Well, PopMatters put up their list of top 20 games of 2011. I was a proud participant in their first ever end of year list for games. Back in December G. Christopher Williams put out an email that we were doing this and despite it only coming out recently all the decisions and blurb writing was completed obstinately before the new year. It was done by having all of us listing our favorite games of the year in order and our editor did some voodoo math to come out with this list. First thing I said out loud upon seeing it: “This list makes no f-ing sense.” Yep, self censor and everything.

For reference here’s the list:

20. Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars
19. Dead Island
18. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
17. Battlefield 3
16. Mortal Kombat
15. Shadows of the Damned
14. Gears of War 3
13. Deus Ex: Human Revolution
12. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
11. Batman: Arkham City
10. Fate of the World
09. Assassin’s Creed Revelations
08. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
07. Dragon Age 2
06. Inside a Star-filled Sky
05. Dead Space 2
04. L.A. Noire
03. Catherine
02. Portal 2
01. Bastion

Again, I say, this list makes no f-ing sense. It doesn’t look like any other lists out there, but that’s not what bugs me. Nor is it that a number of these games wouldn’t be anywhere near my top games of 2011 list. Or the order of certain games. I can totally understand Dragon Age 2 over Skyrim, especially knowing who works at the Moving Pixels blog. I can also get past the fact that Driver: San Francisco was completely overlooked. After all I hadn’t gone on my promoting spree across 4 different sites yet. No, I don’t really have an issue with the list, it’s just really really weird. Logic doesn’t seem to enter into the equation and I end up thinking more about how on earth this came together rather than feeling any unique voice to the site and the culture it embodies.

That’s not entirely true of course. Like I mentioned before the Dragon Age 2 above Skyrim speaks volumes on our priorities. That both blurbs were written by Mattie Brice just adds to it. Catherine coming in third also says something, what I’m not sure. Portal 2 and Bastion are both rather conventional picks for top honors, because they totally deserve them, so it’s what comes after that speaks to our collective tastes. Honestly, a big shocker to me was Fate of the World coming in at #10. It deserves to be there, but I don’t know anyone other than Jorge Albor and myself who have actually played it. Either a small group put it extra high or a lot of people just haven’t mentioned it.

I think what throws this off, is not the unconventional picks for top honor, nor certain absentees that have been noted in the comments. They explained why they weren’t there in the podcast about this list (no one on staff had played them yet.) It’s the rhetorical order of them. Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars coming in at #20 makes sense in looking it over, doubly so for the average reader. It’s an indie game they’ve never heard of at the very bottom of the list. No one is going to complain. It’s conventional to squeeze something in at the bottom. Dead Island speaks to what we as a staff thought of it, not that great, but solid enough. Then you smack the reader with Skyward Sword at #18. Ok, even fanboys have to admit there has been backlash against the game recently. Any fanboy complaints will take that into account in their screeds. But the reader is reeling at the surprise of seeing it so low on the list. Then Battlefield 3 comes in, followed by Mortal Kombat and Shadows of the Damned. Were these three games on anyone’s talking list for GotY. Then we go back to conventions, strong AAA end of year releases not quite as good as their predecessors. The logic behind them where they are makes sense. It’s understandable. Then a minor quibble with Batman. You can see how maybe this group didn’t think it was the bees knees like other sites did. But it’s ahead of other action games, it’s still in relation to other games that are comparable and it makes sense. Then you throw Fate of the World in their face, a game I can guarantee they’ve never heard of. It’s in the top 10 what the hell. Above all these other critically acclaimed games that I have heard of. This threw me through a loop because I didn’t know any of my fellow writers even knew of it. The Critical-Distance editors sure didn’t. The Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, generally considered the worst in the series. It could be accepted an understood in relation to other titles if they weren’t still reeling from Fate of the World. Oh Skyrim, thank you Skyrim familiar territory…Dragon Age 2 what the hell!!! Again an argument I think could have been made and understood if not agreed with were it not for the reeling still going on.

Inside the Star-filled Sky…ok I think you’ve broken our dear reader. He wont make much fuss, but it’s getting a little awkward with him just sitting there. What makes it doubly weird, it’s only the third indie game on the list. Were it more populated with smaller, flash, downloadables etc one could understand the mindset of the people behind it. They like indies over the AAA cheeseburgers. The reader puts himself in a different mindset expecting something else. They expect artsy fartsy stuff they’ve never heard of, but now might try. Instead they’re in a AAA mindset with levels of story being their driving factor as evidenced by Dragon Age 2 over Skyrim, but wait Mortal Kombat is in there and Battlefield three. Ok he’s drooling now. Dead Space 2.

Once said reader has stopped hopping up and down to a chorus of “that came out last year?” It’s another head-scratcher as it was forgotten and to be this high doesn’t meld with the lists narrative from previous Action titles that came before. Then L.A. Noire, which works on a list where story is king, but such a list this is not. Catherine, while it says a lot coming from the top on down, is dumbfounding coming in the other direction. It’s not just that the list doesn’t conform to other people’s opinion, it’s that it doesn’t seem to conform to an internal logic of priorities of the people making said list. (I stop here because Portal 2 and Bastion make all kinds of sense, though it’s a little late for the reader’s faculties.) Artistic statements mixed with story priority games, next to message games, next to riproaring B movie action games, world building and character building all in the top 10.

Said reader was me when I first read this list. Some choices were baffling all on their own, but it’s the lack of any internal logic to what the staff prioritized as personal preferences in picking particularly pleasant play proceedings to present to the petulant people. Hence what I meant when I said it made no f-ing sense. Of course the blurbs don’t really help in this regard as they only explain what we liked about the game and not in how it relates to the rest of the list. I don’t think we could have done that anyway, because this isn’t anyone’s list really. Maybe that makes for a better site to see such diversity.

Of course, what I’m really saying is I would love to see the math that lead to this. There has got to be an interesting story or two in there. I meant to ask back in December, but then the Critical-Distance projects took over so that idea got pushed aside. Take a gander at what we had to say about each game. I had the privilege of making my case for Fate of the World and Portal 2. Oh yeah, and Mike Schiller wrote one hell of an intro to the whole thing.

See, he argues that racism requires intentionality. [These sentences have been removed until they can be corrected properly.] Then he goes too far.

Several times he gives examples that show words have no meaning without intention, but he removes all context so that there could be no intention. He says he calls a woman he loved “Chief” being that she is not an American Indian she it is just a cute little nickname. He is perfectly right in this respect. The word has no meaning outside of that connotation, BECAUSE she is not a Native American. Likewise earlier in the piece he says that the character’s use of “Capt’n” is only affix the racist term to it because it is spoken by a black woman, but has no connotation when on a cereal box with an old white man. Again since context is removed and therefore meaning is removed, that somehow means that the word has no meaning. I hate to burst your bubble, but should you put it back into context the uninsulting word becomes insulting.

I will use a less charged example to show my point. In Mass Effect 2 the main character’s name is Shepard. He partakes in missions titled A House Divided (Mark 3:25, Matthew 12:25), The Prodigal (Luke 11), Eye for an Eye (Matthew 5:38), Sins of the Father (Deuteronomy 24:16 or Leviticus 26:39). In case you haven’t noticed there is a very strong biblical theme running throughout the whole game with the player cast in the role of a Sci-Fi military Jesus. Through him all your squad mates shall be healed. The thing is the parentheticals are my additions. The mission names are just phrases or noun phrases that mean nothing by themselves. They are words plastered on the screen. They are imbued with meaning because I know something about Christianity and the Bible. You don’t even have to know that much because these are well known phrases, known to be biblical though the first one is probably more famous coming from Abraham Lincoln now. Is it everywhere in the game? No, but in most places. (Suddenly it makes more sense that Shepard mother is mentioned throughout the game but not his father.) Does the game have any of that? No, but it is there because it was placed there with the understanding Bioware’s audience could connect some mental dots.

Nothing exists without context in our world. Some comedians make their living off of simply repeating verbatim famous quotes or well-known scenes in new contexts. In fact all comedy is reliant on having some foreknowledge or understanding for something to be funny. Which brings me to the most misleading arguments of the entire piece.

He bookends the piece with a story of him as a baby that would howl should he ever be held by a black person’s hands. It ends with a story of him helping in a Madagascar clinic where the baby’s would have the same reaction when he held them. This is not proof that baby’s are racist or that the baby’s actions are racist or even that the actions have no meaning because they have no intention. Yes the baby has no intention of being offensive if it even knows what offensive is or hurt is beyond physical discomfort. In fact that uneasiness of the parents in both sets of circumstances is an example of us ascribing more to the moment with our own world knowledge than is inherent in the moment itself. But this is not because the action is without meaning, it’s because it is without meaning because it is without context. A baby has limited to no context of the world. I am no pediatrician of infant psychologist, but I feel pretty confidant is saying it’s not the skin color itself that is scaring the infant or any cultural connotations therein, but the fact that the skin is just different. Mommy and Daddy’s skin looks like this and this is not that color, this is a stranger, I want Mommy is along the lines you as an infant and the baby you held in the clinic was thinking. They have no context of the world. They don’t know what apartheid, the North Atlantic triangle, Rwanda, Imperialism, Jim Crow or who Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela or Malcolm X are. That comes with time.

The baby has limited context of the world and no context beyond anything relating to itself. The synthesis you create in the piece by introducing and concluding with these circumstances is to compare video games or any artistic work with a baby. Newly dropped into the world with no context for anything and just a thing that exists. And were the game designed by a baby that would be true, but it was not. It was designed by a large group of adults spending a lot of time going over every detail not just to see if it looks good but to make sure it works as intended and doesn’t break. These are intelligent people who are aware of the world. Deus Ex and Mass Effect and all other video games are a byproduct of the massive amount of blood, sweat and tears of the designers specifically to produce something.

Now does that mean a racist image or character or line in a work is bad. Not inherently. It’s all about context. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was recently censored in a certain reprint to remove the N word from the character of the escaped slave Jim’s name. Why? Because it’s racist. Yes it’s racist, but it isn’t racism. Mark Twain used it as part of the culture of the time and used it to humanize the character by highlighting the degradation and humiliation black of the south went through by attaching it to his name. Finn himself at the end of the book recognizes the inherent wrongness of it and Jim’s treatment. The book is very anti-racism and does it by using a racist slur. Context matters.

Before anything, we must admit that to simply depict something is not to endorse it.

BULLSHIT. Yes it does or they wouldn’t have made it or changed their names in the credits to Alan Smithy thereby disavowing the work. A creator, by making something and releasing it to the world is standing by their work. All parts of it. Mark Twain stood by Huckleberry Finn, Bioware stands by Mass Effect and Edios Montreal stands by Deus Ex: human Revolution.

Are the developers guilty of racism? No. Are they guilty of having put something racist in their game? Yes. Still not a problem, but the problem comes from as you say:

One talks with Letitia not to discover social insights into sub-species differentiation but to figure out where to go next and what to do there. The game is built like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces require a scavenger hunt. Objectives are unambiguous: break in to building X, go find person Y, bring object Z somewhere else. The puzzle is in discovering the prompts.

It’s because she has no other purpose than to be a means to an objective that it is a problem. There is no context other than the cultural knowledge that we bring to the game. There is no context as to why this character is unique to anyone else in the game other than her speech and mannerism. Not her class or her situation that others share. You said this was “before anything else, an aesthetic choice.” What did that aesthetic choice convey? Without any further context in the game, nothing concerning the game at all.

I am quite willing to chalk this up to Edios Montreal being idiots and leave it at that. Same with Capcom and Resident Evil 5. Massive, massive idiots. But you, you are the dangerous one here. I would not have stepped in were it not for you peddling of your anti-intellectualism garbage. Maybe it was unintentional. I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that YOU did not know what you were doing. Words have meaning, the meaning we give them. And you cannot change the meaning of a word by yourself. Only a society can do that, because words are creations of a society. They are thoughts made audible or in the case of writing physical. They are the purist distillation of the mind that a human can create. To say or promote otherwise is an insult to any person still willing to use their mind. Some things change meaning when they changed contexts. Look up the word “set” if you don’t believe me. But some words are so powerful, so strong they create the context for everything else. The same goes for images and cultural conceits. If I may use a video clip to show what I mean in the visual realm:

Meanings can change, be co-opted, disappear and so forth. But do not tell me there is no meaning. Art would not, could not exist without prior understanding and meaning. I focus on this example from your article because each of your examples are not equivalent. They all have different context and say different things to different effects. But they all do saying something all by themselves. You cannot say otherwise without perpetuating a lie.

It all starts with L.A. Noire. I haven’t played L.A. Noire, but I know enough to comment on what it is doing, just not on how well it is doing it. Now his beginning few paragraphs talk about how L.A. Noire is supposed to have “crossed a gulf, that the grand synergy of elements had created something transformational.” Yes if you listened to the marketing that is what you’d come to think. However, even knowing anything about the game beforehand, you will know that is not true. The game was in development for near a decade with multiple staff turnovers and wildly over budget. Given the game’s circumstances I think we were lucky to have gotten anything at all. So build up your reader to drop the shocking revelation that it isn’t. Let’s just get to the quotes.

Quite clearly it’s a Grand Theft Auto dirking simulator without the cop chases.

So, a driving simulator then. Kelly added the Grand Theft Auto because it happens to share the same publisher, who probably insisted in the adding of Action genre elements in what is clearly an Adventure game. This is one of those time that confusing conventions for direction causes confusion, not only in game creation, but in analyzing and critiquing said game. We think of Adventure games as point and click affairs with moon logic puzzles, so when one that doesn’t fit that description is staring us in the face we don’t recognize it and scramble around for any other way to explain it. L.A. Noire is an Adventure game that tosses in needless and rightfully lambastes Action sequences in for no reason.

It has a conversation engine that closely mimics the movements of real TV actors (which begs the question: why not use the actual footage and save a ton of time and money?).

Because it’s creator had the crazy idea to do this in a virtual world in an effort to waste as much of the parent companies money and in the process perhaps push the technological boundary a little forward. Incidentally, that marketing of that technology and the way it was shown off probably sold more copies of the game than anything else. It’s our equivalent of flashy special effects in Blockbuster movies.

You ‘investigate’ crime scenes by walking back and forth over the floor in the hope that the controller will vibrate.
In short, it’s a very expensive nudging engine. It’s actually about the story that Team Bondi wants to tell, and which occasionally pauses to, you know, let the player do some stuff to nudge the story along.

Egh, I think this might be more of an execution problem than anything else. Team Bondi went in a certain direction and to you it didn’t work out. That doesn’t mean you proclaim in your title “Games Can’t Tell Stories” that means this game is shit at it.

Is there really anything to ‘get’? Is it my fault that I find myself driving around LA causing crash after crash (with no consequence), hoping that side missions that involve doing stuff will appear? That I use Intuition as frequently as possible to skip the vacuuming? That interviewing is a giant version of Guess Who, and is very easily mastered (Press ‘Lie’, ‘Back’ and then ‘Doubt’ over and over.) That the supposed ‘noir’ of the game seems at odds with the very brightly lit game environment and the CSI levels of gore?

In order: yes, no, yes, no, and no, but then that doesn’t mean it’s strictly at odds. L.A. Confidential proved that. Though that is a qualitative question so I’ll move on.

Or is it like the moment from Sex And The City when Miranda realises the secret to understanding men: he’s just not that into to you? It’s not your fault. LA Noire is just not that interesting.

If he had ended there, fair enough. He didn’t like L.A. Noire. It seems to be a very polarizing game. But…

What is that interesting is Portal 2. Why? What games like Portal 2 [realize] that LA Noire (and many a cutscene-laden game also) doesn’t is that games are not a storytelling medium. Portal 2 is all about the player.

(Edited for spelling.) Here we get into the meat of it and remember I said he contradicts himself so massively. It’s here. Within the same sentence he says something so ludicrous I don’t know how to quantify it. Portal 2 apparently realizes games cannot tell stories. Portal 2, one of the best story games this year and part of a franchise with some of the best storytelling in all of video games ever. Portal-fucking-2. Were you handed a different game stuck in Portal 2′s box? You must have, because I don’t think we played the same game. The two Portal games have more story packed into them than most games have even attempted. They may not have a lot of plot, but then plot and story isn’t the same thing. You can have a game with thousands of plot point and barely any story. Conversely it is possibly to have barely any plot with layers upon layers of tightly packed story.

Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story.

Go on.

There is no hero.

You are making this too easy. Partially because I have no idea what specifically you mean by “hero” and partially because it doesn’t matter, they’re all wrong. If by hero you mean stalwart figure of virtue, then yes games do have that and no a story does not need that. I could give you a laundry list of books, movies, plays and poetry and does not have a hero at all. If by “hero” you mean person who does things, again games have that it’s called the player and no, you don’t need that for a story. If by “hero” and given the context of the subject matter what you should mean, protagonist again the player controlled avatar fulfills this role. (Also you technically don’t need a protagonist to have a story either. It’s a wide and wondrous world out there.)

Time is in the control of the player, not the creator.

This is the money quote. This is why I wanted to write this response in the first place. Because it’s true and also doesn’t matter. We compare games to other mediums all the time, but it’s not because the different mediums are an exact match, it’s because we are taking some aspect to clarify some aspect about games. In most artistic mediums, it is true that time (I assume he means pacing by this) is in control of the creator and that it isn’t in games, but so what. Every medium follows different rules regarding the formal constraints and advantages to telling stories. Which is another way of saying, different mediums tell stories different ways. While we make initial take techniques from other mediums to facilitate our work and progress in a new medium it is more about giving ourselves a starting point and not how things are done.

So the pacing in games is different with games than it is in more passive mediums. No shit Sherlock. Guess what, that means the stories are going to be paced to match. We use comparisons to other mediums to facilitate discussions and arguments about the fundamental building blocks of understanding games, but I see this from time to time that confuses what has always been with what will always be. Because storytelling for the last 300 years or so has been a certain way means that it will always be that way is ludicrous. We have a new medium with which to work in, so we are going to need new techniques and new ways of telling stories.

There is no inevitability or sense of being powerless.

Have you played Missile Command. The whole point of that game’s story is based around the fact of inevitability. Now getting my contrarian example out of the way, what does either of these things have to do with the ability to tell a story. If you were writing classical tragedy I’d agree with you, but stories are a wide range and variety of ideas and concepts, I’d say most of which have nothing to do with inevitability. Most present day stories around about what happens next because we don’t know, but want to find out. It’s a sense of discovery not inevitability. As for powerless, we have games that have occasionally accomplished this, some within their game mechanics. Also, not necessary for telling a story, because sometimes you need a “hero” to overcome the odds, which means they have some agency and ability to do so.

And the story cannot have the player’s full attention.

Ambiguous sentence, which I believe means that in a game the story cannot have the player’s full attention because of the game aspect of a video game. This is just a guess, but if I’m right then this is also bull. It’s all in how the game is put together. In Bastion I am never not reminded of the story, because the act of walking about and having the blocks fly up and create new ground is part of it. In Portal the story is about being in a series of test chambers solving puzzles, while I’m stuck in a series of test chambers solving puzzles. Silent Hill 2 is about scaring the crap out of me with an oppressive atmosphere and I slowly self destruct in an environment filled with psudo-Freudian, psycho-somatic paranoia nightmares and I leave it up to you to figure out if I’m talking about me or James Sunderland.

So a videogame Hamlet is just a guy running around a castle flipping switches and collecting items to kill his uncle, the big boss at the end. All those speeches just get in the way.

Or you could, you know, not adapt Hamlet into a video game. Yes, Hamlet would not work as a video game; it barely works as a book. Do you know why? Because it’s a damn play. I read Hamlet and couldn’t make it work for me. It was a slog with very little investment or payoff. Which is doubly telling, because Hamlet’s material is right up my alley; political intrigue, art meta self-criticism, philosophic drama. Then I went to a stage production at my University and was absolutely blown away by it. All the stuff I knew was in there came alive in a performance of the material when it didn’t in the dry reading of it. So making it into a game is doubly weird.

The player is not treading the boards at the Old Vic. He’s solving problems, taking action, creating and winning. Sometimes designers think this is just a matter of technique or technology. But it’s not, it’s a fundamental constraint borne of the psychology of play. It will always be so, and is why in 40 years there have never been any good game stories.

BULL. FUCKING. SHIT. How is any of that stuff in the second sentence now malleable into a story? And yes it is a matter of technique, that’s all it comes down to: the skill of the designers to integrate and facilitate a story. Technology doesn’t matter, because gamers have been doing it with pencils and paper for decades now and with pieces of wood and clay for millennia. And finally we get to the one legitimate concern towards games having stories. I say concern and not fact, because it doesn’t disprove it is just an obstacle that has to either be overcome or assimilated: the psychology of play. The most notorious of this behavior is the instinct of min/maxing. Will it always be so? Really? There can’t be a paradigm shift or design subtle enough to encourage other behavior? And I repeat the first sentiment of this paragraph for that last sentence.

But there are many great games that give the sense of a story. Games like Portal 2, Ico and Uncharted 2 give the impression that stuff’s going on, that you’re a part of it, and that it’s urgent. They have great storysense. Characters may talk while you’re doing stuff; things may happen; but the details, the structure, the drama?

They don’t matter. Not really.

What the hell is Storysense? I’ve read other posts where you use that term, but I have no idea what it is. By your usage of it and the examples you chose I think you mean story. You chose three games with excellent narratives and two with excellent stories.

Portal 2 doesn’t imply a story, it has a story, one of mystery and discovery and human woman battling a pair of indeterminate computer AIs. It’s a story of ability and gender politics and the fall of a company that gave birth to the situation. Things are happening and you are apart of it because you are hearing the voices and personally reacting to it, while you are trying to make your way through the test chambers.

Ico, good lord, Ico is minimalist. Just because there aren’t dialogue heavy cutscenes that exposit every little thing, does not mean it doesn’t have a story. It is a simple story with complex and multilayered meanings in the relationship of a boy and a girl as they try to escape a castle. It implies a lot, but then so does The Wire. One of the best scenes by the way contains the use of only one word. I watched an episode of it last night that had a scene with no dialogue and used the camera and characters to convey a conversation and realization that answered the final question of the case.

Uncharted 2 doesn’t have a story. The text says no. This is the most blatant of the three in having a story. It conveys is very differently than the other two examples and for very different purposes, but it has one. It is an adventure story of love, betrayal and the question of what you want in life. If fact, this is the example that -makes me think you have no idea what you are talking about and so made up a term to cover your ass so you didn’t have to admit you were wrong. And you are wrong because-to paraphrase myself-if you can provide on example of a game that has a story, than games can have stories.

The act of playing a game is like astral projection. You go somewhere else where the rules are different and things are afoot. You push a doll around to act as your agent in the world and this empowers little old you to do stuff.

Whether simulation, abstract, real or fantastical, that’s the basis of the art of games. It’s a visual, animated and pressure-oriented art. Players get to be a part of a world in motion. So it is the world that is artistic. Game designers are worldmakers.

This is all true and also has nothing to do with your thesis of “games can’t tell stories.”

Interactive stories, by contrast, are bombastic and ridiculous. Are we really at that point where we have to blame our customers for not being the right sort? Is it the players that are inadequate? Or is it our [internalized] sense of inferiority in the face of Hollywood?

Again, in order, yes they are, not yet, sometimes, and absolutely. Interactive stories right now are bombastic and ridiculous for the most part, because programmers for the most part can’t write worth shit and most writers don’t know how to write for video games, yet.

I wont quote his concluding paragraph because it’s full of more bullshit that doesn’t mean anything and only thinks it’s related to the thesis above. It bring up the psychology bit, but he only mentions it in the entire text and never exactly explain why the psychology of play could or would inhibit a game’s ability to tell a story in absolutist terms. It’s writing that’s expecting the reader to fill in the blanks either because he’s too lazy to or couldn’t if he tried. Yes we shouldn’t shoehorn games to be something else that they aren’t and should focus on what they are; I want to add to that. We shouldn’t inhibit games with what they could be. Games are amazing thing able to put you into other worlds and experience things as people other than ourselves. They can teach us, entertain us and convey to us so much in so many different ways. Why get in the way of that?

Right after I wrote ‘Atmosphere is Not Enough‘ for Nightmare Mode, I got two written blog responses within days that I’ve been meaning to respond to myself. I’m a little late, but I still want to do it. So here are my musings.

The first is by Chloi Rad who went to the lengths of setting up a blog just to respond to my piece. I don’t know why he didn’t just respond in the comments, especially since as of writing this it’s the only post on the blog, but I still appreciate the effort. He also says he hasn’t played Another World yet; well I implore him to do so.

Chloi Rad says that I am misrepresenting the presentation of Limbo by condemning it for being open to interpretation and that its vagueness is an asset as it matches the oppressive nature of the world Limbo is portraying and thematically resonates with the mystery of waking up in such a world in the first place. He then goes on to give his own interpretation of what is happening in Limbo. Generally I applaud this kind of thinking and yes interpretation can go many different ways and no single interpretation is flat out wrong so long as the text can support it. I have written on the nature of interpretation before, but not I’d like to add a caveat to it. While a work can have many interpretations and your interpretation is loosely supported by the Limbo text…there’s no other way to put this, you’re doing it wrong.

Before I used Mulholland Drive to show that multiple interpretations can exist for a vague, confusing and sometimes batshit insane work and be cohesive. The key is to finding a key that can unlock the obtuseness and interrelated meaning of all the elements. This is true for all works, but for most it is much more obvious and we don’t instinctively put it in same mental category. For instance, Die Hard is about family and coming together to defeat a humbug in time for Christmas time. Yes, it seems to go to absurd lengths when you boil it down to that, but it is true and is rather obvious about its intentions that people get it without too much hand wringing. Mulholland Drive is another matter altogether, but only in terms of degree. The two main interpretations that I am aware of it the death dream that latches on the key of the finale and explains the story backwards, unlocking the meaning of the duality the worlds and the more weird imagery. The other is that the blue box is a hypercube that crosses two parallel realities with the elements mirroring themselves with the worlds based on tragic or comedic drama subtypes. Both work because they latch onto different elements to unlock the rest of the meaning. But each one focus on one elements and everything else falls into place. Not so with Chloi Rad’s thesis.

He says several times suppose or what if or maybe to different elements to get them in line. He says that the boy in Limbo is the victim of a car crash and before he can go to the other world he must find his sister. Okay, simple enough. So begins by crossing the River Styx (nevermind that Limbo is on our side of the River Styx and not actually part of hell that the river is the barrier to, I put that mistake on the shoulders of the developers not Rad) and is in the forest to represent life flashing before his eyes. By itself that is an reasonable statement, but you already said it was a car crash you the text needs to connect the two. The he says:

Perhaps this is simply a metaphor. A hotel is a place visited temporarily, and the boy is slowly coming to terms with the idea that where he is now, Limbo or someplace similar, is exactly that. He’ll move on eventually, but not before he accepts that. Or, maybe the hotel is a familiar place to him, part of a memory that he’s torn himself from the reality of his situation to visit, one last time.

Excuse me what. If the game doesn’t inform you of this anyway then you are forcing things to fit. In fact throughout your interpretation you only offer two actual pieces of evidence the seemingly support your theory without pushing other elements into line like the above Hotel piece: the burning tires and the crash through the glass at the end. More than that you leave a lot of WTF imagery that is far more important to latch onto by the wayside. Like the fact that you do see your “sister” long before the end before being attacked by another brain slug only to come back and find the environment has changed. Or the rising water levels in certain sections, the spider, the kids, any of the industrial equipment. You give some reasonable explanations for the shifting gravity and bear traps, but everything else is based on further guesswork and supposition.

That is the beauty of art and interpretation, after all. My own imagining of the game’s narrative utilizes and at the same time neglects many of the elements I’ve gathered from playing through it, which just means there are so many other ways of looking at the story.

Then that’s a shitty interpretation. You can’t exclude elements because it doesn’t fit your vision of what a work means. You have to figure out how they fall into place. If they don’t fit and there are as many items as you excluded then its wrong. The text says you are wrong. You’re interpretation and understanding of interpretation is faulty. Yes, Death of the Author and all that, but a work cannot mean whatever you want. The text says no.

Which only goes to further highlight the problem I brought up with Limbo. There is no answer and I don’t mean there is no authorial driven answer, there is no answer at all of any kind. They separated the elements so far removed from each other that none of the elements can associate with one another in any way. You end up having to do mental gymnastics to try and keep things together and that is a sign of incohesive work if not one that lacks meaning all together. A work doesn’t need a spelled out answer, but some cohesion in its elements might be nice. So I think Chloi Rad for offering me a piece to bounce my position off of and help explain better why it was pretentious and how meaning escaped the work. If it was a black and white puzzle game without the atmosphere and just the physics puzzles I wouldn’t have ground to stand on with such an accusation and thus wouldn’t make it. But the developers added so much with regards to atmosphere and narrative elements even if only thematically that the lack of any cohesion that allows for a meaning to be discovered at least if not delivered it presents itself with a pomp and gravities it neither earned nor deserved than yes it is pretentious. Not a failed attempt or mere experiment of formalism, but a pretentious work.

Halfway there.

The second response comes from the all to infrequent writings of the belovedsanspoof blog. He goes to the lengths to invoke David Lynch in his piece, so you know this is going to be fun. He asks if he characterizes my feeling about Limbo correctly, and yes I believe he does, maybe a little better than I did myself. Belovedsanspoof (I don’t have his real name, so…) defends Limbo not with a half-assed interpretation that the game does not allow for, but with a different point of view. He says the Limbo is not about the “story” and is instead coming from the same place that much of Lynch’s work comes from, an image that the rest of the work is built around. He likes it to the Dadaist appreciation of an image as image. That works for paintings and maybe moving images in a set course, but in a video game it only goes so far. While the appreciation of an image as an image is nice in its Platonic conceptualizing it doesn’t work in practice. Even Dada art had meaning behind it or at least a point in the case of the formalism experimentation. Even Lynch at his most batshit insane has a core behind it, even if he himself does not realize it at the time of shooting. Lynch’s work is cohesive even at its most ridiculous mainly because he is a circular creator. Elements repeat, they separate, scatter and then coalesce back together.

I also feel that I must clarify by what I mean as a connecting point. The connecting point is the key I metaphorically explained above. It is the point by which when used it unlocks the meaning of everything else and it all sets itself into place in the interpretation. It doesn’t have to be one thing; it can be any point in the work that sets all the other elements into place. Limbo does not have that.

I also feel like there is a disconnect between our different uses for certain words. Story does not mean plot. The story is what the work is about. It’s what the very center, the core of a work is where everything takes its direction. Belovedsanspoof says that the atmosphere was built from the ground up, but that’s not true. Playdead has spoken at length that the core of the game was the puzzles. The vicious nature of the puzzle elements and deaths were done as a teaching element not one of atmosphere building. The style came after they had many of their broad strokes in place as a way to explain how the puzzles would be explained to the player. The puzzles are the core of the game with the specific atmosphere tacked on. I’m sure a lot of the other atmospheric elements they had were tacked on as well. In fact Limbo goes on too long because of the puzzles. They ran out of creepy imagery and concepts long before they ran out of puzzles. The final third is full of puzzle padding. The shift in setting doesn’t help the game any either. We go from the forest to an industrial environments without nary a word or pictorial why. This hurts the game overall.

Conjuring up a series of images without a clear connecting point and then presenting them without an accompanying story might be someone’s way of trying to [dramatize] their subconscious; bypassing what they perceive to be the filter of narrative. This, indeed, might manifest in a noise of non-sequiturs but just as with the series of images, ideas and emotions that occur involuntarily in dreams, they can’t immediately be dismissed as meaningless just because there’s no apparent connecting point to them. There might even be a meaning that hasn’t been [realized] yet.

Could not agree more in theory. In practice Limbo does not earn any of this consideration. Because if this is suppose to be a crazy subconscious dramatized, then it doesn’t go far enough. Furthermore if that were the concept behind it that would be the connecting point bringing meaning to the rest of the work. The thing is the game does not eschew the “filter of narrative.” It revels in it at the beginning. The repeating motif of the children and the spider as antagonists are clear narrative motifs of man vs. man. Even without them the narrative motif of man vs. nature still permeates the work at the environment becomes the antagonist. The narrative is one child’s journey through limbo until it just stops. You can’t have it both ways. It has to commit to the imagery idea or narrative one. Lynch submits to the narrative every time. His works may start off with an image, but in the end they are there to supplement the story, the meaning behind his work.

Swain asks many questions of Limbo throughout his piece culminating in “What The Fuck?” Maybe Swain is asking Limbo the wrong questions.

I would love that to be the case, but it isn’t. Even without a clear meaning or just not being able to see it a person can tell whether they are looking at a work with an obscured meaning or one without any at all. It comes from pulling back the layers. If they find more and more layers then yes they just haven’t found the key yet. If they pull back and find only the other side of the same layer they pulled back and nothing else, then no. I am perfectly capable of asking the wrong questions of a work, but I don’t think Limbo has any right questions. It will ignore them all because it hasn’t the material to engage with any. It is a work that ultimately falls apart under it’s own façade if you ask anything of it.

In the end what I learned from all of this was not the something I was missing from Limbo, but that my dislike for Limbo apparently overshadowed my love of Another World, so let me clear that up. Another World is an all time classic that has stood the test of time and will continue to do so as one of the greatest video games ever made.

In all four of those above pieces I cited focus on what RPGs and Adventure games have done rather than look at the fundamentals behind what was done. In the olden, severely technological limited days it was easy to tell genres apart. Action games were arcade like measured in button presses per second (Contra). Adventure games favored exploration and puzzle solving (Zork). Action/Adventure games were button based affairs that has an element of exploration rather than being on a linear path. While RPGs were stat heavy turn based affairs (Final Fantasy).

I think part of the problem is that in the scheme of things, genre labeling is focused on very small distinctive minutia of what a game can do rather than what a game is about. Or rather, we use the same genre labels interchangeable between their two meanings. We look at genre being different, but many have fundamental similarities that they end up being more alike than any natural distinction. We think of genres when before categorizing them down to that level we should look at wider, deeper looking archetypes of genre, the supergenres if you will. This isn’t easy to explain with the likes of Adventure games, RPGs or Strategy games for that matter, but very simple to demonstrate with Action games.

Action

The Action supergenre is composed of a wide variety of distinct genres that makes up the end of the year category awards for many sites: platformers, shooters of the first and third person variety, rhythm games, racers, fighting games and brawlers. The last one divides into the subgenres beat ‘em up, spectacle fighters and slog fighters. As you can see the differences in genre are important when it comes to their design. You don’t want to confuse the design ethos of an FPS with a racing game or rhythm game, oh wait, maybe you do. See that’s the thing, because they all fall under the ethos, the focus of the Action supergenre, mixing under these conditions makes much more sense. It’s why Uncharted isn’t a platfomrer or third person shooter or brawler. It’s an Action game because it is all of these. Also it explains why many games like Call of Duty or God of War are able to incorporate so called “RPG elements” so easily, because stat building is not an RPG element.

I wrote above in my Gameranx piece that Action/Adventure games were games without any set genre or mixes too many to adequately explained. But since I wrote that, I’ve looked over the writings and constant twitter discussions on other genres and think I may have been a little off. In broad sweeping terms it’s true, but it’s unhelpful. Action/Adventure games are those games that mix the ethos’ of both Action games and Adventure games to varying degrees. (Most likely an Open World game.) The trick to finding the key to the Action supergenre is find the fundamental element or primary focus that all other tropes and idioms that we think indicative of these games build off of.

I think that element is a focus on timing. Should the play focus primarily on timing, things that require button presses within a window to perform an action for success, it is an Action game. Racing games, rhythm games, brawlers, fighting games, platformers, shooters, they can all be reduced to an element of timing. The timing of button presses that translate into any number of actions. The timing of jumps between platforms, the timing of firing bullets to hit a target or the timing of movement to aim at a foe correctly. The Action supergenre has the widest variety genres because it’s focus is on repeatable action and there are numerous repeatable physical actions for the player to perform and have an effect on the game. But other genres don’t focus on physical action and their central focus, but interaction is the key to the medium so we confuse the physical action of an avatar for player interaction. In Action games they are pretty much the same thing, the reality is the physical actions are just a method by which the player judges his success or failure when it comes to the particular timing of a game. Strip away the game’s set dressing and narrative elements and they all reveal themselves to be the same concept of missing or hitting a particular window with a button press or combination of button presses. But in other game supergenres focus is different so the physical verbs are not the primary focus. It’s the conflation of these two that causes problems or in the cases above trying to fix problems that either aren’t the central issue or narrowing the field of possible solutions.

RPGs

The RPG or Role-Playing Game is the name of the supergenre though it often gets repeated as the name of a genre with various sub-genres JRPG, wRPG, Tactical RPG, etc. This doesn’t work. There is a fundamental flaw in the reasoning, all because we aren’t descriptive enough. So many people confuse the ethos of the genre with the mechanics typical of games made within it. They are looking at the tools and thinking that’s what the project is about. Hammers, nails and saws are not the purpose of a house, they are how you construct one, the purpose is a place to live. Many people think RPGs are about stat building or conversations trees or (and this one ticks me off most of all and is the source of many of the problems because it was used to differentiate it from other genres back in the day) story. These are all incorrect. Each of these can be found in other genres. Stat building is making its way into Action games and were a part of Adventure games. Conversation trees were a staple of point and click Adventure games of the 90s. And story is everywhere now; even our puzzle games have them. Then what is unique to RPGs that everything centers on? What is the central nugget that is or at least should be the focus of the genre?

It’s rather obvious as it is in the name. The focus is around role-playing, playing a role, building a character or team and directing the growth of said character or team. Because of their gestation from Dungeons and Dragons, (itself born from wargaming) the genre has always been focused around combat and stats. The thing is as a game genre every other form other than video games has moved on or at least diversified. There are RPGs in the tabletop scene that have no institutionalized combat at all. Bhalroidam is a prime, recent example of this. Playing a role or building your character is central to the genre. Combat stats are only one form of it. They define you character’s role within a combat team, the part they play in military endeavors. Tank, DPS, AoE or Support. That is what stat-building does as a form of character creation and progression. Stats work in FPSs, because those stats are focused not on individual character, but are instead focused on improving advantages the player has towards their timing. Larger clips, faster reload speed, stronger ammo or perks are all about improving your ability to accomplish a goal based around the timing of your button presses versus a window. Often these bonuses widen the window a bit, thus giving the player an advantage. They are not the same use of a stat. In RPGs it is your character that is improving, in an Action game it is making the game easier to give the illusion the player is improving.

This is a narrow view of what RPGs are and yet this is the backbone to every RPG in video games. It’s all that is done with the genre. Recently games have instituted character building and defining them through conversations and reputation meters, but it is limited and often a separate focus from the combat aspect. In the tabletop world you can have entire games built around diplomacy negotiations. Student government and Model UN are systems that concern roleplay sanctioned around debate, problem solving and politics. The expansive possibilities are much wider than the central focus around combat currently allows. Present RPGs don’t allow for much personality building or psychological definition.

Because of this I’d argue that all present video games of the supergenre RPG are under the genre category of combat RPGs with multiple recognizable subtypes: Tactical, turn-based, action, massively multiplayer. All the improvements and different definitions regarding world building or point of origin are ancillary rather than the defining aspect of a game’s soul. It’s the method and system for building, defining and developing a character a role to inhabit the world or story that matters. You could have the entire game world be a whitewashed room as long as there were methods to create and develop a character. The worlds of RPGs and all the details within them are only there to serve the primary directive of developing a character by their reaction and place within.

Adventure

Adventure games were named after their originator Adventure, later renamed to Colossal Cave Adventure. In both of the articles above they talk about the puzzles, their effect on the genre and how they killed it. Of course in Adventure games, they weren’t really so much puzzles as finding broad definitions of keys for broad definitions of doors. And yes finding the balance between challenging and impossible or quirky and moon-logic was often an art unto itself. (Babel Fish puzzle) The thing is, the original Adventure didn’t have any puzzles, another person who wanted more to do added them in later.

Puzzles are not the ethos of the Adventure supergenre. If exploration of a character is the ethos of the RPG, then exploration of the milieu is that of the Adventure game. Adventure games are all about learning a new environment, the boundaries and nuances of places different from our own. We would see the sights, talk to the characters, but also learn the societal, physical and logical rules that govern the world by interacting with it. That’s what the puzzles were, methods by which you interacted with the world and consequently learned more about (in order) the logical, physical and societal rules of the world the game took place in. The moon logic came from worlds we couldn’t fully understand because the steps needed to attain the answer had been skipped and we were stuck with an incomplete understanding of the world’s logic. Either that or it was a one of time where the puzzle broke the game’s own logic. Many of the LucasArts and Sierra games were worlds based on logic different from out own. The pace of these games are slower allowing for appreciation of details, of noticing extraneous world building facets that have nothing to do with solutions or story progression. The biggest complaints having to do with the puzzles aren’t the arbitrariness of them, but that they obscure the world rather than reveal anything about it. They become stopgaps to our learning of this new world and the moment that happens we lose interest. The frustration comes that we know that we don’t know everything, but are denied access to the rest of the information. I may be saying things that are well known about the genre in a different manner, but it is important to understand the distinction. Once you understand why certain puzzles failed you can flip it and see why other puzzles succeeded beyond the feeling of accomplishment at having solved it. It also carries into other aspects of the supergenre.

Puzzles aren’t the only method of interaction, nor are they the only feature built for learning or exploration. Adventure enraptured an audience with mere descriptions and connections to other locations. Imaginative and varied locals are the key to extending the life of an Adventure game. Once the player has a grip on the world and understands its intricacies they have grokked the world. Once they have grokked the world they have no reason to keep playing and the game should end about there. Puzzles and challenges aren’t why one plays these games. The player is a tourist, a visitor to the virtual lands of make believe. This is why King’s Quest VI and The Longest Journey are such exemplars of the genre. Both games have varied locals of differing visuals, differing governing laws and differing tones. They have complex worlds that take some time to fully get a hold of. They also change subtly through the game. This can be a big deal after so many times through the same screen only to see something slightly different. They also allow for repeat visitations. They are the right length, King’s Quest 6 in particular, not to bog down the player if they know the world and are here to visit a favorite virtual place.

Character exploration can be a key to this genre as well, but the focus is different. Where learning about NPCs is an important part of RPGs, they are there to relate to the PC and help define your character. In Adventure games it’s to learn about the NPCs place in the world and their relation to others. In RPGs choices are widely different so as yo further define who your character is. Any PC choices in Adventure games are all in character for the predefined avatar. They are chaos theory decisions rather than defining a different person like in an RPG.

Conclusion

I wanted to define the genres, because so much of the discussion of what the games within them are about is defined by what they have done. I see dizzying discussion of round and round maybe touching on occasionally the core of a genre’s purpose, but then again concentrate on the tools rather than the purpose of those tools. I see discussion of where a genre of video games can go based on minute changes to a long lists of previously made decisions. New tweaks that alter the surface level end product, but change nothing underneath. The idioms and structures for the most part lay unchanging and set in stone. Somehow the concept of the genre has replaced that of supergenre for what games are capable of. I understand that supergenre is my own term, but the idea of a broad reaching concept that many different examples fall under is not. The narrower your focus in similar things, the more similar they are going to be. The narrower your focus in similar games, the more surface level the differences will be. But the broader your focus in like minded things the deeper you have to dig to get at what makes them similar.

In chapter 7 of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, he explains the 6 levels of art. This works both from a creation and critiquing point of view, though the work is from opposing ends. Stage 1 is Idea/Purpose, the concept, the central nugget, the thing the creator wants to say with his work. Stage 2 is the Form, the medium the creator chooses to work in, but also all the things that medium is capable of doing. We call it video games, though like comic books it is an out of date term only used by virtue of tradition. Where comics have sequential art as better descriptive term, video games have interactive experiences. Stage 3 is Idioms, here you choose the genre and from that the focus on how you will express your idea and the tools you will use to do so. This is where genres would normally go, but because genre has become so specific in nature to a game’s structure, to express myself properly I have to widen the idea by adding the prefix super to indicate a greater capacity. The idioms, under which all the tools to work with towards a focus of expressing an idea in a chosen medium, are the supergenres. Stage 4 is Structure, this is where genres as we discuss them fall under. This is how to use the tools once you’ve chosen from those available from the given idiom. Stage 5 is Craft, the skill in applying the chosen tools and the ability of the creator to physically put something together. If stage 4 is where the designing would happen, this is where the implementation happens. Stage 6 is Surface, this is the polish, this is pizzazz that attracts people to your work, it is the shiny coat, the wow factor that brings people in.

These are not concrete steps, nor do they always happen in strict order. Nor am I saying that once you are done with one you move on and never come back. Creation is the free flowing exercise between the stages and their focus. Changes in one will inform on changes or new options in another. This is a guide to understanding the theoretical and philosophical ramifications that can and will inform on the practical ramifications. It is a guide to understanding what you are doing before you start doing it.

RPGs don’t have to have combat. Adventure games don’t have to have puzzles and so forth. And Action games cover a wider variety than you previously thought. The real problem is that the gaming industry, both mainstream and indie alike don’t see any of this. The supergenres are capable of so much more, but we insist on focusing on the top end of McCloud’s graph, endlessly tweaking instead of really reinventing the wheel. Well at least outside Action games. I think that is kind of a shame.

Gamification in it’s most basic form is a stupid idea where in most cases people will add points or badges to something and think that is all that is needed to up the engagement with people. Game Frame is not about that. The book is about going beyond that and applying everything that game makers have learned over the decades and implementing the basic system structure that all games work with. Points, badges and other recognition of achievement is a single part of the whole system and one of the less important parts. It goes into depth about a basic framework that all games follow by showing a graph of it and itemizing the different elements of the cycle that games run on: the cycle of Actions -> the Black Box -> Feedback and around again.

Unfortunately the book’s audience is people who are not gamers. These are people who have heard of gamification and the future and want to implement it to their own ends, but understand nothing about games, gamers or the culture around them. It is a book aimed at those who think video games are a mindless pastime for children. So the first two thirds of the book spend it’s time proving that notion wrong. It quotes scientific research, provides economic examples of profitable successes both in games and systems that apply gamification. There’s nothing wrong with this, but there is nothing new here. If you are at all familiar with Gamasutra, Critical-Distance or really anything online that talks about games in a non-frivolous way you know all this. There is nothing new or special for the majority of the book. It’s about convincing people that I frankly don’t know if they need to be convinced of anything. When it comes to buzzwords, people latch onto them regardless of their origin, especially if that is where the market is going. The managers that this section of the book is trying to convince aren’t the same people who will be introducing the nitty gritty of the systems over their products or work environment.

The second half of the book, while it provides a graph that visually depicts how games work, it’s explanation of each and what they are is rather dull. Most of it is going over every conceivable facet of what ‘resources’ a game could use or ‘resistance’ needed for player engagement. In the end the book is an extended collection of wikipedia articles. It has a substantial reference guide in the back and really would probably be more beneficial to read some of the articles in there instead.

The book is focused on a point it wants to make, but doesn’t know who it wants to make it to. It’s an easy read, but says nothing revolutionary or even new. It might be an eye opener to some, but those people wont use it. It doesn’t help that I’m a little uneasy about a book that boils down to a 170-page instruction manual for creating propaganda. He recognizes the power game systems have on people and tells us this is the future and if its target audience is mangers of businesses it can’t help but make me feel a little uneasy. In the last chapter Mr. Dignan talks about the responsibility to use such influential and thought provoking power that these systems have on us and while I respect the effort it is token, like the book itself knows this will be the part of the book that gets ignored.
I’ll leave you with a quote from the book that, in the end, I think is the perfect metaphor for the whole book:

As Yoda once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.

I’m coming at this a bit late. The post went up at that end of last week and there have been plenty of responses in the comments and those made by other critics on their blogs before this. There may be little original I can add, but I prefer to take the time to calm down and get my thoughts in order. So while what I say may have been said before there may be enough in my writing that is original to justify it, or at least say it in an original enough way to do that.

So I’m coming at this a little late, but since Danc is continually editing his post instead of posting a revised version, (I’ll get to that later.) for completion sake, thanks to some cleaver Google searching, here’s the original. (If that link goes or changes I’ll have the original on file.) I’ll be focusing my criticism to his most current post as of May 14th.

First let’s start with the image he chose to put at the top.

The saying is quite a famous one about the nature of criticism, but what it means has little to do, okay it has nothing to do with what Danc is choosing to address. In fact you could call it in direct violation of the position he is trying to establish. The saying “To escape criticism: do nothing, say nothing, be nothing” is about creators who have complained about critics with regards to their work. As an artist or creator, if you aren’t being criticized positively or negatively, you are as the saying says you are. That Danc would headline this saying at the top of his post about limiting the types of criticism we hold as good criticism is counter productive and shows a baseline misunderstanding of what it means. Either that or he used it because it has the word criticism in it four times. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say it’s the latter.

We need better methods of filtering game criticism.  The types of writing about games have exploded.  With communities of writers attempting to support highly divergent goals and audiences, simply understanding if an essay is useful is a huge challenge.

This first one isn’t really about the writing, but it’s a valid point so I’ll let that nitpick slide. We absolutely need better methods of filtering through all the writing about games that is out there. Critical Distance is attempting such a thing and we do our best, but the amount of writing has grown exponentially in the last few years and as I’ve said before even with our massive RSS feeds we can’t find it or filter it all. The internet is just too big. Of course our weekly roundups aren’t what he’s referring to. When you are looking for something specific you can try Google or the game writings search engine we have at CD, but your best bet is asking through crowd sourcing on twitter for a specific piece or topic. Yes that has to be improved somehow.

We need writers who are more deeply educated in the art, craft and science of games. The majority of “game criticism” tends to be informed by a narrow population of gamers, journalists and academics specializing in the humanities.  We are often missing experienced perspective from the sciences and the developers of games.  The vast body of game criticism is written by people that I would consider partial game illiterates.  They are dance judges who have watched Dancing with the Stars, but who have never danced.

His assertion in the heading is fine; it’s when he goes into specifics that a problem with what he means by that arises. The way he frames it is like the people doing the work without game development experience are just louts sitting on their couches yelling at the TV. And while this is certainly part of the process for some, that doesn’t preclude the fact that what they say in their writing has merit. In fact amateurs are some of the best critics out there. Roger Ebert has no formal education in film or made his directorial debut at any time and yet he is held as the preeminent film critic for decades. I could name people like Paulina Kael or Lester Bangs, but I’d rather move on. Who they are and their background should not take precedence over what a person says.

We need a defined class of game writing that focuses on improving games.  The existing community will continue writing about the experience of gaming. But what if there were a small group that wished to do more than talk about playing?  Imagine holding your writing to the standard that asks you to ratchet forward the creative conversation.  For this tiny crew, judge your writing on its ability to directly improve the art, culture and science of games in an incontrovertible fashion

Finally, my main issue with the entire piece and it’s based in this assertion: that the purpose of criticism is to improve games. That is a flat out lie. The purpose of criticism is to criticize. I know it seems circular, but really the only thing criticism of any time has to accommodate: to criticize and explain why. Anything else can be a part of it, but isn’t necessary. But then he explains what he means and misses the point in another fashion.

I’m going to have to unpack the second half, because there is so much wrong in just these three sentences. First there is no problem with wanting to talk about something other than playing games, but the statement positions itself as the superior group. As if talking about playing is beneath the conceits of making better games, despite the fact that play is what games are made for. It’s like trying to make a better omelet without concern for the eating of it or a better book without concern for the reading of it or a better movie without concern for the watching of it. Yes other conversations about games can take place, but to assume that they are some how lesser due to the inherent nature of what is done with a medium, not to be insulting, is a stupid position to take. Then he asks us to imagine pushing the creative conversation forward instead of backward or stagnating as the present conversation apparently does. All critical writing, whether it is experiential, analytical, observational or theoretical pushes the conversation forward. Then solely this “tiny crew” can improve the art, culture and science of games is incredibly arrogant and short sighted. To single out any writing as the only kind that can improve games or any medium as some silver bullet is not just stupid, but wrong. Variety is the spice of life and only with variety of conversations each can anything move forward.

That was just the intro, so he didn’t say much and therefore neither did I, but even in the beginning he makes some outrageous claims as vague as they are.

On our first topic, the “blossoming of shallow game criticism” Danc seems at the same time happy that there is so much attention being brought to the topic and at the same time he derides it, but not on the merits that such writing is often worthy of derision. He gives an example that wasted his time. It was the first post from the latest TWIVGB from Critical Distance, Adam Ruch’s piece on Kotaku about first and third person perspective in games. It’s not a piece I would have included, but I don’t think it warrants the accusations Danc levels at it. But before that, he calls it a waste of time because it doesn’t help him. The only real response I should have to present is, if you are looking for the kind of criticism that will help you the creation factor of games then why are you looking for it on Kotaku? I figure you know what Kotaku is, an enthusiast game journalism blog. By your personal metrics nothing there would be helpful to you, so why look at it in the first place? Especially when you later tell us that you structure how much you listen to something based on who is saying it. Despite who the author is, the piece was on Kotaku and the author would adjust the material as needed for the place of publication.

There is little insight that couldn’t be gained by sitting down with a beer and a controller. There is no attempt at gathering empirical evidence.

Really? I wonder why? No offense to Mr. Ruch. It was a nice piece.

Now I wanted to stick with ideas, but when a tone so permeates a piece it is impossible to ignore. The insulting dictatorial tone he takes with Mr. Ruch is downright insulting. Phrases like “fluffy gamer opinion,” “young student” and the conclusion “There’s a clear and obvious need for writing by young gamers attempting to think about their hobby. Without such essays, you never gain(s?) the skills needed to writing something better.” Wow, could you act any more dismissive. I spent almost a year collecting links about the last prominent mainstream “lord gatekeeper” and at least Ebert phrasing wasn’t so condescending. ‘Yes that’s nice Adam now go play in your sandbox while the grownups write real criticism.’ I don’t want to harp on this, but even in the edited version that supposedly toned down the insult, the high and mighty attitude remains about something Danc doesn’t have a full grasp on is insulting not just to those he dismisses, but anyone who might try and agree with him. You don’t win intelligent arguments by belittling the opposition. You only strengthen others’ resolve. All right, off rhetoric and back to issues.

Now we come to his taxonomy of the different types of game criticism. No issues with the first one, traditional reviews are the broadest form of criticism.

Playthroughs: Where reviews are often (but not always) dry affairs that attempt objectivity, a play through seeks to describe the emotional experience of a game through a single player’s eyes. Though I suspect many would disagree, I see the subjective descriptions of gaming found in New Game Journalism as a type of playthrough.

The next one, however, either has a serious flaw with his explanation or his understanding of certain words. He says they attempt objectivity. If they are trying to be criticism, then no they don’t. If they are trying, but are attempting to be objective then the piece is simply failing on it’s own merits. Also, I don’t know how something could attempt objectivity, but then describe “the emotional experience of the game through a single player’s eyes,” aka their eyes. There is a disconnect with these two reasonings.

Connecting games with the humanities: An academic exercise in which various aspects of games are described as being part of an ongoing structure of philosophy, movie criticism, literary criticism, art history, rhetoric, etc.

I take only issue with the phrasing of his definition in that it implies that these kinds of criticism only serve to extend from previous critical arts taken from other mediums rather than apply the same kind of critical eye and work within a new rhetoric unique to the mediums of interactive entertainment.

I have no problem with the forth, fifth, or seventh ones. They are indeed different types of criticisms.

Game analysis: “Here’s a working game. Here’s the experiment. Here are the repeatable lessons I learned.”

This is not criticism. There is no critique going on with that framework. This is an instruction manual. There is analysis and examination, but only of a mathematical nature. There is no opinion. It would be the same as giving the detailed recipe and instruction for making that omelet I mentioned earlier and leaving it at that.

Then there is the taxonomy of the types of writers: journalists, gamer hobbyists/students, academics/intellectuals and developers. I’m not going to quote each one or I’ll be here all night, instead I’ll give the blow by blow. First of all, why are students put with the hobbyists? Despite what he may think of my writing one way or the other I don’t think Simon Ferrari would appreciate having his work lumped in with mine. Even that falls apart, because while I am a Hobbyist at this, I don’t fit your mold and would fall under Intellectual despite having no formal education in the field. Academic is also a style of writing and not just a profession. Students write in that academic style, because they are writing for academics and not the hobbyist press. Then you say developers only write for developers. I know plenty who consider their audience to be a wider circle than that. Then you say that each type only engage in certain types of writings to be considered under that heading. That’s too narrow, because I’ve written under multiple headings and I know others who have written under a multiple of those headings. I’ve seen people who have moved from one profession onto the next who haven’t radically altered how they write about games.

You admit all this. You admit that these terms are nebulous, and a person may shift from one category to the next or that any piece of writing may fall under multiple categories at any one time, which begs the question: what is the point of them? I’ll add to that and ask, what is the point of categorizing the different types of writing as well? It’s nice that you’ve tried to categorize them, but to what end? It’s a waste of time. Yes you can take any game criticism and put it under one of those labels, but then what? What does that do? Nothing. You’ve applied a meaningless label to a piece of writing. You can’t apply it before you’ve read it so you can’t use the system to save time reading and you’ve admitted yourself that you can’t apply a consistent label to all of an author’s work, because the definition of any particular author’s work changes from piece to piece.

Given this classification system, what do we have in abundance and what are we lacking? Here is what I see: (and this admittedly may be biased by my own personal consumption habits):

I wont quote your assessment, as it is pretty much the same as mine. Journalist type game writing takes up the majority because it pays the most. Intellectual type game writing would come is second, but the gulf between them is huge. Your tertiary and secondary types are far closer together than your primary and secondary. Again I’m not sure what this signifies, because as we’ve established such classifications are practically useless.

The problem with writing only by gamers

I’d hope the people who design my games are also people who play games. It be a little like writers who don’t read or directors who don’t watch movies. I take the implication by gamer you mean non-designer player of games.

So we come to what all that rather meaningless build up is for. Honestly, I think you could have started here and saved us both a couple thousand words. If it weren’t for my bullheadedness with regards to responding like this I would have skipped all that and started here. It would make the above a little less rambling and vague towards future arguments. However, I feel that my response is equal in point to those sections they criticize.

You wish designers wrote more criticism. Yeah, me too. It would be awesome to read designers talk about their work the same way an author talks about his books or a director about his movies, but I think you generalize what the designer might be want to talk about or could talk about. You then ask us to consider your hypothetical dancer, yes lets.

Consider the act of judging dances. Dancing (like making games) is a highly technical craft that may be enjoyed superficially or judged in a rigorous fashion. On one hand you have a trained dancer. On the other hand, you have someone who has watched Dancing with the Stars, but never fully engaged in the practical mastery necessary to understand the foundations of the art.  I submit that if both have comparable skills of analysis and communication, the one with personal experience as a dancer would make the more informed critic.

You assert that a professional dancer who has mastered the foundational aspects of their art would make a more informed critic that one who simple watches. I disagree. I think they bring a differently informed critique. See there is a fundamental difference between dancer and audience. The dancer cannot see him or herself dance, while all the audience does is watch. I don’t just mean during the physical performance, I also mean should the dancer be apart of the theater crowd. The dancer will see it from the dancer’s perspective. They will see the technical brilliance and how it informs the emotional response from the audience, but they may not have the hard lined direct connection that the audience has to that emotional response. But should the dancer and audience member try to express why a performance made them feel they way it did, and they have similar takes and opinions, they will note the same moves and moments and how that connected with them. The dancer will express that connection from the artist’s point of view and the audience member with express it from the audience’s point of view. Given that it is a performance for an audience, devaluing their opinion is fruitless since it is from them you are trying to elect an emotional response. Let’s get off dance, I don’t know enough about dancing to get into proving a specific hypothetical.

Instead lets go back to that omelet. The chef and diner will note the taste, texture and ‘filling quotient’ but is one opinion better than the other. No. It’s even more complicated should the chef say it’s good, but the diner says it tastes horrendous. Who am I to trust my taste buds with? Or to a medium closer to home, who am I to trust my literary reading to, the opinion of the literary elite reviewers, often written by writers themselves or a man of the masses who dares to say the emperor has no clothes? I’m referring to my ‘little black book.’ I read White Noise and the masses were right.

In general, game criticism tends not to be informed (with) hands-on knowledge about what it takes to make a competent game.

Please establish how this is a problem.

When they look for role models in other media, they see no need for understanding the lowly techniques of creation.

That’s because there isn’t. There is no need to understand how something is made to pass personal judgment upon it and as I established earlier, criticism is subjective and personal. Understanding how something bad was made doesn’t change a person’s opinion that it is bad, nor how something good was made doesn’t alter the opinion that it is good. Do the uninformed need to know how something is made to explain why something is the way it is? Not really. If The Border House staff sees a game with sexist imagery, situations or writing and then call it out with an explanation, understanding how it is made doesn’t inform that critique one iota. Nor does understanding the systems behind say inFamous change my explanation of how it was a wasted opportunity thematically.

Purely evocative media as music, video, writing or painting can often be reasonable well described using tools from the humanities and the personal reaction of an individual.  If I want to understand a novel, a single sample has limitations, but it can convey the essence of the experience surprisingly well.

Oh good lord. I, egh, ummm. Ah, eeeeeh, fffff… You have rendered me speechless. I need a moment.

…

Two things. First, calling music, video, writing or painting a purely evocative medium is shallow and shows little understanding for those mediums. It also shows little understanding for the humanities criticism that these mediums produced. Yes they can be evocative, but purely so? Jazz musicians, the director of Koyaanisqatsi, the language poets, or Masaccio are all highly technical artists whose works do evoke emotions, but can be regarded more for their technical prowess. And I so want to take exception to the idea one can understand a novel and convey the experience in a single sample. Yes in some cases it can, when it’s followed up by a couple hundred words explaining the work. Were I to write a paper in college to explain the essence of a novel with an excerpt I’d have been laughed out of the classroom after being failed. There is an entire section how such a method fails consistently in my ‘little black book.’ I’d go on, but this is about game criticism, not literary criticism.

Yet though games do possess evocative elements, they also are driven by a functional heart that resists being reduced to only the softest of sciences.

And if a work of art is only driven by its functional elements it will fall by the wayside. Chess and Go are evocative because of the purpose of their functional elements, not inherently because of the functional elements. Moving pieces around a board is not interesting by itself, but doing to so in a simulacrum of warfare to “capture” the king is. Placing stones on a piece of wood with lines on it isn’t interesting, but with the purpose of territorial control, then it becomes interesting. You cannot remove these evocative elements from the games. Terms like attack, control, surround, take, capture, kill are common in explaining how to play the game. Even in a game as boiled down to systems as you can get like Tetris, rely on the evocative elements. The music, the speed and the satisfying sound effect when clearing 4 rows with an I block are the evocative elements of the game and keep people playing. We may debate how they continually call to players, but it is not the functional systems that keep people playing. Yes an ugly purely functional bridge will do its job, but will fail overall. Why? The Golden Gate Bridge is a success because of its aesthetic and cultural elements that it adds to San Francisco. I haven’t the figures, but that bridge certainly adds to the tourism trade and adds to the cultural identity of the city in a way a purely base bridge wouldn’t.

Games have much in common with functional works involving mathematics, psychology, governments, economics or other complex systems.

Maybe in their creation process, but certainly not in their experiential process, you know, the part where a gamer sits down to actually play the final product. Actually no, even during the creation process if you focus solely on the ‘functional elements’ you lose anything interesting about the game. Games are about how those elements speak to us. If you don’t focus on that as part of the design than you are missing a whole lot of potential. And ironically will be nailed for it by critics.

These are vast fields that are mostly untapped by today’s writer. And for good reason.  You can only dig into them at the root if you devote a large hunk of your life to mastering them through direct experience.  This means making games in a thoughtful manner and then sharing those insights with those who will only play.

I’m confused here. I thought designers were writing for other designers. How does sharing insights of how a game is made help those who only play? How does system analysis convey anything to the person who only plays a game? You’re missing a clause or a sentence here to connect these two thoughts.

I suspect that it is too late for the field of game criticism to ever again broadly mean ‘critical thoughts about games’.

Why? That’s what it means now. The field of game criticism is still much like the Wild West. Different people are trying different approaches. Some methods or approaches get left by the wayside because they don’t work; others get tried out and are held on to. Writers improve with their craft and delve into their thoughts at different depths at different times. I can’t see how game criticism doesn’t mean “critical thoughts about games.” That’s the very definition of it.

Somewhere along the line we imported wholesale too much baggage from media that long ago stagnated under the weight of navel-gazing divorced from practice.

Oh that’s what you mean. You definition of ‘critical’ must be different from the one in the dictionary.

-involving skillful judgment as to truth, merit, etc.; judicial

All of which is opinion within some degree of assessment. Having to do with the practice of creation has got nothing to do with “critical thoughts.” ‘How to do something’ is not the same thing as ‘why something was done’ or ‘what does this thing done mean.’ The latter two are questions dealing with criticism, the first one isn’t.

So now we reach Danc’s proposed solution of changing the name of what he wants. Unfortunately “analysis” doesn’t mean what he wants it to mean either. He wants to look to the future, but analysis is only concerned with what already exists, but I’ll ignore semantics and instead focus on the idea. I find that all Danc is doing is running away from one semantic term to another nearly identical term that isn’t tainted with opinion. And really what I find most disheartening by it, is instead of opening his view or his mind he has closed it further and run off into his own little corner. Well-written criticism is very useful to a creator and not just as metrics. Metrics may help with specific instances of clearing up level design or tightening systems, but only through a lens of iterative design. Jaime Griesemer explains the problems with such a thought process here. The summation is, iterative design will get you a more polished or expanded version of what you already have, it wont create anything new. Substantial opinion and criticism, which included analysis of the game you’re talking about in your critique, isn’t about the technical nitty gritty of creating games, but broadening horizons and thoughts processes. Criticism is the application of thought to something, reading criticism can broaden your thoughts and make you see the game/movie/book/song in a different light or from a new angle and might even change your opinion on it.

Deadly Premonition was a game much maligned by the initial reviews and consensus, until the critics got a hold of it and were able to see past the technical problems of the game to the evocative heart that was at the core. Far Cry 2 is another game that the critics help elevate. Before the likes of Ben Abraham and the Idle Thumbs crew, people only considered it a repetitive, wayward directional shooter with checkpoints that respawned too quickly, but once the critics started talking about emergent stories and the feelings evoked by the chaos in the systems or likened it to Heart of Darkness, suddenly a lot, not everyone, but a lot of players saw the game they once dismissed in a different light.

All of this leads me to your four questions to ask about your writing.

Grounded: Are you basing your theories off empirical evidence?  Do not write something merely because you had a feeling to express.

I covered this above, that great theories, especially when it comes to emotional response towards art do not require empirical evidence. Saying, “Do not write something merely because you had a feeling to express” is counterproductive. That seems the perfect time to start writing to me. Maybe not if it was only a feeling, but a feeling with thought, evidence and examples to back it up, then sure.

Aware: Do you know what other people have written in the past?  Do the research and be an informed commenter.

Do I know what has been written in the past? No, not everything. There is so much even with the limited time frame we’re dealing with, does the fact something may have been written preclude me from writing about a topic or a specific thought? No, what if my reader hadn’t heard the idea before? It’s new to him. Maybe I’m expressing the same idea in a new way or from a fresh perspective or explain it differently that may connect with someone better than what had come before. Maybe what came before was poorly written or poorly expressed. Should that preclude me from writing on that topic simply because it was already done?

Insightful:  Does your writing add a substantial new perspective or tool that moves the conversation forward?  Do not rehash the same old thing simply because you have an opinion on the currently popular meme.

Does it add a new perspective? It could, but it wont matter if it’s already covered material, right? Does it move the conversation forward? Maybe, which particular conversation forward? Yours or the conversation the person new to game criticism is trying to have?

Actionable: Does your writing identify a course of action that previously was obscured? Do not let an exploration of an idea wander off into vague hand-waving. Ask the reader to perform an experiment that increases the knowledge of the community as a whole.

Why kind of experiment? A thought experiment that takes a few seconds or a programmable one that not everyone is capable of? And why should I have a reader perform an experiment? If I’m the writer I should do the work in the writing, not shove it off onto my readers.

Now Danc asserts that by following these weak guidelines, that don’t answer even the basic questions that come to mind while reading them, are the way to A.) have your writing stand out and B.) improve the world by adding your contribution upon the work that came before.

I call bullshit. The way to have your writing stand out is write better. If there is one thing I’ve learned as an English major, to have one’s writing stand out is not through new ideas, concepts or be at the forefront, it is to be a better writer. To be able to connect strings of words in more evocative, entertaining and engaging ways than the others is how to rise “out of the muck.” You say writing this way will attract more people who write this way. Why would any person who seriously wants to intelligently approach games do that? Why would you want a homogeneous philosophy behind how you write about games? It would be the same as if you all believed the same concepts about games, which given where this entire piece is coming from, is entirely possible. That is all you’d attract with such a narrow method. Then you claim such a method will lead to writing that will improve the world and add a contribution to the medium. All critical writing does that. I’ve added contributions, however small, to the medium with my writing. Any well expressed thought will add to the medium. Plus, this goes back to the “Aware” part of your system. Change doesn’t happen when expressed from a single source. You who values his metrics should know that one player getting stuck in at a particular wall will not cause you to allocate resources to change it if 100 others don’t. One person expressing an idea or concept won’t action change. The Border House writers and others like them have written consistently about the sexist attitudes in games and little has changed and they’ve been talking for years. Part of that small contribution is adding your voice to many others saying the same thing so that change will occur.

As a small closing note, I do realize that my comments may seem overly narrow in their focus. Surely game criticism is a big tent in which any gamer can say anything and gentle respect is given to all who share a love for games.  And if that is how you wish to live your life, go to it.

Thank you. I really needed your patronizing acquiescence to continue doing what I was doing, so long as it’s out of sight. Yes, that is how I wish to live my life. I wish to criticize games the way I do and I don’t need to be shoved off like I’m not welcome at the grownup table to so.

I come at this topic with the personal belief that merely rehashing the works of others is not nearly enough.

Not sure what you mean here. Poor criticism may do that, but well written criticism doesn’t. I think it may be the quality of your reading, not the kind of reading you are doing.

As a creator, you have only a few short years to build something great that changes the world.

Why, do they contract leprosy after a certain amount of time?

Responses to comments

Most game criticism is not for developers so none of this matters.

Way to go for the strawman argument. What was actually being expressed was that most game criticism is not written for the benefit of developers and it shouldn’t be. A critic’s job is not to do your job. The original essay and frankly this version as well is like a dairy farmer complaining that the chickens aren’t giving him milk. It’s not the chicken’s job to give a dairy farmer milk, just like it isn’t the job a critic to tell a developer how to do his job. I think many, including Danc, would feel insulted if I started dictating to them how to do their job.

Game criticism is not about improving games. It is about studying what exists.

This is correct. You can only criticize what exists by definition. Also, historians and catalogers are not the same as critics. So, way to go. Missed the point, again. What people were actually talking about is a simple definitional truth. You cannot criticize what doesn’t exist. It’s a maxim: review the game you have not the game you want. It’s not about listing games under headings or developing timelines. If you stopped being so high and mighty from your fortress of solitude and took the time to find out what people were actually saying, you wouldn’t be missing the point so consistently.

How will game developers know what players are feeling if not for game criticism?

This is a valid question that you failed to answer. You talk about the use of qualitative and quantitative data used for the system to reach the desirable point. That’s not what was asked. The question is not asking about raw systems, but how a game evokes emotion and what is being evoked? It requires a more nuance answering than strict numbers or questionnaires provide. What you are recommending is known as tyranny of the masses. Somehow the more “representative” uniformed player when in large quantities know more than the critic, who has more experience, can express complicated thoughts better and with more depth. You are right that the critic may not excavate the root cause of a problem, but what makes you think 100 uninformed gamers will? Also, if intimate knowledge of the systems is required to understand a game, then you are doing it wrong. If I wrote a novel that required more technical understanding than reading or a movie that required more technical understanding that watching I’d have failed in those mediums.

Your note pisses me off more than your original post. (It has since been excised.) I feel this is part of the problem overall. Criticism can be utilized by developers and is used in every other medium by working backwards. Critics express their reactions to an end product. When they find something that does or does not work and explain why, it is the creator’s job to work backwards from that. Figuring out where to go next isn’t our job never has been and never will be. That’s your job, but you seem to confuse that. This essay of yours is another example of that. You all but deleted the original version for this “update” which is really a complete rewrite. It should have been a new post. Instead of looking to the future, you are trying to erase the past and update it. That first post was not a rough draft. You shouldn’t have posted it if it was. It was final copy. I would never post a rough draft only to crowd source my editorial duties and replace it. As a creator that is unconscionable. Your audience is not your editorial staff and the fact you would try to apply this to games, but then advocate others follow you is even worse.

Now to respond to a few of your comments in the comment section. There were quite a few more I could have pulled out to pull apart, but I’m tired and this is long.

When I speak of the parasite critics, I think those in the movie industry qualify quite nicely. I suspect most would agree that turning into the movie industry is *not* a desired outcome.

I don’t understand what you mean by “in the movie industry.” Do you mean movie critics? PR people? Financial assessors? What? And that we don’t want to turn into that, the game industry is pretty much following the Hollywood model of if not the present day, then the studio system of the early decades.

Updated the doc to include feedback: A) Emphasized the importance of listening to players (something I passionately practice!) Tom Chick is still cool. B) Added a bit on the validity of different opinions C) Clarified that perspectives from other fields is good. D) Emphasized the need for game developers to write about games.

Yeah you did almost none of these in earnest. It all read of tokenism. Throw the nay sayers a bone. You emphasized, a tiny bit, the importance of listening to players, but well written critics are still somehow a step below the masses. You added a bit of validity of different opinions, but not to the extent that they are worth listening to. Clarified that perspectives from other fields are good, yes so long as they are mathematics and other systems bases sciences. The last one is all you really did without coming off like a condescending dick and that didn’t need to be emphasized in the first place.

- No, you are not subservient to creators. I’ve seen this comment in a couple of places and I’d be delighted if folks could help me identify the particular turn of phrase that seems to polarize folks so strongly.
- Yes, it is helpful to have someone who can act as a translator to other media.
- Yes, it is important for developers to look at their creation from the perspective of the audience. (This comment actively shocks me. What do you think game developers are *doing* with those metrics, surveys, play tests and thousands upon thousands of iterations on a game?)

Ben dealt with the first one. The second one didn’t come across. And as to the third one, you disregarded the opinions of people who actually cared enough and were moved enough to write something about a game. I point to this with regards to iteration, as iteration wont help with what I feel you only think of as the window dressing narrative elements of many games. Because of the fact you disregard all of this, you are not looking at the game from the audience’s perspective, you are filtering it through your perspective, which is not the same thing. You are shocked by the comment. I’m shocked you think you are looking at it from the audience’s perspective.

Another metaphor: It is like there is a class of writing that spends thousands of pages discussing a person’s individual experience with the texture of a single $1 dollar bill while ignoring anything having to do with micro and macro economics. Are you really broadly doing your job informing the community of the nature of a dollar bill if mostly you focus on the texture of that one example.

This is a great metaphor, for arguing my point and losing ground on yours. The fact someone would spent thousands of pages discussing the aesthetics of a dollar bill rather than economics should tell you they couldn’t give a rats ass about economics and not they are going about it wrong. An economist would have no use for such writing, but the guy making the new printing plates might.

Take your own advice then replace it with game design and game critic. Then you have a person writing about the western genre implications of Red Dead, really couldn’t care about the rendering code one way or the other. While the programmer wont get anything from it, maybe the set designer would or the writer, or lead designer who set the direction of the game may fix some of the thematic problems.

To be clear
- I’m not putting game criticism in a box.
- I’m not claiming your soapbox for my own.
- I’m not restricting meaningful discussion to only developers.

Yes you are. That entirely pointless lead up to your actual essay was all about categorizing and compartmentalizing criticism, pointlessly I might add. You’re not claiming it, but you are trying oh so very hard. And yes you are restricting meaningful discussion to developers by claiming only those who develop games can have meaningful discussion, because everyone else is an uniformed “young student” who “attempting to think about their hobby” but only with “fluffy gamer opinion.”

Believe it or not, the amount of game criticism completely swamps the amount of interesting writing by game developers.

This is a rhetorical tick for me, but you are implying here that game developers don’t write game criticism by divorcing the two concepts and if they did it wouldn’t be interesting. By extension you are calling all game criticism uninteresting.

Re: QA Process and listening to Portal dev diaries.

No, I’m sorry, you are misinformed. Merely reading about something that requires years of practice to master does not instantly translate into experience or understanding. There is a reason why dancing judges are past dancers. It gives a level of insight that the uneducated observer cannot match.

Not true. Reading or consuming material that requires years of practice to do does not translate into the ability to do it, but yes certainly in the ability to understand it. Writing is thoughts made physical on paper or on screen. If you are trying to convey an idea or concept about the creation process than reading or listening about it can certainly convey understanding if not ability. I’ll ignore how this contradicts your entire premise of game designers writing will help people design games. If concepts cannot be conveyed or understood via the written word then how will game designers tell their teachable moments?

Though Ebert happens to not be one, I would state in general that idiot savants are poor role models. Just because there are critics who are ignorant of the art and craft of games doesn’t mean you should strive to be one.

This argument I’m about to make came up last time as well. If there is an example of something being done a certain way that means it can be done that way. Disregarding it in the face of a factual example doesn’t mean you playing to statistics; it makes you willfully ignorant.

Fraser Allison pulled your last comment apart wonderfully in his response below it, so I wont bother responding here.

If I had to make an overall statement to sum up my points, it would be that you are being willfully ignorant of what criticism is, how it functions, and how it can be useful all because it doesn’t fit into your narrow world view. The purpose of criticism is to broaden thought through the medium of discussing a work. The fact that you close your mind in the face of it and then try to slink off into another section by relabeling yourself is ironic and tragic at the same time. If games are only to be mechanical interactions then yes, criticism wouldn’t matter past an examination of function, but art has no practical function other than what importance and individual ascribes to it. By denying that facet of criticism from the creation process you lose the very essence of what pushes games beyond their mechanical boundaries they had in the beginning. The core is neither mechanics, nor raw feelings but central ideas that all elements express. The designers are becoming engineers and programmers less and less as time goes by. In clinging to these mathematical and purely systematic creations and methods you will fall behind and not strive for the future you hope for. If you find this assertion wrong, then you must go back to your own premise, because this is all I see coming out of it.

Having read it, I asked on twitter, rhetorically, how do you review this book. It’s a book about ideas and about theoretical space of a possible sociological future. How can I criticize the book without criticizing* the ideas within? Answer: I can’t. I can’t solely focus on how it’s presented or the coherence of the argument. That would be denying a fundamental aspect of the book.

I did get an answer to my tweet anyway that said, “Step 1 ignore who wrote it, otherwise you’re going to get caught in the cult of personality.”

That’s a good starting position. Jane McGonigal is an enormously charismatic woman. Even in her writing you can feel the exuberant energy of her personality coming through loud and clear. She is a persuasive woman and you can’t help but be swept along by her ideas and optimism. She also has gathered a dedicated following. It’s not surprising. In the mainstream media video games are always about the negative press and the demonizing of the medium. Then comes a charming, charismatic, enthusiastic, professional woman saying ‘no that’s wrong, it’s the exact opposite.’ It’s easy to see how she gathered a following. But thankfully there is more. She is intelligent and knows her stuff. At no point does she feel like she’s bullshitting you.

The book is really three books in one. It isn’t scatterbrained in its delivery, no it presents a series of quite coherent arguments with one point fully explained and explored before having the next chapter build off of it to make the nest point. The book is divided into three sections that follow the shift in focus.

Part one entitled “Why Games Make Us Happy” is self-explanatory. It is also the best part of the whole. Those first hundred pages where she explains all the research and effects paying games has on the human psyche is fascinating. To see how our minds work and how the mass introduction of electronic games has shifted our generation’s perceptions of reality is a masterwork of argumentative writing. She never writes down to her audiences, but does expect you to keep up. She uses simple and clear language to get across these complex ideas, slowing down to explain a piece of gamer jargon to the masses. It contends that reality was always dull, but now with the well-tuned comparisons to fictional realms we see this disparity greater than ever before. Here we see Mrs. McGonigal lays the groundwork for her later assertions, but I heartily recommend this part of the book.

Part two is where she focuses on where we are now. Most of her writing looks not at present day video gaming, but ARGs (Alternate Reality Games). I knew very little about them and you can see their usefulness in certain aspects. She introduces the concept and familiarizes you with what they are while at the same time extolling their usefulness. Chore Wars is an interesting concept that is defiantly beneficial if you can pull it off in your house. SuperBetter is another game that seems like a pure beneficial game in the area of health. In fact all of the examples she gives are wonderful sounding games that make the world a slightly better place or at least make us better in it.

And yet while I was reading it I felt there was something wrong. It was the same feeling I got when I was two and my dad teased me by acting all surprised when plugging a power strip into itself wasn’t working. At the time I didn’t know what, but I knew something was wrong. Several times something would come up that made me think that here is where her argument breaks down, but then further on my questions would be answered.

For instance, at the beginning of chapter 10 she starts off with a few examples of activities that better our self-esteem.

Shout compliments at strangers on the sidewalk

That sentence made me stop reading for a while. It actually made my mind go blank. Eventually I was able to muster a thought and it was, “That is going to go horribly wrong.” I even started constructing my argument on the various problems with that activity. But as I read on the game it was apart of made more sense than that sentence by itself. My fear of the activity were countered by how the game worked and the problematic situations wouldn’t come up.

Another issue I thought was all these games seems only to work with first-world issues. There is nothing wrong with that, but McGonigal was contending that games would change the world for the better. Nothing I was reading would solve Darfur or hunger in Africa. All the crowd sourcing and positive thinking wouldn’t help those desperate people in need, but then I got to part three.

In part three the focus shifts to the future or rather the matter of scale. All the games she had looked at previously were rather personal or at least confined affairs. Now we are starting to explore the games of a global scale. As for hunger in Africa, the game Free Rice is an answer. A game solving a real world issue 10 grains of rice at a time. The further she pushes forward it is difficult not to follow her lead. Even when she gets into explaining the most esoteric and most complexly mental ARGs you can’t help but figure how these game systems could better the world.

However, something doesn’t ring right. Even as my minor quibbles are one by one shot down through her rhetoric I still couldn’t shake the feeling something was off. Her facts add up, her conclusions are step by step and logically sound. Then one of problems hit me. Her entire book is overwhelmingly positive. I knew this going in and doing my best not to be a curmudgeon, but the book really is looking too much on the greener side of things. She glosses over or outright ignores many of the darker aspects of gamer/internet culture. One of the greatest crowd sourcing accomplishments is Wikipedia, which she talks about at length, but another is Anonymous. Even ignoring them, Wikipedia is not the great project millions pour hours into solely to make great. There are a large number of people who will change things purposefully to be wrong or politicians who will abuse their personal page and insert things they haven’t done. She glosses over this by framing it as an argument of differences in how to present the facts. Yes there is that too, but it ignores a big problem that Wikipedia has been dealing with from the beginning. In fact throughout the whole book “griefing” is mentioned once and only in passing. The concept of people who enjoying throwing the game off balance or harming the experience for others is ignored. Trash talk is covered when talking about a facebook game people play with their moms and equated to light teasing.  The first thing I think of with regards to gamer trash talking are the racial and homophobic epithets streaming from a 14 year olds mouth to my ear over Xbox Live. Trolling is treated like it doesn’t even exist. Gamification is never mentioned by name, but at the same time that is what is being advocated on some level, but only in a certain application as if corporations or governments wouldn’t use it to modify other behaviors that may or may not be beneficial. McDonald’s wants you to buy more fries and could easily make a game out of it. It’s not healthy for you. She talks hopefully of a peaceful day where North Korea can successfully connected to the rest of the world freely and I can only think of their leadership learning to use these same techniques for the opposite effect.

I can understand not wanting to focus on it, but pretending it does not exist is just naive. That’s what was getting to me the whole time. McGonigal is an idealist, but to a fault. She so much wants to focus on the positive that the further the book goes along that path the harder it is to follow. This is where I finally saw the real problem with the whole argument. Ignoring the ugly side of gamerdom was only a symptom of the greater issue. It was bothering me from the beginning and it was only after finishing the book could I see the whole picture to realize where it breaks apart.

She disregards the positive value of the “escapist entertainment” of video games at the very beginning. To her credit she doesn’t say we shouldn’t have them, but it would be a shame if that is all games amounted to. Video games are a burgeoning art form and art can have a profound individual effect of a person. McGonigal seems to disregard what a sublime work can do to a person and instead looks at the formula that allows them to be so effective at the ‘inconsequential’ and transplants them to the macro.

She starts at the smallest and most individual level in the beginning of the book and then works her way up to a global scale. However, as we move up the sense of scale we lose the effect on the individual. She mentions activities from World Without Oil like fostering a community, potlucks to help with food shortage, self-sufficiency with gardens etc. But those are mere parts of the larger-hypothetical-system to surviving the hypothetical global oil shortage. The macro system is like the god games Civilization and SimCity that McGonigal uses for comparison and like those games you cannot control the individuals. The Sims have the exact opposite problem, you can control the micro (the small community of sims), but cannot see the macro (the larger world that continues on past the borders of the map).

Superstuct was an impressive piece of hypothetical work, but again its focus is on the macro systems that has little parlance with the micro and at the same time any focus on the micro would lose the global structure set forth by the macro. This disparity seems like an oversight or a challenge to overcome or something else. I don’t know. It’s never addressed. The game is about the role of super structures changing the world, but where are the game elements for each and every individual that would have to participate to effect them.

Plus, McGonigal is trying to replace one system of thought with another via a full-scale implementation of gamification, but it doesn’t work like that. Recent evidence from Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, Libya, etc would say it is the other way around. It is multiple micro elements that culminates in, without any super structure, a macro movement.

The biggest issue in solving a problem is not how to do it, but knowing it’s there in the first place. We have a society that has no knowledge of these problem’s existence or and sophisticated understanding of them. Education and enlightenment seem like a better use of these engagement systems. Pushing towards a greater good utilizing the systems of MMO is one thing, but knowing what you are doing and why in the end seems like a better purpose, even if it doesn’t transcend to a global scale.

McGonigal’s book is an interesting read and given with the great push from all sides towards gamification probably a necessary one if only to see the best of all possible outcomes even if the argument is incomplete. But without the counterpoint, without solutions on how to deal with the problems such systems could potentially create themselves Reality is Broken is incomplete. And incomplete thoughts for good are more dangerous than complete thoughts for evil.

*Criticize despite what most people think, as a negative term is a neutral term. You can have positive criticism and negative criticism.

I don’t mean to be insulting, but this is a pathetic argument one step above a straw-man. But it’s not your fault. What you are describing is not the failure of video games or their creators “to convey emotion, philosophy, and commentary on humanity and all of its general screw ups/triumphs” it’s a your (I’m using the collective your that amounts to nearly all video game players) ability to understand what you are playing. Yes video games are mostly schlock, but then the saying goes “90% of everything is crap.”

There is a small minority of video game players that do regard games as art, but additionally taken the next step to treat it as such and criticize it as if it were. Just like movie critics, literary critics and dramatic critics are a minority of the people who enjoy their chosen medium. Most are working hard to figure out how to describe and explain the nature of video games and how they do all that you say above in your definition of art and more. We lack a universal critical language and ability to accurately describe the experience of playing them.  The lingo used by most gamers are listing categories and not critical descriptors, nor universal; I’ve never heard “manic shooter” before and know them as bullet hell games or shmups (Shoot + them + up).

I’m going to address the two games you bring up. First Final Fantasy VII is a beloved darling of many people, even among critics, but few people, if any should they be honest, consider it art with a capital A. Most consider it just as you describe it. You admit not to being as in to video games as you once were, so I wont call this a straw-man and give you the benefit of the doubt. You also may not know that the style of presentation and conveyance that Final Fantasy VII promoted and made popular has had a large backlash in recent years, to the point where many critics hyperbolically call the JRPG genre, of which FF7 is an excellent example, dead.

You claim you wish it was a mini series or a novel instead and in the case of Final Fantasy VII I’d say you are probably right. But any video game that utilizes the medium’s inherent assets to convey meaning cannot be soundly adapted. Just as books version of great movies are bad and how even the best movie adaptations of great books fail to live up to their printed counterpart. Why? Because you cannot translate the inherent nature of one medium to another. The best transitions are those where the original work uses only surface level techniques to convey meaning like basic plot or character and do not enhance it with a book’s ability to use poetically descriptive prose, or a movie’s ability of camera angles and shot depth, or a comic’s balancing of image and word to build something greater etc etc. A game that doesn’t enhance it’s basic meaning with mechanics is better off as something else. But then most consumers in all mediums do not care about such things.

Now, Radiant Silvergun, a game I haven’t played, but from your description of it I have issue with your conclusion to it. You claim the ending was something great against the 70 minutes of filler leading up to it, to which I counter, without those 70 minutes of build up and challenge would that ending have meant anything? Would the somber, sacrifice for the greater good ending of Casablanca have had an emotional impact were it not for hour and half build up. No. I’m not saying this is art either, because I have not played it, but even from your very sparse description of the game, it sounds like that the changes from what the game’s previous 70 minutes had gotten you used to was part of the effect. In other words, those 70 minutes were necessary for the final boss battle to mean anything.

You speak of story as your only example of conveying a sense of art. You focus on it almost exclusively in your description of video games. In contrast I’d like to give two examples that convey their emotional meaning through play and have no real story: Tetris and Missile Command. Both are classics, the former on the Gameboy and every system since and the latter from the arcade.

Tetris conveys a feeling of fatalism. You can’t win Tetris. The game will keep going and for a beginner, the infinite play of the game doesn’t matter, because they have difficulty surviving. The blocks keep falling and you have to try and get rid of them, but you will eventually be overwhelmed. However, to one of the greatest players who can play a single game for hours on end, the feeling changes and it becomes more of a commentary on protestant work ethic. You keep doing the work, because it’s there. The blocks keep falling and your job is never done, and yet you persist. Should you stop working, you fail. You lose. You may say I’m reading too much into it. Many people have said this to the academics who have brought this reading of Tetris forward. To that I say Missile Command. I wont explain here, because this video has already done an excellent job of it:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2545-Narrative-Mechanics

Pay particular attention to the effect the game had on it’s own creator.

There are a lot of people who don’t see video games as anything more than a toy (I’d like to note there are toys out there that are themselves considered art.). These people cannot see beyond “the best use of video games is to unload some of your brain’s stress and replace it with entertaining visual cortex massage” when in fact that is a video game at its most pedestrian. I do not fault you personally for this view. It is merely the product of lack of critical ability towards this specific medium. This is the opinion of a movie goer without such a critical abilities about movies, for what is Transformers 2 but a “visual cortex massage” despite being crap. Or the opinion of people who call books boring who lack basically literary analysis skills (thanks to the American education system faulty administrative practices, their number grows). Video games are capable of so much more and there are hundreds of designers and critics who strive both to create games of artistic merit and successfully describe them.

I responded to Ebert in my own post last year and considered myself done with art debate, but this was such a backhanded defense of video games from what I can tell is an otherwise intelligent and critically thinking person that I had to respond. Your line of thought was the line of the most forward thinking about 15 years ago and would be the film equivalent of saying that no sublime movie can come from a comic book (The Dark Knight), it’s out of date.

“It’s why the “rah-rah kill them” mentality of the Cogs is somewhat undermined by the fact they cower behind chest high walls at every opportunity despite wearing refrigerators.”
That strikes me as ludonarrative resonance; undermining the tough-guy images the characters present is Gears of War’s central narrative theme. The game is chock full of moments illustrating how deep-down these characters are actually scared, vulnerable, and desperate. An “ooh-rah kill them” attitude is a highly adaptive reaction to this kind of situation, no matter how silly it might seem to us civilians.

I could have kept my thoughts to a response in the comments section, but one I feel that would start to drift off topic and two, I’d much rather use it as a spring board to discuss my thoughts on the characterization of the Gears universe.

To start off the bat, I missed out on the first Gears and my first hand experience is solely with the second one. But from what I understand there is not much of a difference tonally between the two games, so I don’t think it will be an issue.

The game Dagda experienced would be one I would love to play, however Gears is not that game. I don’t feel there is any deep-down fear among any of the principal (and from the Gears perspective) important characters. In fact the Gears of War games perpetuate a concept that fear is to be avoided. Anyone who is afraid or takes the basic steps of protecting themselves with a helmet or bracers is subject to an instant and ironic death. The greatest protection afforded to a person is the shield of ‘I don’t give a crap’ cynicism the game is chock full of.

Carmine is the epitome of this concept, both of them. Anthony Carmine has a gung-ho attitude and bright personality, so he has to go. Benjamin Carmine is more fearful and worried due to his inexperience. He is shown to be far weaker and inferior to the muscle-bound protagonists. During co-op we were counting down the seconds from his first appearance for what would be his “untimely” demise. His introduction within this universe painted a big red bull’s-eye on him. The game disregards anyone who isn’t part of the main cast of 4: Marcus, Dom, Cole and Baird.

Another character in Gears of War 2, Tai is a spiritual man from a line of classically inspired honor-bound warriors. He is as bulky and skilled as any of the other members of the Delta Squad. However, he doesn’t espouse the rah-rah “fuckin’ sweet” attitude of the standard 4 Cogs we follow. After his capture and torture, and from my memory he wasn’t captured that long, rather than continue on he commits suicide in what can amount to a direct reprisal of his previously held beliefs. His final act in the Gears universe is the equivalent of a deathbed conversion. ‘If only I had fought this war with gallows humor and unbridled machismo I would still be alive.’ I get that really it was the Locust’s version of Hector that killed him, but it is the handling of the situation. He goes off the Gears tone the milieu implies that he should have lived.

But it is not only with the side characters providing counterpoint to the “heroes” attitudes and personalities where we find the Gears universe dictating the characterization. The main characters keep with these attitudes and make it through. The times when Dom starts going on about his wife are so insincerely manipulative we can only see these scenes for what they are, an attempt to direct and force our sympathy so we will have an emotive response other than what the game has built us to expect. It was a nice notion, but the execution falls flat and became a major punching bag of the game upon its release. This factor is a minor infraction of ludnonarrative dissonance unto itself.

Gears of War is a teenage boy’s fantasy of what war is, and I wont take that away from him, provided everything else keeps us out of real wars. The glory characterization of war had been around since the time of Homer and probably before he ever started spouting poetry, but even Homer had the good sense to depict battle in all its gory detail. It had characters debate over the worthiness of war as a vehicle for glory verses its destructive and horrific attributes. Gears of War is a work that disregards the second part. Then in the sequel where it tries to address those emotions, it rings hollow and unnecessary to the game, because the world has been built too strongly on a cynical enjoyment of war and ability to destroy without consequence that when the counterpoint comes along it can’t fit itself anywhere in the narrative properly.

My other major contention with Gears’ resonance interpretation is that the reading of their actions would require some form of subtlety on the game’s part. To pull back the veil of bravado, humor and adrenaline induced haze and see venerable, scared individuals is a difficult tightrope to walk. It can be done through a heightened exaggeration to inflict the desired emotional response, but unless you can evoke that within the game parts and not just as a token effort in cutscenes then it doesn’t matter. Also, with this situation it requires a stark reflection of what is being done. In other words, the work has to recognize the ridiculous nature of the action, even if the characters do not and comment on it. Gears is a Loony Toons episode with more cursing. If viewed in realistic terms or deconstructed it would give the viewer an understanding of the violence and would horrify anyone seeing it. Of course Loony Toons doesn’t horrify anyone. People laugh at it; it’s absurdism, or maybe not that far and just ridiculous.

The point is, one gets the same visceral thrill or enjoyment from the Gears of War franchise as one does from Loony Toons. Both are safe, non threatening entities meant for surface entertainment. (And yes I realize there is more to some Loony Toons episodes, but for the most part. The super-meta cartoon artist episodes not withstanding.) The milieu’s zeitgeist is too firmly established as one of cynicism and playful destructiveness. The fact that there is a chainsaw on the main gun should have been the first clue. This is a game about what is awesome first and what is subtle second.

Now the game play has the player hiding behind cover, shooting from cover, creating cover, and running from cover to cover. In a war setting this is perfectly reasonable. Were I being shot at by homicidal, man-sized insects, I’d be hiding right next to the Cogs and would probably stay there. The game gives us feedback based on this rule. Hide behind cover to live. That is what playing the game instills in us. Get to cover as fast as you can, rush as desperately as possible. That is the feeling the game evokes as we play it, especially during some of the more difficult encounters. But the game’s fiction does not back this up and establishes a feeling of the complete opposite. There is no hidden agenda behind the game’s story. It’s a bunch of fun and colorful ideas thrown together. Some parts of the story didn’t even make sense while we were playing it, but we ignored that feeling, laughed along with it and kept playing. It’s a game that doesn’t want to be taken seriously or even closely examined, because it begins to crack and fall apart at its most basic structural level. The mechanics are solid, the environments varied and the strategies diverse enough to keep things interesting. The plot, story and narrative do not have that luxury.

Again, Dagda I would have loved to play the game you did. I didn’t, because it does not exist in Gears of War. The elements are disconnected. Even within the elements there is some messing around. That is the definition of ludonarrative dissonance. When the thematic purpose behind the ludic elements and the narrative elements do not match up, are disconnected, and/or are in disarray. To me Gears of War was and still is the poster boy of the term.

Ok, over two pages of criticizing, I feel I need to say this. Gears of War II was a good game. It succeeded despite the ludonarrative dissonance. It got away by being exceptional at what it did in it’s technical prowess, if not it is artistic one. Nothing about it is really memorable. It’s a cheeseburger of a video game. Great when you have it, leaves a taste afterwords of you wanting more, but if you give it some time you wont remember it all too well. I appreciate that Gears of War II tried to insert some actual human emotion in order to connect on an empathic level to the characters we were controlling. But telling us to be empathic and convincing us is a whole different ball game. In nearly every great war story the action may be bombastic, but the emotions are subtle. There are quiet moments and they are what allow the heightened moments and the work as a whole greater impact. You think that iconic death in Platoon would matter at all without all the quite scenes where the characters sat around talking and smoking.

The subtle war game has not yet been made.