Yeah, a big part of What Remains of Edith Finch’s hype came from casual gamers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game, but its popularity was buoyed by people who rarely played games. I’ve heard people I know IRL who never play games before suddenly race about it.
Yeah, a big part of What Remains of Edith Finch’s hype came from casual gamers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game, but its popularity was buoyed by people who rarely played games. I’ve heard people I know IRL who never play games before suddenly race about it.
truly incredible to me that the big enduring copypasta complaint here is "some walking simulators got some good reviews ten years ago" and the complaint even includes the concession that the games were good! so what are we even talking about?
even if one concedes that Edith Finch necessarily appealed to more casual gamers, okay, but what is supposed significance of that fact? casual gamers are gamers! it's right there in the name! and also, re earlier points, what does being "good" at video games have to do with anything? criticism isn't esports! being a gamer in general isn't esports! plenty of people who play a lot of video games are bad at video games! either in general or maybe bad a certain kinds of games despite being good at other kinds of games. we can log into the ranked mode of countless online multiplayer games and quickly witness this reality for ourselves.
I personally think that games journalism was better at engaging with game mechanics in a time when the only people who became games journalists were people who loved video games, but maybe I'm being a big romantic, who knows.
maybe the way i'd put it is that the prioritization of storytelling over gameplay took several forms in the past decade or so, some in games themselves and some in games criticism.
i don't love this trend in games themselves, and i don't always love games criticism that meets this trend too eagerly or seems to be capitulating to it. that said, some of the trends in games writing are definitely responding to trends in the games themselves. what else are critics supposed to do? pretend BioShock and The Last of Us and Gone Home never happened? just bang on about the frame rate and call it a day?
people don't want constant sermonizing and moralizing in every other review, okay, I can work with that, but I don't know what to do with the sort of person who seems to think writing about modern video games, with all their artistic advancements and aspirations, should just be tech blurbs.
I don't want games criticism to just be tech blurbs. I fully endorse games critics approaching the game as a piece of art, the same way a film critic (in principle at least) approaches a film. I greatly enjoy when a critic approaches a game review in a thoughtful, reflective and even long-winded way, like Super Bunnyhop or Errant Signal.
I can get on board with that! but in practice I get frustrated with a lot of the common complaints about excessive intellectualization or politicization in games criticism because it's often two camps both being very stifling just in different ways.
I'll take Sifu as an example. I thought a lot of the more popular writing about Sifu was insufferable because it was so overly, singularly, direly invested in "cultural appropriation" discourse about its kung fu influences and consequently disengaged from the gameplay conventions and lineage. I wanted to read about Sifu and the long tail of God Hand. but we didn't get that kind of coverage, except from maybe Gene Park, I think i remember his review being strong and thoughtful. so there's a case where I'd argue too many writers went a little too hard and narrow in evaluating a game on its progressive merits/demerits.
but! i also don't want to live in a media landscape where any attempt to engage with social or cultural issues in games or via games gets shut down or triggers a sort of all-or-nothing anti-woke immune response. critics shouldn't be activists about everything but they shouldn't be stifled and walking on egg shells everywhere either.
for instance i thought Peter Parker's relationship with the NYPD in Spider-Man was interesting. i'm not some huge anti-police activist, i certainly didn't hold it against the game, it's a good game! but as I was swinging and marveling at a relatively realistic block-for-block depiction of Manhattan, I thought the game's quest dynamics were interesting to think about in addition to all the other stuff, including more straightforward gameplay stuff, that the game also made me think about. but there is absolutely a sort of person who met any review that engaged with that stuff — not just the most aggressive, strident reviews, but any review that engaged with it at all — like they were some zealot trying to brainwash the children with maoist propaganda.
and what I think, is that people have to chill out, there is a lot of livable middle ground here.
Pretty much on board with the above. Errant Signal made a good point that "keep your politics out of my video games!" is a stupid rebuttal when the video game itself is explicitly engaging with political themes in an overt way (e.g. you can't really discuss the story of BioShock Infinite without discussing white supremacy, American exceptionalism etc.). But I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone to want to discuss the mechanics of Mario Kart without getting derailed by debates about its alleged political messaging.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the fact that ENGs appeal to casual gamers. I'm not even saying there's anything wrong with modern games critics liking them. I'm saying that their popularity among modern games critics is indicative of the kind of person who becomes a games critic nowadays: they have no interest in games in their own right, they think video games and the people who play them are stupid and contemptible, they aren't good at playing them (which I DO consider a deficiency in a professional critic, in the same way that poor literacy would serve as an impediment to being an effective literary critic), and they are ignorant of many of the basic concepts and critical referents unique to the medium.
No one is obliged to like video games, understand them, be good at playing them, or think the people who play them are deserving of respect. But if you are none of these things, it's pretty weird to pursue a career in video game criticism. I would feel the same way about a film critic who hates movies and thinks cinemagoers are stupid degenerates.
i think it is notable that your examples of games "indicative of the kind of person who becomes a games critic nowadays" were released 7-10 years ago and are being made out of be "indicative" because . . . what exactly? because they got good reviews? what kind of reviews were they supposed to get? you said you loved Gone Home, so I guess what I'm asking you is: what was ideally supposed to happen instead of what actually happened? what is the logical bridge here?
the film criticism comparison is precisely what I don't get about your reasoning. you're not describing video game critics hating anything; you're describing video game critics liking games that you also liked but then weirdly extrapolating a general hatred of video games from the fact that they liked a handful of games, including one that, again, you loved!
Most of the ENGs I've played have sucked, but many of them got great reviews from professional critics. A more recent example: Paratopic, which admittedly came out in 2018 but I only played last year. The point I'm making is that, if you are bad at playing video games, ignorant of many of the key concepts unique to the medium and are on a tight deadline (exacerbated by the fact that a mechanically challenging video game will take you longer to complete than the average person), it's understandable that you will prefer to write about games which are short, easy and which pose minimal risk of exposing your ignorance of the medium which you are writing about. Hence the praise lavished on ENGs by professional critics, which tick all three boxes.
I'm not extrapolating a general hatred of video games from the fact that critics like ENGs (although one COULD extrapolate as such, given that ENGs are so mechanically light that they're only barely interactive). It's a fact that many well-known games critics dislike the medium, such as Anita Sarkeesian. I can dig up examples of games critics within the last ten years pushing that whole "shooters make people violent IRL" narrative which was debunked old hat by the time Jack Chick got disbarred, and which would certainly be a *surprising* narrative for someone to advance about a medium they DON'T hate.
Yeah, a big part of What Remains of Edith Finch’s hype came from casual gamers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game, but its popularity was buoyed by people who rarely played games. I’ve heard people I know IRL who never play games before suddenly race about it.
truly incredible to me that the big enduring copypasta complaint here is "some walking simulators got some good reviews ten years ago" and the complaint even includes the concession that the games were good! so what are we even talking about?
even if one concedes that Edith Finch necessarily appealed to more casual gamers, okay, but what is supposed significance of that fact? casual gamers are gamers! it's right there in the name! and also, re earlier points, what does being "good" at video games have to do with anything? criticism isn't esports! being a gamer in general isn't esports! plenty of people who play a lot of video games are bad at video games! either in general or maybe bad a certain kinds of games despite being good at other kinds of games. we can log into the ranked mode of countless online multiplayer games and quickly witness this reality for ourselves.
I personally think that games journalism was better at engaging with game mechanics in a time when the only people who became games journalists were people who loved video games, but maybe I'm being a big romantic, who knows.
maybe the way i'd put it is that the prioritization of storytelling over gameplay took several forms in the past decade or so, some in games themselves and some in games criticism.
i don't love this trend in games themselves, and i don't always love games criticism that meets this trend too eagerly or seems to be capitulating to it. that said, some of the trends in games writing are definitely responding to trends in the games themselves. what else are critics supposed to do? pretend BioShock and The Last of Us and Gone Home never happened? just bang on about the frame rate and call it a day?
people don't want constant sermonizing and moralizing in every other review, okay, I can work with that, but I don't know what to do with the sort of person who seems to think writing about modern video games, with all their artistic advancements and aspirations, should just be tech blurbs.
I don't want games criticism to just be tech blurbs. I fully endorse games critics approaching the game as a piece of art, the same way a film critic (in principle at least) approaches a film. I greatly enjoy when a critic approaches a game review in a thoughtful, reflective and even long-winded way, like Super Bunnyhop or Errant Signal.
I can get on board with that! but in practice I get frustrated with a lot of the common complaints about excessive intellectualization or politicization in games criticism because it's often two camps both being very stifling just in different ways.
I'll take Sifu as an example. I thought a lot of the more popular writing about Sifu was insufferable because it was so overly, singularly, direly invested in "cultural appropriation" discourse about its kung fu influences and consequently disengaged from the gameplay conventions and lineage. I wanted to read about Sifu and the long tail of God Hand. but we didn't get that kind of coverage, except from maybe Gene Park, I think i remember his review being strong and thoughtful. so there's a case where I'd argue too many writers went a little too hard and narrow in evaluating a game on its progressive merits/demerits.
but! i also don't want to live in a media landscape where any attempt to engage with social or cultural issues in games or via games gets shut down or triggers a sort of all-or-nothing anti-woke immune response. critics shouldn't be activists about everything but they shouldn't be stifled and walking on egg shells everywhere either.
for instance i thought Peter Parker's relationship with the NYPD in Spider-Man was interesting. i'm not some huge anti-police activist, i certainly didn't hold it against the game, it's a good game! but as I was swinging and marveling at a relatively realistic block-for-block depiction of Manhattan, I thought the game's quest dynamics were interesting to think about in addition to all the other stuff, including more straightforward gameplay stuff, that the game also made me think about. but there is absolutely a sort of person who met any review that engaged with that stuff — not just the most aggressive, strident reviews, but any review that engaged with it at all — like they were some zealot trying to brainwash the children with maoist propaganda.
and what I think, is that people have to chill out, there is a lot of livable middle ground here.
Pretty much on board with the above. Errant Signal made a good point that "keep your politics out of my video games!" is a stupid rebuttal when the video game itself is explicitly engaging with political themes in an overt way (e.g. you can't really discuss the story of BioShock Infinite without discussing white supremacy, American exceptionalism etc.). But I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone to want to discuss the mechanics of Mario Kart without getting derailed by debates about its alleged political messaging.
That sure is a lot of exclamation marks.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the fact that ENGs appeal to casual gamers. I'm not even saying there's anything wrong with modern games critics liking them. I'm saying that their popularity among modern games critics is indicative of the kind of person who becomes a games critic nowadays: they have no interest in games in their own right, they think video games and the people who play them are stupid and contemptible, they aren't good at playing them (which I DO consider a deficiency in a professional critic, in the same way that poor literacy would serve as an impediment to being an effective literary critic), and they are ignorant of many of the basic concepts and critical referents unique to the medium.
No one is obliged to like video games, understand them, be good at playing them, or think the people who play them are deserving of respect. But if you are none of these things, it's pretty weird to pursue a career in video game criticism. I would feel the same way about a film critic who hates movies and thinks cinemagoers are stupid degenerates.
i think it is notable that your examples of games "indicative of the kind of person who becomes a games critic nowadays" were released 7-10 years ago and are being made out of be "indicative" because . . . what exactly? because they got good reviews? what kind of reviews were they supposed to get? you said you loved Gone Home, so I guess what I'm asking you is: what was ideally supposed to happen instead of what actually happened? what is the logical bridge here?
the film criticism comparison is precisely what I don't get about your reasoning. you're not describing video game critics hating anything; you're describing video game critics liking games that you also liked but then weirdly extrapolating a general hatred of video games from the fact that they liked a handful of games, including one that, again, you loved!
Most of the ENGs I've played have sucked, but many of them got great reviews from professional critics. A more recent example: Paratopic, which admittedly came out in 2018 but I only played last year. The point I'm making is that, if you are bad at playing video games, ignorant of many of the key concepts unique to the medium and are on a tight deadline (exacerbated by the fact that a mechanically challenging video game will take you longer to complete than the average person), it's understandable that you will prefer to write about games which are short, easy and which pose minimal risk of exposing your ignorance of the medium which you are writing about. Hence the praise lavished on ENGs by professional critics, which tick all three boxes.
I'm not extrapolating a general hatred of video games from the fact that critics like ENGs (although one COULD extrapolate as such, given that ENGs are so mechanically light that they're only barely interactive). It's a fact that many well-known games critics dislike the medium, such as Anita Sarkeesian. I can dig up examples of games critics within the last ten years pushing that whole "shooters make people violent IRL" narrative which was debunked old hat by the time Jack Chick got disbarred, and which would certainly be a *surprising* narrative for someone to advance about a medium they DON'T hate.