harmonix for not showing me the Guitar Hero prototype that must have been somewhere in their office when I visited. Frankly, I'm not sure how I'd handle such a situation. On one hand, a better knowledge of the challenges developers face might help me write more informed reviews. On the other hand, it's not my job to review what should have been, or what I know the developer wishes had been. I'd like my first exposure to a game to be its completed form.

Question 5: Review writing carries real consequence, especially among members of the enthusiast press. Once-warm PR people and game producers can become cold upon our publication of undesirable review scores, diminishing or eliminating our ability to secure subsequent interviews and access. Postmortem discussions and exclusive looks at the publisher and/or developer's forthcoming products are less likely. Conversely, a few publishers will permit us to post reviews before competitors, provided our review scores are favorable. Do such pressures produce a subliminal background or even enter our thoughts as we write reviews and assign scores?

Again, hasn't come up -- one of the benefits of writing for non-enthusiast publications. I have to say, I don't know how I'd handle it if I had actual relationships with PR folks. I have a horrible tendency to tell people what I think they want to hear.

Question 6: Is grade inflation an ongoing problem?

Less so than the habit of declaring games "one of the best," "one of the most," or "important," before we've even had a chance to let the disc drive stop spinning. Look, scores probably are too high. Everyone seems to agree on this. But I think the Metacritic model has largely done away with this problem. Can you tell the difference between a score of 9.6 and 9.7? Not on one site, no. But in the aggregate, yes. That is, a 10-point difference in a Metacritic score usually seems definitive to me, even if both games are scored too high.

Question 7: Do scores determine our tone? Can a "3" encourage us to explain an aspect of a game in clearly negative terms where our attitude is actually less decided? Example: Game X's camera obscures the action, combat is irritatingly difficult, and "save" stations are few and far between. In our reviews, is Game X's plot, which we're still thinking through, more likely to become miserable than plain?

In this case, I would probably skip discussion of the plot altogether, or mention it briefly as one case in which the game is not a total loss. Here's why: In this scenario, the game's plot, however strong, obviously could not overcome the game's other flaws. Therefore, who cares about it? It may be worth the mention for readers who might be interested, but, personally, I don't think it's the critic's job to try to divine what hypothetical human being might enjoy each and every game. It's the critic's job to be honest about his experience.

Question 8: Do scores encourage our readers to conduct a sort of text-to-number calculus where the two obviously negative statements in an otherwise positive-sounding review necessarily translate into every point deducted from the "10" that the game didn't get? Does this make reviews with high marks more likely to overlook fault, and reviews with low marks less likely to celebrate accomplishment?

If so, whose problem is that? But just as with the situation above, if a reviewer thinks a game deserves a 9 or a 10 despite some fault or another, I'm not sure how important it is to mention that. This does get at the basic problem of the scoring system in general. It's important to remember how much people really like scores, though, and how useful aggregators have turned out to be. I don't think the solution is to throw out scores entirely, tempting though it may sometimes be. The best a reviewer can do is try to be consistent. (Note: No one will ever accomplish this.)

Question 9: Which is more important to us, our scores or our copy? If the latter, have our responses revealed any inconsistencies between our attitudes and actions? Are we still convinced of the importance and power of scores?

Copy, copy, copy. Any writer would tell you that. Nothing is more important to me than the text of my own reviews. But I'll let the readers tell me whether my responses have revealed inconsistencies between my attitude and my actions. I don't think so, but I'm not the best judge of that.

Related suggestions for Ethics section:
Have we ever submitted review scores to publishers prior to their publication? If so, why?

No.

Have we ever submitted review copy to publishers prior to its publication. If so, why?

No.

Have PR people suggested that specific critics review specific games? Have we complied with their suggestions?

No.

Reviews Vs Criticism
Question 1: What is the object of a review? What are the review writer's obligations?

This depends on the outlet. I actually do think the big sites should be acting as consumer advocates, even if I wish they were a little bit more adept at doing so. For myself, and for the kind of writing I find most interesting, I think the point of a review is to illuminate what a game is actually about, beyond the surface level of the plot and the play mechanics. How do they intersect? How do the game's apparent goals seem to mesh or conflict with its execution? What is this game trying to say? A reviewer's obligation is an honest and thorough attempt to find both the question and the answer.

Question 2: If the purpose of a review is to suggest to consumers how they should spend their time and money, why do we avoid less-granular grading scales such as Buy, Try, or Avoid? Example: Giant Bomb founder and former Gamespot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann told MTV's Multiplayer blog that “'How can I save people money today?' is basically the kind of mentality that I tackle this stuff with.” Under Gerstmann's directorship, Gamespot reviewed games on a hundred-point scale. Is a 9.6 different than a 9.7 when the wisdom of a purchase is what the reviewer wants to communicate?

Well, I don't think this is the purpose of all reviews. Like I said, for Gamespot or IGN, it probably is, and that's valuable in its own right. But for what I'm after in reviews, it doesn't matter if a game costs $100, or is free. I want what I say about it today to be true whether it's brand-new, part of a "Greatest Hits" collection, or even eventually available for free as abandonware. I probably don't always meet that goal, but it is the goal.

Question 3: Actual sales rarely correlate with review scores in cases where games are not also heavily hyped and marketed. Increasingly, gamers pre-order games prior to the publication of reviews. Interactive demos allow our audiences to decide for themselves whether or not a game will be worth their dollars. In addition, word of mouth and message board discussions inform our potential audiences' purchasing decisions with an intimacy and directness that we cannot provide. Finally, review aggregation sites such as Metacritic mute the bias of individual reviewers and provide a bigger picture. Do these circumstances suggest that our self-perception is, well, delusional – a throwback to a time when magazines and websites were gaming's gatekeepers? If our audiences believe this, even if we do not, what are they really reading for?

I don't think my self-perception is what Shawn implies here. I've had too many conversations with Phoenix readers who weren't aware that the paper even runs game reviews to get too full of myself. But this is part of the argument for deeper, better game reviews. It's good that gamers can decide on their own what to get, thanks to demos. It's not so good that a well-oiled PR campaign can turn an iffy game into a million-seller. If reviewers want to consider themselves gatekeepers, they are doing a very bad job of it -- numerous and varied counterexamples not withstanding.

Question 4: Can criticism (concerned with telling our audiences what they're spending time and/or money playing as opposed to whether or not a game is worth spending time and/or money to play) coexist with reviews? Is a competent review also a critique -- as is so often the case where lit, movies, and music are concerned -- or should we separate the two?

I think the best reviews would have a little from column A and a little from column B. If a review is written well enough, even if it leaves out some things that might be important, a reader should still get an idea of the game's gestalt experience. They may read a positive review and be convinced that a game is not for them, or read a negative review that nevertheless convinces them to give the game a chance. The goal isn't for readers to agree with everything the reviewer says, but for the reviewer to provide food for thought.

Question 5: What can (or should) such criticism take into account?

I think I got to this up above somewhere, but to distill it, I'll paraphrase Roger Ebert: "What is this game about, and how is it about it?" I'm still irked by criticisms of No More Heroes that complained about jagged graphics and the limits of the Santa Destroy overworld. The game was a satire. Those things were manifestly the point of the game. Now, a reviewer may still fairly dislike the game for these reasons and more, but it was a dereliction of duty not to accurately interpret the game's intent. On a broader scale, I believe games have a responsibility to be user-friendly, thoughtful, and moral (not moralistic). These are all things I try to think about when I write a game review.

Quiz: The Year in Swooning

Match each of these games with the breathless excerpt from its review.

1. Grand Theft Auto IV
2. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
3. Dead Space
4. Far Cry 2
5. LittleBigPlanet
6. Fable 2
7. Fallout 3
8. Resistance 2

A. "Is it possible to give a game an 11? If so, this would be the game that would merit that score."

B. "I now know how film critics felt after screening "The Godfather." ...doesn't just raise the bar for the storied franchise; it completely changes the landscape of gaming."

C. "It is not hyperbole... an achievement that rivals greats like Half-Life 2 and BioShock. Its nuanced and labyrinthine plot, fully-realized characters and devastating attention to minute graphical details are beyond reproach."

D. "...a staggering, genre-defining achievement - marrying an utterly immersive world, memorable characters, incredible production values, some of the most inspired ... mechanics ever devised and so much heart ... Stands so far ahead of the majority of the games ... that it would be a crime against gaming not to laud this title as anything other than a masterpiece."

E. "...a landmark title that fundamentally changes the genre. Better than the original in every way, it is an amazingly rich adventure packed with anything and everything from exploration to fierce gun battles to harrowing car chases. It's incredibly polished, enormous in scope, and one of the best games of 2008."

F. "While the single-player experience is a great tale with an epic scope, it is equaled, and perhaps surpassed, by the multiplayer modes, which are perhaps some of the best I've ever played, and I'm particularly picky about my multiplayer."

G. "...one of the most important games to be released this decade. A tall order with the hype machine running overtime for the game but the way it reinvents how video games are played is sure to have lasting effects indefinitely."

H. "One of the greatest RPG’s ever made, a must own game for fans of the genre and anyone who wants to experience something truly unique."

Answers:

1. B (Game Informer)
2. A (IGN)
3. C (GameSpy)
4. E (GameShark)
5. G (Kombo)
6. H (WonderwallWeb)
7. D (Xbox World 360)
8. F (IGN)

Give me good writing

Critics who write so everybody can understand everything are actually engaging in a kind of ventriloquism -- working as their own dummies. They are pretending to know less than they do. But critics who write for other critics are hardly more honest, since they are sending a message to millions that only hundreds will understand. It's a waste of postage.

--Roger Ebert

Ever since I wrote "Do readers want intelligent games criticism? Do writers?" I've been fighting this nagging feeling that I got something fundamentally wrong. There were some good points in there, and the question of why so many published writers need a blog to express their "true" voices is one that deserves an answer. But I didn't answer it. And I didn't get to the heart of the matter.

The fact is, there is plenty of intelligent games criticism out there. Academics like Henry Jenkins and James Paul Gee crank out serious, high-minded looks at the mechanics of games that have nothing to do with assigning a "fun factor" and everything to do with expanding our pereceptions of what games are and what they can do. Guys like Ian Bogost and Simon Carless are on the front lines every day pushing for serious, independent games -- and game criticism. These may not be the most visible writers around, but they're not hard to find. And they're doing important work.

What they're not doing, though, is writing for a general audience. They're not producing great essays that stand alone. And that's true of most of the best videogame writers I can think of.

Don't misunderstand: Everyone I've mentioned, and everyone I'm discussing by inference, does great, valuable (even invaluable) work. I'm just saying that they're writing for a niche audience. You have to care about games before you can appreciate what they're doing. You have to know and understand things about video games that 99% of gamers will never think about. Think of them as the garage band that inspires the next generation of platinum-selling artists. They're helping to shape what we'll all be playing down the road.

But what happens when game critics do write for a general audience? Yesterday, I spotlighted what I thought was some shoddy workmanship in an IGN review. Perhaps it was a little unfair to engage in that kind of drive-by criticism, so let me expand a bit.

IGN does a great many useful things for your average gamer. They deliver truckloads of previews, reviews, screenshots, videos, and news on a daily basis. They do that well. What they don't do is write compelling criticism. And why should they? That's not their charge. It's also not where the revenue is. The last thing on their minds ought to be advancing game criticism as its own art form. They'd probably end up alienating their core audience.

The problem here is the lack of separation between video games as a medium, and criticism of video games as a medium. What we still lack are the critics who can split the difference that Roger Ebert talks about in the epigraph to this post. No one has ever bridged that gap quite like the man himself. I don't need to be interested in a movie he's reviewing to want to read his review. I read Ebert, and I come away enlightened and entertained -- just as when I watch a good movie, or play a good game.

Where's the middle ground? Where's the thoughtful, incisive criticism that is nevertheless accessible to a general audience? Where are the game reviews that are worth reading on their own merits? They're out there. I've lauded the work of Tom Chick before, and I think he comes the closest to what I'm talking about. The Escapist sometimes does, too.

As usual, it's easy to identify a problem without offering a solution, or even -- as I just did -- pretending that extant solutions aren't sufficient. Ultimately, my aim is selfish. I love to play games. I love to read. I want to be able to love reading about games.

Do readers want intelligent games criticism? Do writers?

Mike Walbridge interviewed me for his latest "Game Anthropologist" column over at GameSetWatch. I thank him for including my rambling, incoherent thoughts alongside insights from some heavy hitters, including N'Gai Croal from Newsweek, Kieron Gillen from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and Shawn Elliott from 1up.com. The subject: The state of intelligent games criticism.

Without knowing how much was left on the cutting room floor, I get the impression that nobody is too sanguine about the state of the art. Of the writers interviewed, most contribute to fairly popular, mainstream paper-and-ink publications. Yet, to a man, it seems like we all see our blogs as the only place we can write about games the way we really want to.

N'Gai says all the interesting writing is being done online. Leigh says her blog is the outlet for her voice (which, presumably, means that Kotaku and Variety are not). Shawn says his blog is a place for him to try writing about games as it should be done (again, implying that Ziff-Davis publications aren't). I feel the same way. Although the quote wasn't used in the piece, I said as much to Mike -- that Insult Swordfighting is the place I can say what I actually want to say.

That's strange. Writing for publications as diverse as Kotaku, Newsweek, the Phoenix, and Games for Windows, and we all feel like -- what? Like we're not serving our readers as best we could? What's the implication here? Are we speaking the softest into the biggest megaphones? Do we think the larger audiences are somehow unready for the brilliance we're slinging on the side? If I didn't know better, I'd think this signaled contempt for the readership.

But that's not the case. If anything, this article makes it clear that most of us have faith that things are heading in the right direction, slowly but inexorably. For one thing, you do have to keep your audience in mind when you're writing for a magazine or a newspaper. You have to remember who you're working for. I see the typical Phoenix reader not as a career gamer, so it doesn't make sense to try to talk to them on that level. Instead, I try to talk put the game in a context they'd understand, focusing on things like story and theme when possible.

Am I sure that I've got this hypothetical reader pegged? No. It's a question of intuition more than anything else. But it's always at the forefront of my mind when I write for the Phoenix. Years from now, I think that reader will have much more of an intimate relationship with games, and the style of review will be different at the time. Still, on a blog, that question never comes up. You write what you want, and the readers either come or they don't. Usually, they don't.

You can't ignore the hard numbers. People want newsbites and they want review scores. Web users just don't want to read long, involved essays. As readers migrate from print to the Web, savvy publishers are going to continue to break their content down into easily digestable chunks of fast facts. I'm not suggesting that this indicates a dumbing down of the general population -- it may even be the opposite, as more and more people get online -- but writers and readers may be at odds as far as what they want criticism to look like. And in every case when such a conflict arises, the readers will win. (As they should!)

Of course, there is still an audience for this stuff. People do read The Brainy Gamer and Save the Robot -- just not in the numbers they read IGN or Gamespot. When 1up editors like Shawn Elliott and Jeremy Parish explore the studio space in their personal blogs, they're reaching readers, too. The level of discourse in games coverage is higher than it's ever been, even if you have to hunt for it a little bit. But even that is starting to change. Mike's article is evidence of that.

It won't happen overnight. If good writers are committed to improving the quality of all writing, then there's really no other choice but to keep at it and hope our efforts bubble up through our blogs and into the "real" publications. We have to do this. We're writers.

Two sides to every review

Via GameSetWatch, I read an interesting thread on NeoGAF about Gamespot's Army of Two review. (Is that enough links in one sentence for you?) The complaint is that the reviewer, Joe Dodson, centered his critique on the game's storyline and themes, and therefore failed to do his job. Worse, the original poster seems to feel that such considerations have no place in game reviews. As somebody who tries to base most of his reviews on issues of story and theme, I frankly found this troubling.

So I was heartened to read both the review in question, and many of the dissenting replies in the thread. I have a couple of possibly unfair prejudices in mind about Gamespot and NeoGAF. The former has often seemed dry and snooty to me, and the latter has seemed like the Internet's petri dish. Gamespot's review says, basically, that Army of Two is a fun game with some troubling overtones. (In fact, the bulk of the review deals with gameplay issues, and not the storyline.) I haven't played the game too much yet, but from my experience so far, Gamespot's take seems about right.

This is the first game I'm aware of that explicitly name-checks 9/11, to the point where an early cinematic shows a character waking up to see an image of the Twin Towers burning on his television. How do you see that and still say this is just a game? How do you play the rest of the game -- which is about Blackwater-esque mercenaries fighting in such fantastic locales as Afghanistan and Iraq -- without constantly drawing parallels to the real world? I'd suggest that if you can play this game without once considering the issues it raises, maybe you really are desensitized.

To be clear: I'm not saying any of this is out-of-bounds for a game. In fact, I think it took some serious stones for Army of Two's developers to go this route, and for EA to publish it. This is the world we live in, and I'm glad to see a game embrace that. The only problem I'm having so far is that, even in the short time I've played it, the undertones keep shifting under my feet. It seems thematically confused. On one hand, it's goofball satire, with braindead and vaguely homoerotic interplay between the two leads, and hyperbolic portrayals of suicide bombers who run toward you shrieking and waving their hands above their heads. On the other, it trends toward distressing realism when talking about the uneasy balance between the military and unaccountable private contractors. It's possible this all gets tied together in a cohesive way before it's all said and done, so I don't want to go too far with it just yet. I only want to emphasize that the angle Gamespot took in reviewing Army of Two is a legitimate one.

And I'm glad that so many of the commenters on NeoGAF seem to agree. A significant number of them don't, and think that reviews should stick to the basic issues of graphics, play control, and so on. That, too, is defensible. But it's less interesting to me than more critical game reviews, and most people seem to agree that critical game reviews are what we currently lack. This comment summed up the dischord in the thread:

The videogame media are a bunch of parochial idiots for just mechanically praising games on graphics, sound, sex, and violence in reviews, instead of being more mature and evaluating games as an entertainment medium with storytelling, characterization, and a cultural context.

The videogame media are also idiots for evaluating games as an entertainment medium with storytelling, characterization, and a cultural context instead of just telling me how the graphics are and whether the game is worth playing.

Or something like that.

Well put, but let's not forget that there's room for both kinds of reviews. It may be fair to criticize Gamespot for publishing this particular Army of Two review when they've made their bones by catering to hardcore gamers with a more straight-ahead editorial style. I happen to think someone could write an interesting and enlightening review of the game without spending more than a token passage or two talking about the gameplay. A game that explicitly raises topical issues absolutely deserves to be dealt with on that level, if not by every reviewer.

What is Army of Two trying to say? Does it succeed in saying it? These are the kinds of questions we ask without hesitation of books, movies, and music. I've said it before, and I'll say it again now: If we want the broader public to treat games with the respect we think they deserve, then it's our responsibility to set the example. That means answering these kinds of questions first, before people like Jack Thompson try to answer them for us.

The difference between reviews and criticism

Pat Duggan sends a link to a piece at Play This Thing!, titled "Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren't It." The premise is one that has been bounced around for years, and which seems to be popping up with increasing frequency: that the vast majority of game reviews really aren't criticism at all. As this piece puts it:

A review is a buyer's guide. It exists to tell you about some new product that you can buy, and whether you should or should not buy it...

Criticism is an informed discussion, by an intelligent and knowledgeable observer of a medium, of the merits and importance (or lack thereof) of a particular work. Criticism isn't intended to help the reader decide whether or not to plunk down money on something; some readers' purchase decisions may be influenced, but guiding their decisions is not the purpose of the critical work. Criticism is, in a sense merely "writing about" -- about art, about dance, about theater, about writing, about a game--about any particular work of art.

The piece argues that the games press is well stocked with "reviewers," and totally lacking in "critics." You can go anywhere for a Consumer Reports-style look at a game, but it's tough to find any really insightful or illuminating critics -- especially someone whose reviews are strong enough to stand on their own as readable essays. I don't disagree with this. The places people tend to identify with game reviews -- IGN, Gamespot, Game Informer, etc. -- take a rudimentary approach to their craft. I do disagree with this point:

The truth is that, for the most part, we don't have anything like game criticism, and we need it -- to inform gamers, to hold developers to task, and to inform our broader cultural understanding of games and their importance and impact on our culture.

That "for the most part" is key, because you have have to dig to find what this person is looking for. But that doesn't mean it's not out there. Lots of the writers on my blog roll take a more critical approach to games, like Leigh Alexander, Michael Abbott, and Chris Dahlen, and so do I. Whole blogs exist to fill precisely this alleged void, like Critical-Gaming. Paste publishes a page full of critical game reviews every month, and that's a popular national magazine. What about The Escapist?

Do we have the equal of Pauline Kael yet? No, not that I know of, and if there is, she's certainly not getting published in anything like the New Yorker. But that doesn't mean she's not out there. It may simply mean we haven't found her blog yet. The implication of something like this, too, is that Kaels abound in the world of film. It's not so. Most movie reviewers are guilty of the same sins as game reviewers, even if they tend to be more witty and literate across the board. The piece calls out Roger Ebert as more of a reviewer than a critic, but hell, if a game reviewer ever won a Pulitzer as Ebert has, I'd consider that a victory for all of us.

I'm glad Play This Thing! brought up Ebert, in fact, and not just because of the controversy he's ignited in the gaming community of late. He's one of my few heroes in the world of criticism/reviewing/whatever, and not just because he's a wonderful writer who can find something interesting to say about the most boring of films. It's because the man cares, and cares deeply, about movies. He doesn't let ugly or cynical films slide because they're "just movies." He believes in the promise of films to bring us to a higher emotional and spiritual plane. When that doesn't happen, you can tell he's disappointed. That brings me to what I think is the most important and true bit in this whole piece:

The point is that a critic has to take his subject seriously, as an example of art, or at least of craft; and take seriously as well the intentionality of the creator, and the importance to those who experience the results of the results, and the impact on how they think and feel.

This, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with game reviews today. Which is not to say that it's true of all reviews or reviewers -- only that when and where reviews fail, this is most often the reason. We are happy not to take games seriously. We treat them as playthings.

Which, to be fair, some are. Not every game may be worthy of the critical approach, quite honestly. Good ones are. Some bad ones are. The wasteland of acceptable, unremarkable fare isn't worth the time or attention, I don't think. I'm happy to be proved wrong on this point. But right now I'm playing through a game called The Club, a pretty rote exercise in skill-based gaming, and I can't even fathom applying to it the slightest intellectual rigor. It's not a bad game -- certainly entertaining enough in spots -- but it is a game with literally nothing on its mind. Therefore, I will take an entirely different approach to reviewing it than I did, say, No More Heroes. The point is that each review should be tailored to the game, rather than trying to cram each game into the same review template.

As ever, the best way to fill the void of critical gaming discourse is to begin to discourse critically about games. It is valuable to point out where the games press is failing readers, but just as with criticizing a game, it takes more than simply identifying flaws. It's about aspiring to an ideal. It's about demanding more from our games and from ourselves. The corporate sites won't do it, because it doesn't make sense financially. They're already getting the biggest slice of the pie -- why change? That means it's up to bloggers and independent sites to dig deeper. There are plenty of us out here. If we lead, the readers will follow.

And then -- only then -- so will the publishers.