First is Avadon: The Black Fortress. This is a massive cRPG based in old school isometric design with deep characters and lore that feels relevant to the story to are taking part in. I only played the demo, but I still put almost a dozen hours into the game and never reached the end of the demo. I can’t imagine how much more there is to this game, but I bought it and will be finding out. Everything about it looks dated and indie, but that’s because the game put the effort into what counted, the story, the interface, the characters and the feel. This is the successor to the Baldur’s Gate style of RPG that the big guys have left behind.

Next, Outland, a metroidvania style game with Ikaruga inspired color-switching mechanics combined with a tribal African aesthetic. It’s a beautiful and original looking game with simple tried and true mechanics, but unlike Castlevania games, it’s sprawl doesn’t get out of hand and back tracking is kept to a minimum when it comes to the story. The bosses are interesting and kept as unique challenges throughout the game. Again, a game I’ve put at least 10 hours into and have barely gotten anywhere.

Thirdly, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. I got this game for Christmas that I hadn’t heard anything about it until very recently when it started showing up in awards and end of year lists. I’ve only had the time for the opening, but so far it looks like an innovative and well-constructed adventure game. It already has me hooked with an intriguing mystery and bizarre style all its own.

With that said, let’s get into my top 5.

5

The Stanley Parable, a Half-Life 2 mod that I’ve played probably a dozen times by now. It’s simple choose your own adventure style of game taking place in a 3d environment with a narrator very aware of what is going on. Depending on how well you follow instructions is how meta the narrator gets. It is an allegory on the nature of video game storytelling that plays out with you rather than in spite of you.

4

Driver: San Francisco was a game that was overlooked at every turn and had no right to be. Part of the problem has to be with how it was shown to us at E3. In short bursts it seems like an insane idea and cool for a few seconds, but incredibly stupid afterwards. And it is, but the shift mechanic is a slow burn. Showing off what can be done isn’t the same as experiencing it. After a while you begin to process what can be done with the concept and what happens as a consequence. It becomes part strategy, part world building and part psychological drama. This magical realism the world is imbued with doesn’t only explain gaming conventions, but makes them apart of the story.

3

Fate of the World is what I wished more games could be. Explaining a difficult world through deceptively simple mechanics. It makes me think of The Wire in that the game is about systems and what those systems mean to the world. How the different elements interact and the complicated concepts affect everything else. I tried to explain it and made it sounds awful. That’s because I’m not sure it is a came that can be explained, it is a game that must be experienced to be understood. Did it teach me specific things about the world? Some. Did it teach me why things don’t always work? Yes. Did it teach me that when push comes to shove I will make some choices I find despicable by themselves? Absolutely. That alone is what great art does.

2

Bastion is the indie darling of the year, but unlike previous year’s indie darlings this one doesn’t go for obscuring it’s story or what it is about. That is right front and center. The world has ended in the Calamity and the Narrator is explaining the story as you play it out. You find your way to the Bastion and do the only thing you can, rebuild. The music highlights the thematic journey and gives a spiritual resonance as well as old west tang. It is a fantasy western from top to bottom. It’s part of an increasingly large cadre of games that is melding the verbs you perform in game to what the story is trying to convey. Now go build the wall up on the hill.

1

Portal 2 is on paper a game that has no right to exist. Portal the first was as perfect as a video game can be and really left no loose ends that needed tying up. But trust in Valve we did and what we got a spectacular game that push the boundaries of the first in ways we didn’t expect. It increased the size of the world and the length of the game, but more importantly it increased the thematic scope of the game. Where other sequels feel empty with their extra space filled by the same amount of ideas as the first, Portal 2 fills that space with expanded themes derived from the first by go far more in depth and cover a wider range of details.

I didn’t know what game was going to be my favorite until I sat down to think about it. In fact it came to me while recording the end of year Critical Distance Confab. I realized while examining the game and thinking what that experience was that it couldn’t be anything else by my Game of the Year. Realizing what Valve had given us made me tear up. This hasn’t been a great year for me or really for most people. And in all that I had the good fortune to play what will be remembered one of the greatest games of all time. It is excellent in every regard and personally hits the mark when it comes to my personal biases with regards to themes and storytelling. I said it before, but I’ll say it again here because I don’t get to say it often. Thank you Valve.

While I started writing for PopMatters’ Moving Pixels blog only in December on a biweekly schedule, and consequently only got a single post published before the winter break, I think it’s a great post highlighting Desert Bus for Hope charity drive, an event I was hooked on for a whole week. In companion to my Moving Pixel’s piece I created a video gallery on this blog to highlight some of the best and most entertaining moments of the whole event.

I started much earlier with Nightmare Mode. Thankfully they let me write whatever I want there and have a great editorials staff willing to talk at great length to make sure your piece is the best it can be. My first post was a repost of my Enslaved piece, the first post of the year, but with editorial oversight, so this is the version you should read. I followed that up with a Ninja Theory companion essay on Heavenly Sword. Then a piece on the Atmosphere of Limbo and Another World that got a big enough response to warrant an in depth reply and further critical discourse in the comments. (Again, the Nightmare Mode repost has editorial oversight and is the better version.) After that began the series of posts on racing games. It has been a bit difficult to get on a weekly Thursday schedule going (a self-imposed schedule), but I am getting better and hopefully I can stick to it in the new year.

At Gameranx, I did a number of top X lists and while not too notable in themselves, I like to think that they are part of an effort to elevate the concept of the top X list itself. Additionally I wrote a feature on what Action/Adventure games are and it lead me to a new area of theoretical thinking. I breach the topic here. I say breach because the response was such that is going to take several more posts in the new year to iron out all the thoughts on game genres.

With all these posts elsewhere, I’ve take a page out of Jorge and Scott of Experience Points’ book by writing up a short companion piece to my posts that appear elsewhere. This has a double benefit of letting the essay be a better more focused work by allowing extra tidbits.

Once again I tried to start up my Indie Game Spotlight series, but could only manage two posts. I was driven to write about The Stanley Parable by its exploration of storytelling, a favorite theme of mine. The other Indie Game Spotlight I wrote was on p0nd, a game I finally got around to writing about. I want to keep up with this series as I had many more minor games I wanted to write a couple hundred words on, but I seem incapable.

Another running theme this year is my focus on books towards gaming as a whole. I reviewed Jane McGonigol’s Reality is Broken and Aaron Dignan’s Game Frame. Neither of which I particularly liked. But I also read A Reader’s Manifesto and how pertinent it was to the modern state of game reviews and cultural ideology toward them.

Massive critical response take downs were other theme. While I could consider my Limbo response a part of that, I’m talking about the link by line take down of arguments I not only disagree with, but also are flat out wrong. These arguments have factual difficulties and problems with the very concepts they were trying to deal with. This is the second time I pulled apart one of DanC’s piece A Blunt Critique of Game Criticism. At 15 pages not many people got all the way through it, but I’m proud of the achievement. I do wish that I didn’t have to so harsh with DanC every single time, because he is an excellent thinker. Incidentally he has invited me out for a drink should we ever meet in person. The other huge take down I have much less qualms about given the original post. I would have ignored had it appeared on writer’s own blog and not Edge. The title of my response says it all: Better the World Think You a Fool than to Open Your Mouth and Prove It Right.

Overall this year was the not the best. In fact were it not for the changes in the last several weeks I would have considered this one of the worst years I’ve ever had the misfortune of living through. Just a constant personal misery and doubt pervaded nearly the whole first half of the year, culminating in August in my Existential Critical Crisis. Writing that was more cathartic that I could have ever suspected as it acting as a way to expel all the horrendous bile that has built up on my soul. And thanks to that post, almost as a karmic response, I was offered a staff position on Moving Pixels and Nightmare Mode both. So in the end things worked out pretty well for me.

This year was one of disappointment for me on the whole. For most of the year I was sidetracked by other mediums and a lot of real life problems got in the way. Then I lost my entire site for a day and while I had a backup of the text I lost all the pictures. This was a massive loss. My posts use images not only as breaks, but rhetorically to make points or enhance the writing. I lost screen captures and pictures of tweets now long lost to the archives of twitter. And then there is the matter of my PAX East photo trip. I have all the pictures, but the hassle of putting them all back in. Not just that post, but also the rest of them. It is a level of aggravation I’m not sure I want to contend with. Though in the end, while I may not have a job at the moment, I feel I have direction and responsibility enough to keep moving forward. I’ve got a theory series in the works and a huge stack of games to play through. I’m not at a loss of things to write bout and not at a loss of platforms to write them on. In fact I’ve been thinking on starting another blog or tumblr for my thoughts on the other media I consume: movies, TV, comic books. I’m leaving things open this time around and see where 2012 will go one day at a time.

Oh and I finally stopped cataloging The Ebert Response this year and as if by magic, they stopped being written.

I said on twitter last week in response to the bad Freeplay panel that I would…hang on; let me see if I can find it. … Here it is:

Well I’ve done a bit of that so far from one perspective and another, but here is the big enchilada. As a critic, I believe one has to examine at one’s own work from time to time as a matter of course to make sure one stays on course.

The Search

Two years ago I wrote a post entitled “What Do I Do Here.” That is still an apt question that I haven’t yet answered. Oh, I gave some broad minded answers that at the time addressed things that needed to be addressed as it was a time in video game criticism where it was weakly defined if defined at all with the critical spectrum. It hasn’t been formally addressed and it never need be. We’ve come so far as a community and both entrenched and new comers that I don’t think proper categorization need ever be a necessity beyond “that is an Eric Swain piece.” (Substitute your own name in that place for my point.) This idea also has problems, after all who the hell am I?

Last year around this time I was desperately doing everything in my power to graduate by throwing myself into that final class I needed. I have my diploma. It was mailed to me. I didn’t attend any ceremony, to which my parents are more disappointed in that than I am. But my despair at the time did highlight that I still don’t know what I’m doing. Though I didn’t write and by the time I could the relief of passing over shadowed anything else. Which brings me to now.

As much as my friends may say to dissuade me of some of my beliefs, this is one I don’t think is wrong. I am a third rate video game blogger. That I dare call myself a critic in some circumstance is by virtue that critic is the blanket term for any deep thinker not attributable to any other definition. It comes down that my ideas and projects (not to mention prospects) have been dismal as of late. (Not the least of which can be traced to my ongoing unemployablity, which as more time goes by becomes truer and truer.) It’s great that I have wide categories to which I can fit my intellectual prospects into. That doesn’t make it any better that I am no closer to the minutia of criticism, or better yet to say the actual physical form my body of work and thought could take. That would be nice to know. The closest I can gather is that I’m at my best when truly pissed off.

That is not a healthy mind state to be in.

Let us go back to the concept of me being a third rate critic. People try to dissuade me with thoughts of ‘your writing is excellent’ (sometimes it is), ‘you have great ides and concepts’ (most of which remain lazily half written in outline form), ‘traffic doesn’t matter, that doesn’t make it quality’ (it’s a numbers game). The last one is true, just because you get a click doesn’t mean you are read or are engaged with. Popular does not equal good. But it is still a numbers game. The only time I get mentioned is when I’m told my blog is among those listed as dead. I have no intellectual impact and if the internet is anything to go by I apparently can’t piss anyone off enough to be worth the effort of trolling.

Did I really just complain that I don’t get trolls? Ok, bad example, but it highlights my point. I exist in an aether unconnected to anything. I was pretty okay until That Freeplay panel. Sure attacking criticism, especially the type of criticism I constantly engage with and more importantly write deemed as basically pointless is hurtful enough. (I will ignore for this post the rage of being told by a panel of “experts” that many of my friends are invisible.) The worst of anything is always self-induced. How does one protect oneself against what one does to oneself?

During the twitter storm, something difficult to keep up with while watching a live Let’s Play, I did some quick research. What makes it even worse I now realize was that the Google searches I was conducting were biased in my favor, because I was logged in and Google now adjust searches for the individual based on what sites you already go to. Criticism’s visibility came up during the tweets (again in regards to woman writers) but I expanded it to all real criticism writers and I came up with zilch.

Pages of unrelated articles or worst of all, years out of date posts asking in one form or another where the thoughtful game critics were. The first page results for many basic search terms gave the impression nothing is out there. We really are screaming into a void.

I highlighted in my comics piece, which was two months work and is more fortuitous in timing that anything else, that comic book criticism is basically invisible, if it exists as an individual thing or as a community at all. I really have no idea. Now I find a similar fate with video games. Critical-Distance showed up at the bottom of the page for “Game Criticism.” On a biased search, a site I am heavily affiliated with comes up at the bottom of the page over articles I’ve never read or read years ago and dismissed as unhelpful back then. The big dogs aren’t known. They aren’t seen. Their existence is hidden; BrainyGamer, Experience-Points, The Boarder House etc aren’t showing up.

When I started I thought I was onto something. I thought I could define a trail for myself that no one else was walking or at least talking about openly. Ah, how young and naive, but who could blame me, it’s not like I saw it being talked about anywhere. I found everyone by pure accident; a link at youtube to an article, which linked a post that mentioned BrainyGamer. I’m not the only one to walk this path of cluelessness. Over the last couple of months I’ve become the go to guy for people wanting to find more critics, blogs or sites. Why? Because I overcompensate, from nothing I gathered everything I could. I amassed an RSS list that approaches the singularity, and my RSS reader is small in comparison to others. I read everything posted though. If I don’t have time for it now, I save it for later. I don’t know how much of an accomplishment that is or how proud I should be of it.

The Writing

I said before that two years ago I wrote about what I was doing on my site and what I was doing here. I write criticism on games. It’s in the name. Yeah, real clever Eric. How? That’s the important question and two years later and I still don’t know. I have a basic manifest on what broad swashes of uncharted land I should trek, but that doesn’t help me build a road or set up a gas station along the way.

By nature I am a storyteller, so I tell a story. The more posts I look at the more I realize more of them begin with me telling you the reader not what the post is about or why I’m writing it, but what random set of events lead for the idea of this post to pop into my head. In fact, these posts in their entirety can be looked upon as me telling the story of the journey through my thought process. Hell, look at the top of this post. I started with the Freeplay panel debacle and that I wrote a tweet during it and this is the end result of the promise in that tweet. Does anyone care about that tweet? I can’t imagine, but it’s the only way to begin the post, because that’s what caused it to be.

I’ve also gotten into the habit of asides and parenthetical to augments a point. The flow is similar to how I talk if you let me go on long enough. The flow of thoughts from one topic to the next reinforces the idea that I’m telling you a story of how I came to these thoughts. But again, these are big concepts and taking broad strokes towards my style. It doesn’t help identify anything or work towards any conclusion of the problems faced when looking at the minutia.

I’ve always been an idea person, always focused on concepts rather than their execution. I’ve got tons of ideas in my head, but I have little ability in being able to express them properly. I’m bogged down into a very direct sort of writing, which only works so far. That’s all right for blog posts dictating analysis of a work or theory.

My best writing is not when I think a game is great or when I think a game is terrible. This is for very different reasons. When I like it I can’t write about it for the reasons I list above. I do not have the honed skill set to craft sentences that are frankly good enough to convey my pleasure about a game. And I can’t write about my hatred of something, because it would become a screed, something no one wants to read. I am best when a game is okay, but disappointing. It allows me to step back and do what I find I am best at, being analytical in a step-by-step process. I work my way down like a list explaining each issue and then wrap it up. For what better way is there to express something orderly talk about something than to give point-by-point complaints on it. If it’s good they are nit picks and not complaints and if it’s bad what’s the point.

What I find intolerable about my own writing is that as a reflection of who I am, as most writing it, I find the person I see staring back at me is not a flattering image to mine own eyes. (Which does a hell of a number on my paranoia.) I see a third rate blogger trying to pass himself off as something better. I act like I now what I’m talking about, because I think I know what I’m talking about, but in the end I feel a very large gap between my ambition and ability. Maybe realizing that puts me a step ahead, but that doesn’t change the output.

Which gets right down to the main problem. I can’t write.

Writing is a conveyance of thought using words and in looking at what thoughts I convey I talk about structure and broad concepts. Which means I can construct a stable paragraph and even create a decent flow from one to the next, maybe even use it to some effect if I’m feeling inventive, but paragraphs, sentences, punctuation and all the other stuff is not writing. Writing is crafting words. It’s the minutia of stringing varying definitions one after the other in a process of connecting concepts into a greater whole. This I cannot do at a high consistent level. I am workman like in my prose. I describe things as they are, and it is boring to read. Little inventiveness, little artistry and I can’t imagine much point. My outlines would do the job as efficiently. I’m surprised people put up with my “wall of words” enough to read them.

So why do I bother? Because every once in a while I surprise even myself with an ability to mine a sentence of superb quality out of nowhere, so much so that it a step out of place among the other sentences. Which might actually highlight another problem: my sentences aren’t that good, but I only think that because of what is around them. For a critic supposedly brought up to analyze the written word, that’s a pretty poor. And yet I criticize.

The Responses

Two pieces popped up recently that somewhat coincide with me thinking about criticism. First is G. Christopher Williams’ column entitled: “Why Video Games Might Not Be Art.” The title is baiting, but I want to answer his query in the piece. He says that the ‘games are art’ people dismiss a “legitimate issue” the detractors have when it comes to games as being art, the issue of interactivity. We all agree that interactivity is essential to the nature of being a game, but not of art. He claims we either use circular logic to defend our point, by saying games are art and have interactivity therefore art has interactivity, or brush off the notion that games as art can be questioned. I thought it was understood, but I will respond.

There are multiple ways to explain why interactivity does not inherently disqualify games as capable of being art. I came up with four.

First, despite games being interactive, games have fluctuating narratives where it can change depending on the player’s choice, the Roger Ebert uses to disregard games as art, the thing is, there is something there that isn’t changed, the game itself. The rule set, the boundaries, the area of play within which the player can effect change is unaffected by any action of the player. The narrative may be mutable, the minute-to-minute actions up to the player, but what they cannot change while in game is what they are capable of doing. There is a hard line of what a player is capable of in game and what they aren’t. The Stanley Parable is a perfect example of this lesson in motion. You can defy the narrator, you can disregard the story to different degrees, but you will get one of 6 endings that have been prescribed by the designer for you. You are expected to play it multiple times and expected to defy the narrator at some point. It was planned for and the game works with that. Yes there is interaction, but there is a solid text that cannot be changed. Even cheat codes had to be programmed in ahead of time for player use. You are thinking too narrowly in understanding a new medium. You are using older rational and definition of ‘text’ when looking at a games. You think ‘story’ or ‘plot,’ when really the core is ‘idea.’ Plot and narrative are mere tools to convey ideas to the audience, in games that is the role of the rules and mechanics.

Which brings me to the second counter-argument. Previous mediums have, for the most part, looked at such a narrow delivery system that we fail to understand the conceptual interaction that exist between audience and work. We look at an object, a text as is, and that is the art. Of course it comes with the philosophical conundrum, can a book be any good if no one reads it. Quantum physics state that it is and isn’t at the same time, but art doesn’t work like that. It is from the experience between the work and the audience that the art can form and then transferred into the work itself. Often in criticism in previous mediums we skip that initial step. With books, plays, film and painting the experience, while it varied in the techniques unique to each medium’s form, remained pretty much the same. A work is there and is observed, physically passive by an audience. The ideal was to shift the consciousness of the audience in such a way as to not to remove the barrier between the work and the audience, but to transition the material in such a way that it would make them forget that barrier was there. Games offer a different approach the work/audience dichotomy due to their interactive nature that to understand where they take it we must first take a step back and see first that all art is an experience in and of itself that is designed to manipulate emotional or intellectual resonance of something it is physically not. Before the prerogative has been to remove the perception of the barrier between audience and work. That has been the traditional model. With games’ inherent interactivity, that is not an option and for the medium a new paradigm must be understood.

Which brings up another bugbear of Williams’ argument, the concept of tradition and the subject of my third counter-argument. Tradition is a good grounding, but we as a society should not be slaves to it. I can name a few other things that are fairly recent developments that once went against tradition (and incidentally all had been claimed would destroy society and civilization at the time), but are now the standard. Mandatory education for all social classes, a living wage, the novel, the car, the moving picture, theater, and not dropping dead from dysentery in one’s mid-30s. Yes, cars, medical innovation and even the novel were said to be capable of destroying society. Adhering to tradition can be quite backwards. (Incidentally there are people out there still railing against each and every one of these.) Saying this is how art is done or this is what art is because it was always like that, again seems a little backwards. Writing was not considered art, because storytelling was an oral tradition and could not be art without the poet there in front of his audience. Painting of non-heavenly things could not be art because it was an affront to take time and spend so much effort portraying anything lesser than God’s domain. Theater was not art because it was a medium of the masses and anything for the masses could not be art for they could never appreciate or comprehend it. Novels were not art because they didn’t have the delicacy or lyricism of poetry and would rot the brains of its readers instead. Moving Pictures could not be art because they were shown in carnivals and curiosity, a sideshow attraction and not worthy of any greater interest. A urinal could not be art, because an artist didn’t make it and seems more to be a joke at the audience’s expense. Chess and Go cannot be art because…hang on! Both were considered art in the courtly palaces of both Europe and the Orient way back in the day. People who could play really well played before kings, not as a performance to give a show, but the performance of actual competition with such described as one of the highest pursuits of courtly life alongside painting, calligraphy, poetry etc. Yes it was the performance that was great art, but like in all other mediums we transfer that experience to the work itself, why not with games?

Which subtly slides into my fourth counter-argument. Games are somehow other from artistic mediums based on ‘interactivity.’ Williams seems to assert that interactivity is a unique feature of games, it isn’t. For decades art historians and experts have acknowledged the use of interactivity in works as legitimate in the traditional mediums. In the 1960s there were entire galleries and shows based on the idea of audience participation with a work to achieve the meaning of the piece. Having a large canvas with a box of nails next to it with the audience having to nail a nail into it wherever they wanted to become part of the piece. Or writing something so tiny and placing it on the ceiling that to appreciate it you had climb a ladder to get close enough to see it. Or the performance art of “Cut Piece” where the artist would wear a gown and the audience one by one was inviting to come on stage to cut off a piece of the gown until they were naked. A more modern example in theater would be “See No More” which is less of a stage play and more of a complex of rooms (sets) where things happen and there is no preordained way to experience the performance. You can stay in one room the whole time and see what transpires there or travel throughout the rooms however you wish. Sometimes the actors will remove your audience mask and pull you into the performance. This is interactivity in art. You are not simply a passive observer.

Williams talks about the importance of distance between audience and work is the tradition of aesthetics. Again I fear that is a quite modern conception placed on old mediums. The gap was much narrower in the old days. People would shout to events and characters on stage and even throwing food if they were really displeased. Sometimes the script would be changed on the spot to accommodate a particular audience’s taste. They wouldn’t wait until they got home to complain on their blog, the response and reaction were almost immediate. Go back even further to the time of Ancient Greece and you have the oral storyteller evaluating their audiences’ reaction and adjusting their story to fit the their needs with emphasis where it was appreciated. Roger Travis can go into further details of this result in his theory of practomime. At that time few people mastered social debate just as the rules of a competitive eSports are today. Socrates grokked the system so well the other players put him to death.

Williams highlights this passage from Roger Ebert:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. [Kellee] Santiago might cite a [sic] immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This somehow disregards that you can and if fact do experience a game. Everything is an experience. In fact people who dismiss it as “just a game” are often the same that say it isn’t a real experience. That’s false. It is a real experience. You are having the experience of playing a game where specific things are happening to affect you via your projection into the mechanics and rules.

The artificial stimuli to evoke the emotional and intellectual state of something that is not really happening is the goal of all other mediums, but somehow video games must be held to higher standard than that to count as art. Sorry no. I have never seen a definition of art that excludes games, when looked at closely, that does not include the phrase “except games.”

The other piece was a direct response to the freeplay panel by Brendan Keogh at his blog CritDamage. If we could go back to my point about experiential projection towards a work, Brendan plays pretty heavily into that point. So much so, that I have a small quibble with his ideas regarding criticism. Yes, New Games Journalism is indeed an important branch of any critical sphere, but to hold it up as the only thing criticism can be is a bit narrow minded. There is a physical object, as much as 1s and 0s can be a physical object, to be examined as well. Also, writing about your experiences is good and all, but if you don’t connect it to something other than, ‘this happened to me, look at me’ it’s an anecdote and not criticism. The story won’t stimulate without a point beyond the story’s existence. I bring this up not to discredit Brendan’s assertions, but rather to temper them. He cites “Bow Nigger” as a great example of NGJ and it is. But it is more than a story. The way it is set up and was it is told is played off against the knowledge it is a duel in a Star Wars video game that create its synthesis of meaning. In the piece he states that this wasn’t a duel between good and evil and that the fiction faded away in this bout. For him this is true, but for the reading audience and his next opponent that watched the fight, the themes in the fiction are only further highlighted. He may have been concentrating so hard on his battle that the good/evil dichotomy vanished, but for us it was emphasizes. (It can even read about a commentary to all good/evil battles in fiction and in real life, at the momment of conflict there is no good and evil to the combatants.) All of us have seen jerks on the internet and this was one getting his karmic just desserts. We can all cheer for that. It’s a piece that says something about people and the game or maybe the Star Wars universe as a whole.

There is one last person I wish to critically respond to and again it is Dan Cook (Danc). In the comments of Brendan’s piece he states that criticism is not important to the acceptance of a medium as a whole. He brings up that if you change video game with sport in Brendan’s assertion it falls apart. Yes it does, but not for the reason Dan thinks. Criticism wasn’t necessary for cultural acceptance, because they found cultural acceptance through other means. Sporting events were originally political exercises. They quite literally took the place of war by asserting the physical dominance of one city-state over another in an ever-shifting balance of power. It was propaganda and people of their city wanted their athletes to win so they could gain a political and therefore economic edge over other city-states. The mentality hasn’t altered much, though the end results have. People still want their city’s team to win to show they are better than other cities, though it doesn’t come quite with the political or direct economic effects it once did.

However, I’d use another medium to examine the effect a lack of criticism caused: comic books. In the 1950s there was little unified support or public discussion to help them at the time during the congressional hearings. There was no internet and independent publication was an expensive and prohibitive venture at the time. There wasn’t any ‘comic book criticism’ that could mount a defense of comics at the time and a since proven liar managed to convince congress into establishing effective censorship on an entire medium effectively ghettoizing it ever since. We’ve jumped that hurdle a few times, but the cultural conscious can still judge against the medium’s higher aspirations. We are already as a niche culture building ourselves into a corner. Criticism as intelligent discussion, understanding and eventually education about what we know to others is the only out I see for games as an artistic medium.

Then there is “the umbrella of ‘video game criticism’ focuses on a surprisingly narrow definition of games and player experiences. It predominantly deals with core retail titles.” There is a reason for this. Criticism as focused on exploring games as an artistic medium, focuses on these titles because they are 1. played by those writing for more frequently and 2. have something worth focusing on. Why do we not focus on board games, social games or iPhone apps? Well board games are covered quite extensively, just not by us. I don’t play board games, but those that do certainly go into depth about them. I’m sure Julian Murdock or Rob Zachy could point you to one or two sites. And as for social game and iPhone gaming, well there’s nothing to sink one’s proverbial teeth into. I’ve heard them called the cheeseburger of the gaming industry, made for the broadest possible audience with little nutritional value. I disagree. Call of Duty is a cheeseburger. Farmville and the like are lettuce. It has no taste, leaves no impression beyond its consumption and cannot be adequately talked about. There are interesting things to be said with regards to company culture that made the game or the analysis of the statistic regarding the behavior of players in the game, but that isn’t the game. (Incidentally both company culture and statistical analysis happens all the time for social and mobile gaming.) That is the periphery of the game. We don’t say anything about Farmville and its ilk, because quite frankly there’s nothing to say about Farmville.

But one very important thing Brendan’s post brings up is point number 4: The Possibility That Pretentiousness Actually Exists.

What if us videogame critics have indeed built an ivory tower for ourselves? Or, rather, what if we have somehow managed to convince everyone on the ‘outside’ that such an ivory tower exists? I for one think it doesn’t exist. I quite literally blogged my way into videogame writing and I believe that if you are a good writer who has something interesting to say about videogames, you will be heard.

But are we more cut off from the world than we (or at least I) believe? Not even just non-gaming culture, but gaming culture, too? No one on this panel seemed to be aware of the broader videogame criticism out there. Is this an actual problem? Are we too self-absorbed. Are we even a we? I hope we aren’t a “we,” because I think we are just the players. All of them. All the people who have a stake in having real, actual experiences of these games and those experiences are worth recording and worth remembering and worth sharing. So I don’t know. I hope ‘we’ are an open community and that anyone who wants to write about games does write about games and, further, I hope we are reaching or can reach the broader gaming community of players and developers alike.

I too hope we are not a “we” or are perceived that way. I am as open as can be and will read anything and submit anything I think worthwhile. But like economics and art, perception is everything. Nothing we do matters if it is not seen. We can have the most open arms possible, but if the random Google searcher sees a bunch of people standing in a circle with their back to them (metaphorically of course), well that’s the ballgame. Pack it up, call it on a account of rain. But all of this is based on the assumption someone is looking for it at all. There is so much differing psychology and presuppositions going on in different demographics heads all disregarding the concept or idea of criticism in the first place. At the very least they act as barriers for one to perform the Google search in the first place, let alone the problems once they have done so. Are people looking for criticism, if they are looking for it, do they know what to call it or it is only a simple unidentifiable yearning for something else that in the end is ill answered from a state of diminishing returns.

So that is where we are. On the one hand we may, and if my recent delving into the visibility of criticism is any indication, probably are trapped in an ivory tower for subset of a subset of a subset of gamers and any potential to branch out into the biggest games out there is met with nothing actually to say. The broader culture sees games as time wasters because the only games they play are time wasters. And should there ever come the broad crossover of games played and worth talking about we are hampered by the ideas and preconceptions that inhibit games from being talked about with any intellectual means. We are thrice screwed.

I’ve gone around in circles trying to identify anyway out of this rattrap. I’m not even sure what the point of all this was. I have a limited audience, my fellow critics have a limited audience and criticism as a whole seems to have a limited audience. How many out there even knew Freeplay was happening? I pretty sure nearly everyone who reads this will say ‘yes I knew’ yeah, but that’s my audience. There was an uproar, but by people who already care about such things. I haven’t seen any mention or talk about it at all outside our “niche,” let alone uproar. Maybe it’s because it happened in Australia and American focused outlets could care less about our brethren down under?

Then I think of all the mediums that came before us. Why their criticism was held up or at least remembered nowadays. Back in the day, with a country or a culture desperate for any scrap of information about their medium, criticism was read, with judicial restraint in what was published to make it worth people’s time and money to read. That somehow the combination of limits on what was said along with demand for a conversation about books, movies, rock and roll etc. and limited places it could be had. Imagine as I do, a kid somewhere in small town nowhere, USA sometime in the 60s or 70s, listening to rock and roll and thinking how awesome it is and then he sees some essay written by some guy called Lester Bangs explaining why rock and roll is so awesome with words he both can relate to and admire. That this new music demonized by the majority as noise or not worthwhile was now being described not with the fans’ “awesome dude” sorry “groovy man” affectation but the intellectual stripe that can counter the authority that says it is junk. Now I think to today with the ease of access, the huge variety, the next to no cost, the massive choice and the desire to get anything one can. Suddenly, it’s all noise. One thing strings into another and ease of comprehension becomes the name of the game to getting the clicks. You want people to choose your site over everyone else’s and so you broaden your base, simplify your prose and write unchallenging ideas or things that will bring the vile and are rewarded for it. Everything else can become successful, but will always be pushed to the sidelines. More noise comes in and everyone now has to be louder to be heard. More people hear and come in trying to be heard themselves in this new thing that must be important because everyone is yelling. So they are louder and say more outrageous things until all that can be heard is nothing worth listening to.

And here I am on the periphery, speaking quietly to myself hoping someone will stop to smell the roses.

The Void

Years ago I called myself “the dumbest person in the smart room” I may not be the dumbest anymore, but I’m certainly down there. I’m always behind in thought and ideas. Many of my bigger projects get the response, “why?” They are long an intensive that so far few have seen the light of day and the more time passes the more an anachronism my work becomes.

My priorities have changed since those early days of the blogosphere, before I made my grand entrance and discovered giants had come before my inconsequential ant of a being. I was too late even to be a follower. My formal training was and is rather useless. My real education started only after I graduated college. My interests are too wide and varied to be any more than a jack-of-all-trades and yet master none, such that my most impressive feat is the breadth of my sight.

I sometimes wonder if I’m too smart not to notice how dumb I am or too dumb to truly comprehend anything of intelligence. I learn by debate, but there is no debate to be had in areas where I need to learn. People who’ve long since stopped caring have already had them. I have discovered no games, but have become the sole, fierce advocate for only one. A game no one remembers. Any positions or ideas I have sound like I am quoting from a consensus to my own ears, that if anyone disagrees, I don’t hear it only because they can’t be bothered.

‘I learned books, maybe I should critique books and I try my hand at a few reviews and find connections to our present medium.’ The act is limited and feels more like a work of stagnation than anything else. So I try a different medium, comic books, only to learn little but fear for a path my own medium of choice will fall into. I advocate, somewhat, thematic readings and critical examinations of video games, but again the more I say it and the more I listen to such talk I can only think, “yeah and…” should be the reply.

Come to think of it, to say that my priorities changed from the early days is a bit of an understatement. From delusions of being the first and/or the grandest towards an infantile medium, I now cling to a little dream. One day in the far future, when the history of video game criticism is being written for some obscure publisher for a quick sale and maybe some legitimacy, in chapter 6 or perhaps somewhere on page 115 I’d like to be an incidental footnote. It’s a small dream, but it is mine. That is my limit. I’ve accepted that and will be happy should I some day achieve it.

Well that was a nice little stroll down mindfuck lane. I enjoy writing when I do and I suppose seeing the relative failure of my output is disheartening and that’s what the last 10 and half pages come down to. Is there anything to be learned here? Was there any point in trying to figure out what it’s all for? Beyond my responses, that probably should have gone into the comments section of their respective posts, no. Save maybe this lesson: you shouldn’t look to closely or bore too deeply for you’ll find only the blackness between things.

The last two times I marathoned comics it was a less difficult proposition. Watchmen, the movie, was on the horizon so the natural thing was to read the book first. Thanks to DC publishing a bunch of free teaser comics entitled “After Watchmen, What Next” I got a taste of plenty of their most critically acclaimed titles and read a good deal of the stand alone greats. Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One Arkham Asylum, Joker, and a few of the more contained series like Fables, Ex Machina, Sandman, DMZ and Y the Last Man. I kept up with the trades as my library got them or in the case of Fables bought them outright. But this time I had read all the stand-alone stuff and I wanted to try and dive into the mainstream superhero comics.

Without the internet, an intense desire to figure what was what, and a single mindedness bordering on obsessive compulsive I would have never made it. I would have done what many other new readers did, read one or two and walk away. They are not easy to get into and now three paragraphs in I get to the point of why I’m writing about comics on a site called ‘The Game Critique.’ Trying to get into mainstream superhero comics gave me a very strong impression and emotional resonance to anyone who might try to get into mainstream video gaming. There are so many hurdles and difficulties that run in parallel within the niche cultures of the two mediums.

Starting in the right spot is almost impossible. To someone new it looks like a monolithic wall with everything blurring together. You have to make your own crack in it and start climbing from there hoping not to slide off into oblivion. It may prove fruitful and it may prove disastrous. I like X-men, I have said so many times. I love the basic premise and the conflict that exists on more philosophical grounds than many other comic books. Or at least that’s the impression I got looking in from the outside at the premise and implications alone. I didn’t grow up on the comics, I grew up on the original cartoon and Evolution as well the Brian Singer’s movies. The present state of the comics gave me a huge ‘what the hell.’ Kieron Gillen, bless him, is trying, and does an admiral job trying to make new comers feel welcome, but it’s a sort of Sisyphean task when at present there are 13 present titles all existing in the same universe continuity. Don’t get me started on the ended titles and titles from other continuities like Ultimate X-Men or X-Men 2099 etc. In fact the Ultimate universe was created by Marvel to allow new readers get into comics without having to worry about all the decades of continuity or tons of interloping titles. The thing is 11 years out and there are 34 main and mini series all contributing to the overall world continuity at my last count. In fact, the alternative universe miniseires, or in the case of Spider-Girl, long running alternative titles are much easier to get into than the main stuff. Plus, most if not all of these long running series have gone through multiple writers with different visions and ideas. Some are great and others not so much making the idea of a title being where to start ludicrous when they are inconsistent at best.

I can’t help but feel there is similar type of befuddlement when it comes to mainstream video games. What do you get when everything looks the same to you. You do what I did, you go for the brand. You hear Call of Duty and Guitar Hero and Wii as the biggest sellers and conflate popular with good whether or not the titles deserves it. Call of Duty has 3 different studios working on the series last I checked and Guitar Hero had around 4 before it finally went belly up. But you don’t know that.

That’s another thing, the reliance of franchises and well-worn IPs rather than new and fresh concepts. In the upcoming DC reboot here are 4 new Green Lantern books, 4 Superman related titles, 3 Justice League and a whopping 9 Batman titles. I’ve already talked about the X-Men and it was only recently that Spider-Man got cut back to a single title, though the new Spider Island event is causing about half a dozen new miniseries to pop up that you have to buy to get the full story. Plus with all these titles, how exactly are they different. Rogue alone appears in three books at present and she is apparently in Iran, Atlantis and the far side of the galaxy all at the same time. I’m sorry I cannot follow your storylines if you can’t either.

Maybe you think yourself ambitious or a conscientious consumer and decide to look up what the critics say. People whose jobs it is to know what is what. Comics have a tendency to like the upper end of the review scale. I have done nothing but anecdotal analysis on review scores sufficed to say I see a lot of 7s and 8s, have seen only a handful of scores below a 5 and apparently a very derided run of Action Comics described as “junk” and get 5s and 6s. I don’t really have to go into the similarities here, do I?

Further on the subject of comic “news and review sites” I looked around and found what I surmise to be the biggest or rather what came up as first on Google for very broad search terms were Comic Vine, Comic Book Resources, Weekly Comic Book Review and IGN Comics. These sites have a constant cycle of news/preview/review going on. Very little attention is played to what had just come out and is always forward looking sometimes to titles and events that won’t happen for months. The X-Men Schism event comic had news stories about it for months that tell us the ending in the press release. (Every review I’ve read so far ends talking about how they don’t quite see how this ending is going to come about from this premise or the newly revealed details.) This is a majority narrative medium, much more than video games, and we’re being told what is going to happen during the preview cycle. Or something that got more mainstream coverage, the new Ultimate Spider-Man revealed as a half-black half-Hispanic newcomer. The actual part of the comic that contained that comic was essentially all revealed in previews and was on the nightly news.

Criticism for comics is hard to find even when you know what you are looking for. I get the strong feeling there are entire circles devoted to doing deep and thoughtful criticism, the equivalent of what I and my ilk do for video games, but even with some diligence I could not find any. Only when Kieron Gillen linked to a post on twitter did I find any. I can’t help feel it’s the same for video games. If a person wants to read lengthy analysis, he’ll be hard pressed to find any. (This was proven somewhat, the weekend after I initially wrote this at the Freeplay convention in Melbourne, Australia.) He might get lucky with one of our sites and find the all the connecting blogs, but it’s kind of if you already don’t know where it is you wont find it situation. The Isle of de Muerta of comic or video game culture. And that’s only if you know what to call what you are looking for. Is “Criticism” a common word anymore? I honestly don’t know.

Speaking of culture it appears some of the ongoing debates for comics are the high prices of the books, where as recent as a few years ago people were complaining about (I think it was Marvel) upping the price of their books by another 50 cents, and the smaller amount of material gotten for that price. Complaints of rushed products, books written by committee, editorial mandates, recycled ideas, generic copycats, gratuitous T and A and sexism in the works and production.

It’s eerie.

What does it all mean? Not much really. The complexity of the medium and the unhelpfulness of those already entrenched is something we all are academically aware of as a thing, but we ourselves are so entrenched in the culture that we can’t feel it like an outside does. The comparisons here to comics, sociologically, gave me that resonance. I felt what it was like to be an outsider, someone with an open mind willing to try and wanting to like this niche, but was being pushed away at nearly every turn by and instituted system not designed for newcomers. There is a high barrier to entry. If it weren’t for all the factors above, I feel like I would have given up myself. Write it off as a failed experiment and go back to the safety of my already established hobbies.

But also like video games, no one either sees these issues of newcomer friendliness or they don’t care enough to do anything. This may have sounded like three pages of bitching, but realize all of these complaints come from a man who bothered to spend a huge amount of his free time trying to wrap his head around a potential new hobby. I found hurdles and problems the average consumer will never encounter because they will give up long before reaching them. I wanted to slide in, to be able to enjoy what so many others do. Please remember this is a mere outlining of issues coming from a person who bothered to try. If I weren’t as demented as I am when it comes to consuming media as I am, I wouldn’t have bothered and comics would have lost themselves a fan just because they couldn’t be bothered to help me.

I don’t know if it’s too late for the comic industry. If it’s too entrenched in its ways to make the giant shift necessary to rise up out of the niche market and produce something better. (I have to admit I was unimpressed with most of the contemporary stuff, if I could follow it at all.) I’m told that there might be hope in the indie market, but I know nothing about that and there was nothing from the big sites that could help me in that regard. Plus, why should I gamble my money on unproven material that may go belly up as soon as I start?

Yes, I know exactly what that sounds like, but it’s how I feel. This last month and half has given me a deeper appreciation for many facets of my own culture. Price sensitivity is something I’ve always had, but I’ve also had massive amounts of information, a critical support network, and understanding of genre and creators to go along with it so I could spend my money on the riskier titles. With comics, not so much. Piracy is another thing I see in a whole new light when it comes not only to the high prices, but more importantly the clogging of the market of so many titles, so many of which seem the exact same. Additionally, there was also a matter of availability. So many older titles disappear or haven’t been put in trade or can’t be found in legal channels.

But what I feel worst about is I’ve also experience a sort of loneliness when it comes to wanted to discuss what I’ve just read and unable to engender it from anybody, because it is just that obscure. And I follow over 250, let’s face it, geeks on twitter. I may be connected to a large video game critic circle, but it’s a shot in the dark if anyone I’m talking to has read or even heard of something I just finished and want to talk about. I’ve gotten one or two conversations, but even they felt lacking. It’s what it feels like to have a burgeoning enthusiasm ready to spill out and feel a connection, to share an opinion and converse with someone else with a similar or better yet a diametrically opposed one and have a fulfilling conversation. And then watch that entire potential die, as it gets lost, drowned out by everything else, ignored into the abyss of the chatter. Loving a work and wanting to spread it to anyone who will listen, but no one will or can.

However, there is one other thing I’ve gained a huge amount of respect for, something so often derided by my fellow critics as link bate or wastes of time: the Top 10 list. You have no idea how useful this is. Who give a fuck what the numbers are, here is a list of ten things that someone who knows far more than me says pulled ahead of the pack under some criteria. I have a starting place now. It pisses me off even more now when I think about how the top X lists have gotten co-opted by the initiated and are now written directly for them. They aren’t there for them. They are there to generate discussion and be a starting place for new comers. They are the premade handholds in those monolith rock walls, but they don’t work if you make them to pander to the fanboys, putting the wrong kind of thought into them or no thought at all.

I went in wanting to read some great stories, see someone superheroes kick some ass and have a different part of my brain tickled. I got that, but I also got a crash course in the hell anybody experiences when they step into our world. Now my only problem is, I don’t know what to do with that feeling.

If you are thinking about writing about video games, I highly recommend this. In fact I’d call it damn near required reading, despite it being about another medium. Like Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, you need to read this. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that even though it’s about books, the critical writing he takes to task and the subject matter of such writing is equally analogous to the mainstream review writing and culture that revolves around video games. The second is the correct usage of the word “pretentiousness” with regards to it’s meaning in relation to critical analysis of the arts.

The second point can be made faster so I’ll deal with it first, before moving on to the bulk of the argument in favor of this book. ‘Pretentiousness’ is a word that gets thrown around a lot with regards to anyone who should dare to think above “duuuhh duhhh, explosions are fun.” Of course for most the word pretentious is far to big, so the meaning is implied or long explanations utilizing short words that could be summed up with ‘pretentious’ are used instead. You’ve seen them used. Recently it has become a hallmark phrase of people who want to avoid thinking about something negative or difficult.

It’s just a game.

What they are saying in effect it, ‘stop being a pretentious douchebag.’ The last word is added to connote the spirit in which the comment is given. That is what they are saying, what they really mean is, ‘stop bringing this shit up, I don’t want to hear/think about it.’

Pretentious – adj- 1. making usually unjustified or excessive claims (as of value of standing) 2. expressive of affected, unwarranted or exaggerated importance, worth or stature (Merriam-Webster)

That is what the word actually means. I want to establish that for most of the words usage or implied usage it doesn’t fit. I direct you to Moff’s Law for a full explanation.

So, if the word’s usage is not proper with regards to thinking critically about video games or any creative endeavor, then why would I apply it to the writing about video games after I just discounted its use? Because it is wrong to use it as a pejorative or first response against a thoughtful argument because it happens to be about video games, or again any creative endeavor. Even if you don’t agree with the argument or the argument is really outlandish and seemingly far fetched the term still isn’t applicable based solely on those grounds. No, pretentious is an adjective describing a very particular instance of critical assessment. It comes in two forms and this is where I segue neatly into the first point above.

A pretentious analysis is one that is unsupported or pulled from one’s ass. The first is self-explanatory. If you make a declaration or assessment and then do not back it up or explain yourself you are being pretentious. Saying the sky is blue and then not explaining that’s the color our eyes are interpreting based off of light refraction is not pretentious, it’s a shortcut. We know the sky is blue; it is a basic, natural, observable fact. I am specifically talking about statements of assessment or declaration of quality.

Over and over, B.R. Myers will excerpt passages, or rather sentences from books that were first excerpted by praising book reviewers. He only uses excerpts that were praised for their quality by high profile book reviewers first. In nearly every case the reviewer will describe the passage as great or insightful or maybe compare it to a literary great of the past and then give the quote. And then would move on. They would not defend their thesis that this excerpt warrants merit or mention. Meyers would often counter with a quality quote from a much better book. To show you what I mean I’ll pull one of the “so-called great literary passages” at random.

There’s something about German names…I don’t know what it is exactly. It’s just there. (White Noise).

Thank you for wasting my time then with those two sentences. I wont bother to give Myers appraisal of it, because I had to read this book and have been waiting 3 years to eviscerate it somewhere. I hate White Noise and in my Contemporary Fiction class I couldn’t help but feel, deep down, that it was bullshit. You can usually tell something about a book by its first sentence.

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. (White Noise)

Yeah that’s memorable. I had to look that fucker up. Here are some other first lines:

“Call me Ishmael”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
“It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth.”
“In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.”
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

I shouldn’t have to label any of those quotes for you to recognize them or at least know where they came from. Every single one of them immediately holds your interest to read the next sentence. They are evocative and can be pulled apart word by word to discover the care and craft that went into them. The first line is probably the most important single line of any book.

There is nothing technically wrong with the first line in White Noise, but then there is nothing technically wrong with a lot of published books, but I wouldn’t call them literary genius. There is nothing technically wrong with the first line of The DaVinci Code:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.

Again, nothing wrong with the line itself, it even tantalizes with a few intriguing questions of “who is Jacques Sauniere?” “Why is he ‘renowned?’” “Why is he staggering?” and “Where is the Grand Gallery that it must be capitalized?” The thing is, now that I look at it, this is a better first sentence than White Noise has. It is well crafted, it may not be superiorly crafted like the above list, but it gets the job done and throws in a few mysteries. But the real bug I have with White Noise is the third and fourth sentences. After two short ones, we get a sentence that is half a page long. That by itself is not the problem. I love Proust and he holds several of the top places for longest grammatically correct English sentence in publication. (These go on for several hundred words. I believe the longest is in excess of 950.) I’ll reproduce Don DeLillo’s third and fourth sentences here; you can skim it instead of reading it.

The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping backs, with bicycles, skies, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and hairdryers and styling irons, the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey ad lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags-onion -and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut crème patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn, the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints. (White Noise)

Yes, it is an enormous list and is important enough to take up one fourth of the book’s first chapter. The first chapter is two pages long. My teacher spent so much time explaining the meaning behind this list and the emotions its post-modern affectations and styling are instilling in the reader about consumerism. I did what Myers explains all people do, skimmed it. Unless it’s a shopping list for what we are shopping for and have to locate each individual item, we don’t take in a list. We skim it and confirm that yes it is a list. This quote was found in nearly every favorable review of White Noise a book I called later, because I would have failed the class had I spoken up at the time, a hulking waste of my time and why I couldn’t be bothered to read much of the material for that class. Part of A Reader’s Manifesto‘s well, manifesto is that much of contemporary literary fiction is meant to be skimmed and thought profound, but if one puts an inkling of thought or actually reads the words slowly, it all falls apart. The above is a perfect example. The effect only comes over the reader when skimmed. Should you actually read it, like we did in class and go down the list you can’t help but think it a waste of time. And then to be told it is a sublime commentary on consumerism, that’s pretentious bullshit. See, it wasn’t the writing itself, although when you add in the author’s aspirations and inflated opinion of himself, then it becomes pretentious, but it was my teacher’s assessment of it. For this is the second type of pretentious analysis, pulling it out of one’s own ass, or to be less colloquial – making an assertion and then supporting it with something that isn’t there. Also known as lying.

Back to that original quote that started this train of examples, what was it again?

There’s something about German names…I don’t know what it is exactly. It’s just there. (White Noise).

Ah, thank you. Again, what was the point of this line? You say there is something about German names, but don’t know what. In other words you could have not written it. No, it’s not “just there” you have to explain it. Don’t expect me to do the work. I didn’t bring it up.

All of these lines aren’t the problem. By themselves they are just stupid, inane and general wastes of time. The pretentious ones are the ones that try to inadequately defend them. They think there is a profundity to saying ‘I don’t know, it’s just there.’ Or as Myers puts it “I knew this without knowing why.” That is saying there aren’t the words to explain why something is, is some great insight. No it’s laziness. DeLillo has gone on the record saying: Writing is the concentrated form of thinking. This is like one of those Jon Stewart comparison moments where something great is compared to something stupid and contradictory that the exact person suggested for humorous appeal.

So, what does all that literary analysis have to do with video games? Quite a lot. The afflictions that infect the literary reviewers are analogous to the reviewers of video games. In condensed form, Myers suggests there are only three possible responses when a critic is asked to review a work of literature:

1. “Praise the novel and novelist.”
2. “Lament that novel is unworthy of novelist’s huge talent,” (But still praise it).
3. “Review someone else’s novel instead.”

To paraphrase:
1.Praise the video game with a high score
2.Lament it wasn’t as good as you hoped, but decent (And still give it an inflated high score)
3.Review another game instead

Number 3 isn’t as used, though given how much shovelware gets put out and not reviewed you can be sure that the mean, median and average review remains high.

This graphic may be in jest, but is underlies a sad reality about video game reviews, the populous criticism. In some cases it may be about not having raised your standards enough, as it seems if it runs technically well then it guarantees a 6 already. But then this falls apart for the biggest of big releases, full of game stopping, save deleting, console crashing bugs getting 9s. Read that again, because they are not exaggerations. “Game stopping.” “Save deleting.” “Console crashing.” Of course I’m talking about Fallout: New Vegas. That the game got so many high scores despite not being able to run most of the time is unconscionable. As of writing this, the game has an 82 Metacritic average for the PS3 version, with the lowest score being a 60. The 360 version has an even higher rating with an 84. Yes, the developers fixed most, note only most, of the bugs through patches. A minority of consoles are connected to the internet meaning that most will never see those patches. These are the same people who buy only a few games a year. One of their $60 purchases is unplayable and it has an 84 average. I’m guessing this game falls under the second category of praise. It’s bad, but you still praise it because of its lineage/who it comes from.

If you want batshit writing and under supported or unsupported main stream video game writing, well you can go here to find an achieve of it.

It’s all about honesty. I’m not talking about reviewers supposedly being paid off to like or hate a game. Whether that happens or not has no bearing on what I’m talking about. I’m also not talking about badly written reviews in the form of poor structure or being unclear or convoluted at times.

This is not a well-written review. Back in January is caused a small furor on Reddit and later on the rest of the internet over people complaining how bad it is. The craftsmanship and tone have been criticized elsewhere; instead I want to look at what it says and not how it says it. It is not pretentious in the way I’ve described above. Greg Miller supports his claim about Dead Space 2. He says it’s a 9 out of 10, which on their scale means it is Amazing. He thinks it’s amazing and everything he says works to that effect and he supports it with evidence from the game. When talking about the game’s combat flow he gives the example:

Slowing down a Necromorph, blowing off its arm, and using the severed limb to impale the foe on a wall is a thing of beauty that doesn’t get old.

It’s a descriptive, specific moment. The line implies that it happens over and over, but the presentation of this example is so good the repetition doesn’t lose its horrific charm and is emblematic of the other moves you can pull off. It’s better than simply saying the combat doesn’t get old.

I know that “linear” is a bad word in the video game industry, but the package is so well done here that I can’t knock Dead Space 2 for taking me on a very specific ride that’s marked by awesome moments, environments that range from a cheery schoolhouse to pitch black rooms, and sound that’s so well done I’d find myself trying to figure out if it was a monster making its move or my dog rummaging in the living room.

This line goes on and would have been better as two or three sentences, but the point it makes is solid. He says the game is linear and though many do not like linear, the reviewer doesn’t care with regards to this particular title, because of the environments (which he gives examples to show their range and variety), picks out the sounds as integral part of the experience and of course the “awesome moments.” I’m not going to go too far in defending the review for reasons I linked above. It’s slapdash writing that for a site as major as IGN reeks of unprofessionalism. Poor grammar and tense changes plague the thing, but like the Dan Brown line it’s workman like. The review is not exemplar, but it does its job.

And then there is the other type of review, the kind of review that seems just to list a game’s qualities and assign a score. Author Jen from TheGameFanatics wrote such a review on Dragon Age 2. Forget even the writing quality, which is no more than banal, but that by the end of it I couldn’t tell if she like it or not or rather if she would recommend it or not.

The first half of the review is plot summary, but doesn’t say anything about it. She mentions she got a Final Fantasy XII vibe from the story, but what specifically gave her that vibe and is that a good or bad thing in her eyes. I don’t know. It says that making friends and gift giving is easier than before, but again is that good or bad. Then it goes on to talk about the features of the game like interface and combat, but it makes no pronouncements about them. It might as well be a features list, because that is what it is, a gussied up features list. When she does give her opinion it’s nearly always negative: confusing and laborious code inputs and installs, annoying popups, poor sound mixing, dated graphics, bunch of glitches and bugs (including a screenshot of one) and she notes two weeks later there still isn’t a patch. That’s quite a lot of complaints. She finally lists a few points she liked, for example the fact the game is never the same twice or that the game offers choice, but what does that mean? How does it make sure it’s the never the same game twice? Ok, it offers choice, but to what degree and how good are they?

Again, there is so little there I couldn’t tell if she would recommend it or not. If she did I figured it would be one of those decent above average, but not exceptional recommendations then I see it got 9 stars. What the hell? There is nothing in the text that warrants the final-word praise like it does.

It’s not the only one either. IGN’s Homefront review makes a lot of declarations like it’s not an elite shooter, or the shooting, voice acting and sound is serviceable, but nothing special. The thing about it, it never says why. I only have Colin Moriarty’s word for it that all of this is the case. He never backs up any of his claims with evidence from the game. At least Greg Miller did in a few spots.

Then we have Susie Lye’s Homefront review at GameNTrain that does what I thought we moved passed, splitting the review into looking at the individual sections (gameplay, story, graphics, sound) in turn. That doesn’t help me if I’m buying the whole product. How much does each of these matter when looked at as a whole? Is sound important like in Dead Space or Silent Hill? Do the graphics detracts from the shooting or can I make out what I’m doing? And what exactly is “Gameplay Overall?”

Or Ken Laffrenier of XboxAddict who doesn’t get to the game in his review until it’s a fourth of the way done. Then he waxes lyrical in such a convincing way, that you know he likes the game, but it doesn’t tell you why you’d like the game. It describes little about the actual game and even less why any of that is good. It comes to a head in a really perplexing paragraph where he explains the story is amazing if you had read the companion novel, which expands on the invasion through the eyes of “an intricate character” that narrates in the game, but I don’t see how between level voice over narration is a good video game story. Also, why is it good if I have to read a supplemental novel to get everything? This isn’t even a right to his opinion thing, it’s just wrong. The game’s story is good, because I read the book? It talks about influences and mentions some stuff that’s in the game, but never seems to say anything about the mechanics; you know the actual things you press buttons to do in the game and never gives qualifying statements. This isn’t just bad it’s baffling.

It comes down to being an honest reviewer. Not just honest with the audience, but honest with yourself. It means not calling a game average and then giving it a 7 or up. 7 out of 10 is not average, not even close. The mathematical average on a 10-point scale is 5. On a scale of 100 it’s 50. You have to be willing to use the full range of scores. The most common numbers you should be giving out if you are a review site is from 4-6. Most games should be in that range. Kill Screen says the range should be between 3-7, but the main point holds. If you are being honest you should recognize most games aren’t amazing or incredible or phenomenal or life altering or “the most important video game of our generation” or bad or terrible or dog piss. Most games are ho-hum, run of the mill, bland, forgettable, in other words: average.

Now with this shocking revelation washing over you, here’s another: reviews are opinions. Reviews are subjective. Subjective does not mean objective. The number attached to the review is not scientific, it is not an objective result derived from critical observation. It is a subjective opinion derived from critical observation. If a reviewer gives a substantially different score from another reviewer it does not mean one is wrong and the other isn’t (if they both supported their arguments). It means they disagree. They have the right to their own opinion, what I’m championing is the assertion that they do not have the right to their own facts. Regardless of anything else, how good the animation is, how deep the story is, how nuance the characters are, how tight the controls are, New Vegas is not a good video game because of the game breaking bugs and coding errors that will not allow it to run. I don’t care how good your game mechanics are if the game freezes up on me consistently and constantly. Your game is broken and is not good.

I will end this with a few reviews sites or in some cases sites that do reviews that are honest. I may not agree with some of them, hell some of the reviewers on the same site do not agree with one another, but they are honest for the reasons I have outlined above.

Game Critics is the most mainstream game review site here. They hit all the major releases and much of the minor ones and unheard of one as well. They use the full scale and are not afraid to exercise that against major release titles like Brad Galloway’s 2.5 for Dragon Age 2. If a reviewer disagrees strongly enough they will do another full review as a second opinion, with a new score. I’ve seen third opinions too. Each review was given a different score and each one was a supported argument.

PopMatters is a site that concerns itself with all forms of popular culture. There is the Moving Pixels blog, which is higher minded and analytical criticism, but they also do reviews. Again these use the full spectrum of the 10-point scale and are backed up arguments. Even if they flounder like their recent Dragon Age 2 review. With regards to support of her score, Kris Ligman defends it in the text. She liked the game despite the flaws it presented even if she is not entirely sure why, but says so. She admits she may not be exactly sure why, but she says so and gives her best estimation. You may not agree with it, but that is the act of an honest reviewer on an honest site.

Yahtzee-love him or hate him-is an honest reviewer. In his very hasty, no pause video review he delivers his opinion in around 5 minutes every week. What is more interesting to note is how his reviews are often received. He is the only reviewer I mention in this post not to use a score and often his watchers are confused as to whether or not he likes a game. This is the viewers’ fault and not his. He is very clear whether or not he like a game, it’s just the gamer audience is so used to the extremes they cannot recognize gradients anymore. Some games he likes a little, some a lot and some not at all. He may not follow the mainstream, but he is always true to his own opinions and always backs them up.

Paste Magazine has a more limited video game section and does less frequent reviews, mostly on high profile releases. They have some of the best-written reviews out there and go beyond simply what the game is, how well it works and how much they like it. They try to explain the game’s appeal and the effect it has on a player. Kirk Hamilton’s Limbo review should be proof enough. It says little on the game itself, but after you read it you know whether or not you want to play it yourself to experience what it has to offer. To keep consistency Kirk Hamilton gave Dragon Age 2 a 4.5, to him a “forgettable.”

Kill Screen has the best spiel on game review scores I might have ever read. I referenced it above, but please read the whole thing here. Now they don’t do the volume that the major mainstream sites do, nor have they focused much on the AAA titles. Their editor-in-chief has said they are not adverse to them; they just haven’t received those submissions yet. They’re focus is mostly on indies and the iOS/Android platforms. I’ve seen their scores go as low as the 20s and the highest I’ve seen to date is a 79 out of 100, which was later changed to a 93 and that was a nothing but praise review, also the only 80+ they’ve published. They have high standards and do not sacrifice them. They want to elevate video games and video game writing so they must hold themselves to a higher standard.

These are the honest sites with well-written reviews. There are plenty of examples of well-done reviews within each of them. Most reviews are subject to the hype. They are influenced by it and tainted by it for one reason or another. The thing is to remember, when the game is no longer new, when the game is years old and the hype has died down, the commercials are no longer on TV and the news/preview/news cycle has stopped, all that’s left are the words. All that’s left are what the critics had to say. I’ve gone back to some of the major sites to see what they had to say on modern classics like Shadow of the Colossus and have been sorely felt wanting by what I found.

You may have found it egregious that a lot of what I had to say focused on the scores a game was given. I did it because that is what the industry, all three sides of it are, are focused on. The developers/publishers makes many of their decisions based on what the critics score it, the average consumer makes his decision or validates it with the scores, and the journalists, as much as they rail against them put a lot of effort into defending them. The score is the thesis in a way and the text is the support for that thesis. If you think a game is a 9.0 then your writing has to support that, just as if you called a game a 1.0, the writing must support that. But most of all raise your expectations to reality. Set the record straight. A 6 or a 7 is still above average and could be that fun game. Save the high scores for something that truly deserves it. And when I mean high I don’t mean 9.0 and above. The inflated review scores are a major part of the problem; so major you could say they are the problem for they cause all the others. 7,8,9 and 10 are all high scores they are just different degrees of high. Arguing the score is pointless, it is his opinion and so long as he supports his opinion it is his. But as it goes, there is opinion and then there is just plain wrong. If the reviewer calls a game mediocre and grants it a 7 or an 8 then yes he is wrong.

You can argue that the 10 point method is not the best way to go and sing the praises of letter scoring or 5 stars, but it all comes down to the same thing: you must be honest and use the full range of what ever scoring method you use or your opinion has no value. Everything is not wonderful, just like everything is not crap. You have to explain yourself, because the explanation is the important part. Not the score and not the ‘your opinion.’ It’s why you have that opinion that matters, because if you tear the game apart the person reading may feel they want to try out the game, because what you didn’t like may appeal to them and vice-a-versa.

You really should pick up A Reader’s Manifesto, it’s a brilliant piece of literary criticism, but more than that it’s criticism about an embedded review culture staked in keeping itself afloat. Myers notes that in the period before he wrote and published it there were strong rise in sales of classic novels, because the reader of quality literature had been burned and knew they could no longer trust any sterling review, because they were all sterling. The writers gained an inflated image of themselves, where in Cormac McCarthy’s case he had produced some great craftsmanship, later seemed to be phoning it in because no one told him otherwise. You tell someone what they are doing is great and wonderful when it’s not, it will not drive them to do better things, constructive criticism will.

The title A Reader’s Manifesto is there to assert its literary origins about the review culture around books and more specifically post-modernism literature that is presently in vogue. But it is more than that. It can speak to any review culture, either as a warning or as a mirror. A Reader’s Manifesto is for review readers as a whole. The problems and arguments may be about books, but the defensiveness, ad hominem attacks and step-by-step analysis of the response to any challenge to embedded elite reflects on all of us.

Suffice to say I also haven’t played all that many games from this year. I missed out on most if not all of the major releases and most of the secondary releases. This is all depending on your deification of AAA release and AA or A release. I also had a bit of trouble deciding on which game I thought was the best. There was no supreme standout like ’08 or at least a powerful shortlist like in ’09. As I said on the CDC podcast, this year seemed to be a bunch of lackluster releases. All had great promise and all seemed to trip over themselves in some way or another. Even those that some have said didn’t, I haven’t got around to playing yet. I’m still waiting for a laptop with a dedicated graphics card so I can play the Mass Effects and Metro 2033. Bayonetta, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Red Dead are all sitting in my play next pile having got them over the Christmas break.

It’s not surprising since I was broke for a good amount of the year and spent 3 full months getting reading for and taking a language class to graduate. Now it just sounds like I’m making excuses, let’s get on with it. There won’t be a long set up and handing out of awards, but before I announce my game of the year I’d like to get talk about my honorable mention.

Honorable Mention

Minecraft was the breakout hit of the year, literally coming out of nowhere to being a million dollar seller. The fact that or most of the year it was is alpha is absolutely incredible. The creative force behind the game comes from the player almost if not more so than the creator. Both the creative and the survival aspects of the game create a special sort of game that creates a unique and personal experience for every individual. There are many things about the game that subvert many of the notions of modern AAA gaming. There is no instruction manual requiring you either to figure it out before night falls or search the internet for only the most basic of facts about what can and needs to be done. There is no real goal once you create a basic shelter; you make your own fun. It’s the digital equivalent of going to the park. There are monkey bars, there are slides, there are swings, but the fun you get out of it is only what you put into it.

Before the October 31st update, I created two worlds and spent most of my time in large dungeons/cave complexes I found. In the second world I found a mountain and started to dig a D&D style dungeon before digging straight down and hit a large cave complex. I spent days exploring and ended up getting lost in circles and then three dimensional figure eights. I went further into the system where figure eights blended with more figure eights. Eventually I hit bedrock in several locations. I nicknamed it Barad dur. I didn’t even get to finish exploring it. I failed at building a bridge across a lake of lava.

I built another world after the October 31st update to see the new biomes and other features Notch had coded into the game. Unfortunately for all the universal praise I could give the game’s design, creation and otherwise soul it came with a memory leak. A basic, 16 bit game after a few minutes eventually monopolizes over half of my computer’s processor and third of my ram, over a full gig. I can play only with every other nonessential program turned off and few of the essential programs and only for a limited amount of time before the frame rate makes it unplayable. I wish I could still play the game and maybe it will be fixed by some update in the future. I hope so, because I’d like to continue extending my Barad dur and build my great wall. Because of this major technical hiccup I can’t really rate the game. Without this issue, it would have been my runner up, or maybe even my game of the year.

Runner-Up

Heavy Rain was and is a game plagued with problems and issues. The walking is stilted, the story is full of holes, actions scenes come and go that make little or no sense, characters are stupid and the dialogue wasn’t written or translated by a native English speaker. I think the game is great despite it’s flaws. For all that it does bad, it creates a world and sinks you into it. All modern AAA talk about immersion, Heavy Rain succeeds by having a story and set pieces that are quiet. Explosions and gunfights are not the word here, in fact when these things happen it breaks the immersion somewhat. The best scenes are those that allow quiet contemplation about what you are making these characters do.

The third trial is the most talked about scene in the game, so I’m sure no one minds if I go on about it as well. I cannot tell you the tension this scene filled me with. I can’t think of any movie or book made me feel so terrified or shaking by watching a man sitting in a chair. That’s really all you are looking at while you manage his breathing. Just so the screen will stop it’s slight shaking. If you succeed you are give a clean opportunity to cut off your own finger. The fact that the game sets this up, so you would okay with it, but became complicit. Yes, Metal Gear Solid 3 broke this ground, but that’s all it did. It broke the ground and it took a lot of people off their guard. The impact of the scene was inherited not really because of the story or action, but its impact is from the realization the game is making you pull the trigger. It crosses that line from QTE to moment, by virtue it was a basic mechanic of the game you spent hours mastering. In Heavy Rain, it is the same mechanic used for a large variety of actions. With this setup context is everything. The abstract and representational nature of the mechanics amplified the context and the actions we were taking.

The game also had something almost no other game had, which I was grateful for: quiet and slow moments. Many have unrightfully called the beginning boring. It was slow, that is not the same as boring. Modern gaming has set us up with certain expectations and when a game defies even one of them, every claims it is bad this or that without even looking at what the game was doing. Heavy Rain was giving us contrast. Action heavy scenes only have meaning if they can be contrasted with slower scenes of quiet intensity. For all the details that were Heavy Rain’s failing, its structure, something I’ve been harping on nearly all year, is excellent. It’s pacing is right on point to tell the story it was trying to tell and matched mechanics to suit it. Everything flowed together and builds a solid super structure on which they could hang the dressings. Pity they chose moth eaten rags, nearly pretty and shiny rags, but rags nonetheless.

It’s the complicity that I loved in Heavy Rain more than anything else. It create a situation where failure wasn’t the end all be all. Every ending was legitimate, from the saccharine sweet to the soul crushingly depraved and everything in between. It really was a what-if mystery. Maybe not so much with whodunit, if you were paying attention (I wasn’t paying close attention), but rather in what will happen next. It is a roller coaster, but not the Michael Bay type and thank goodness for that.

Game of the Year

Neptune’s Pride is an online real time strategy game that takes about a month to complete. It is slow moving RTS, with ships taking hours if not days to travel between stars. It’s rather bare bones with only you only able to upgrade the three attributes of a star: economy, industry and science. The first gives you more money in the daily pay out; the second gives you more ships per day and science, which makes research towards tech, go faster. Combat automatically happens and can be calculated ahead of time. There are no random chances to any part of this game. I’d call it the chess of RTS, but you aren’t given full or perfect information. You can only see the space with scanning range of your stars. You can contact the other players and can trade with them. This is where the game takes itself to the next level.

This is a game where you can lose friends or come to hate strangers. The game becomes more an exercise in trust and betrayal than it is strategy. You can get through the early game with strategy alone, maybe, but if you haven’t set something up, something in the wings you will be destroyed. I lost a game today, because I didn’t foster any sort of relationships with my neighbors and went first in everything to 5th place behind two opponents who had been put under AI for inactivity. No video game makes you so nervous to be away from your computer. No game so simple or basic pulls you win and gets you so invested in your empire’s survival.

The ludodecahedron set up a few games in the summer to duke it out. No game caused so much battling on twitter or googlewave as the virtual fighting we did in Neptune’s Pride. Only a rule system as deep as Neptune’s Pride with the added benefit of human cunning mix to create a truly personal and memorable experience. I mastered the strategy, but my undoing is when it comes to betrayal. When it’s time to invade my neighbor, I set up too late. On the other hand I have come in first in two games, with tactics I could regale you with like the master generals.

Neptune’s Pride, a game with real people pit against real people, with no flash or complexity is my game of the year.

This year was also the year I finally graduated college. I have my BA in English from Boston University. I’ve also found that I enjoy reading massive amounts of games criticism almost as much if not more than playing games sometimes or writing about them. Thankfully this is a useful skill at Critical Distance where I’ve taken on a larger role as the year progressed. In the beginning, March as it were, I was just filling in for Ben as he gallivanted around GDC. It has now turned into a monthly thing. And as of two days ago I restarted the CDC podcast, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and turns out only took about a week to set up and complete. Both are efforts I will continue in the coming year if Ben will still have me. (It was a long 4 and half hours long.)

In looking back over the last year I realized I only wrote about three games specifically. ‘Where is the Last Third of Brutal Legend?‘ was the first game essay I wrote this year. In the post I challenged classics professor Roger Travis to tell me where I’m wrong in comparing Brutal Legend to the Greek epic. He did so in the comments and I’m grateful for it. Later in the year I managed to write a trio of posts on inFamous and its missed opportunities with each post focusing on different elements of the game. Something I should do with more games in the future.

An ongoing theme in my writing about games this year in the need for structure in games, or rather a need for solid structure in games. I feel too many games drop the ball on something so basic for reasons, I really don’t know what the reasons are. Storytelling structure, which by the way is different from plot structure, is something we have mastered a long time ago and continue to innovate to push it forward, while always adhering to the basics in other media. I sometimes feel the basics are ignored or unknown in the games industry.

You could say this all ties into the Games as Art debate and whether or not they’ve reached that level. Thanks to Roger Ebert a lot of you did and I took it upon myself, I still don’t know why, to catalog these responses and because some people cannot let go, am still cataloging responses. As trite as it is to hate the topic and cry out in exasperation every time someone brings it up, we should know well enough to only use that response with someone who legitimately should know better. A game journalist, a game critic, an industry insider, developer or publisher. To a vast majority of people this was a watershed moment. This was the first time anyone had ever had the idea proposed to them. The reason the topic keeps getting brought up, is because someone will come along, ignorant of all the conversation before hand and say, “well what about this?” We should not go “uugggghhhh,” throw up our hands and condemn them. We will have this debate again, and we should be as calm and reasonable as we were with Ebert. Or at the very least point them to my post. There’s enough reading material there to keep them quiet.

This year was the inaugural PAX East. I was there and have the photos the prove it. It was definitely the post with the most title changes ever, as I had to fix the number every time I did some edits in the text. I have no idea if I’ll go to the next one. If enough of the people I know end up going to be worth the trip, then I’ll be there.

Another debate that came up that more people are sick of than aren’t is the one about CLINK HOCKING’s term ludonarrative dissonance. I’ve already written my defense of the term. I also went ahead and wrote a full post response to one of the comments in said posts. Gears of War deserves the term and it deserved a full post unto itself.

Tom Bissell wrote probably one of the most important pieces of game criticism of the year and not just it came in the form of a hardcover book. It has exceptional writing, but I felt that it lacked focus in making its arguments to any particular audience. It seems to be a 101 of game criticism and yet sometimes doesn’t even go that far. But as Kirk Hamilton said on the podcast, “sometimes beautiful writing is enough.”

I wrote a great response to a piece of criticism regarding Final Fantasy VIII, that I managed to expand into a piece on what exactly criticism is and how many people’s narrow thinking of it is wrong.

I end this look back at some of my better work on the post I was most afraid to publish and which ended up being one of the pieces I’m glad I did. Critical Distance back in its birth was a bit of a wild west as everyone tried to figure out how to fulfill its purpose, once we figured out what its purpose was. Eventually we got the weekly roundups and they became longer and more in depth. But it seems few were aware of how this mystical process of choosing the best writing of the week was done. I’m glad I could shed some light on it. It’s even spawned a larger discussion near the end of the year in relation to game writing. A discussion we are only seeing the beginning of.

What do I have in store for next year? Well for starters I have an entire word document filled with post concepts, a few outlines and one post that is three pages long and isn’t even a quarter finished. A lot of these are posts that should have gone up this year, but I spent most of the summer studying for the last language class I needed to graduate and then the mad search for a job that I’m qualified for that no longer seems to exist. On the bright side I got a contract writing gig at Gameranx writing the news. That starts early next year. I hope to get Indie Game Spotlight back up, but if there is one thing I’ve learned I should make less promises when it comes to my writing. I don’t seem very good at keeping them.

The Collection

Every week since April 19th of last year Critical-Distance has put together a weekly feature collecting the best of the critical writing the internet had offered that week. That initial purpose has been stretched somewhat, at different times discarding the internet, week, critical and in certain cases writing parts of that mantra. Every week people send in links to Ben via twitter, e-mail, facebook and/or any other method of getting links to a person. Then he aggregates them. Sometimes he passes the responsibilities off to myself or so far Ian Miles Cheong, when he is either unavailable or too busy to do a good job. It is important to note that we do miss things every week. Even with our expansive RSS feeds (Ben’s outstrips mine by about a factor of maybe 100) and people sending in links plenty slips through the cracks. Whenever we find something has been overlooked we enter it into the next TWIVGB. Sometimes it was missed by a day, a week, a month or in one case half a year.

My point is we are happy to get suggestions, in my case a little relieved. I hate being a sole authority on something like this. The fact of the matter is, the audience of this blog and Critical-Distance’s TWIVGB has limited overlap. I have a tiny audience in comparison. In fact, most of the hits TWIVGB gets aren’t even from Critical-Distance, but from the feature’s republishing on GameSetWatch and Gamasutra, especially the latter. People who might have an interesting in critical game’s writing, but have not the time to look for it, to go to many different sites or even to wade through RSS feeds to get it. That is our real audience. There is a good chance that those who take an active role in game’s criticism, the majority of my audience have already read a good deal of the posts we link before TWIVGB ever gets published.

This is where I feel like I have more power on the content than I reasonably should. In any given week I submit anywhere from 60 to 90% of the links. I don’t submit everything I read, not even close. If I had to guess, I would say a little less than half. If I think it’s interesting and worthwhile to others I submit it for TWIVGB. Think about that, 60-90% of what I think is worthwhile and interesting.

This requires a little history lesson of about a year and half ago. Critical-Distance went through a period right after it’s inception where people thought it was in danger of becoming a closed circuit network and, to be specific, have a white, middle-class and male slant centered around certain people. These accusations and fears were not entirely unjustified. Near all the contributors and editors are white, middle-class, male and in time it dawned on us English speaking. The debate almost completely devolved into arguments and fighting with the end result being that a lot of the culture link round ups and debates disappeared and Critical-Distance shrunk it’s scope to critical compilations, now far more infrequent and TWIVGB, which has grown. It wasn’t all bad. At some point in that debate someone said something along the lines of:

Well if you don’t like it, give us something not white, middle-class and male centric.

Of course the intention was good, but absolutely put the wrong way. I forget the specifics and I know there were nuances, but I can’t be bothered to search for them. (They are available in the comments of a post somewhere in Critical-Distance’s archives.) It was understandably taken as a rebuke effectively meaning, “we are white, middle-class and male and can’t be bothered to write or include other points of view” instead of how I saw it as an admission of a weakness along the lines of “we are white, middle-class and male and don’t know anything else, please show us what we’re missing.” Thankfully a few of the commenters took it as a challenge or as something that needs fixing and in exchange for a smaller scope Critical-Distance, The Border House was born. A fair trade any day.

It was a contentious affair and is still going on in other parts of the web every day. I will not belittle it. Instead I want to head anything like it off at the pass as it were. Honestly, if I kept my mouth shut, no one would have noticed or complained, but I don’t feel right not bringing it up. With content creation there is the 99%-1% rule. Where dedicated 1% of users create the 99% of the content for everyone. We see this is mod communities, LittleBigPlanet and Critical-Distance’s TWIVGB. I’ve never been apart of the 1% before, but there is a difference between a mod community and TWIVGB. With the mod community it is a matter of a person or group of people creating what they want to create. With TWIVGB it’s a matter of revealing already created content for others. I will admit it; my references and beliefs of what is worthwhile and good influence what I submit. How could it not? It wouldn’t bother me one bit if the submissions was more proportioned among users. However, thinking about it more, there are times where a piece will get submitted more than once, from what I see on twitter, by different people. I do not know what Ben gets e-mailed, but that doesn’t seem the case for the most part.

Also, regardless of how much I submit, or how much the regular contributors submit we will not find all the best game criticism. The internet is just too vast and places that don’t talk about video games may have a one off that is interesting and insightful and we will miss it. A few weeks ago, the time before last when I took the reigns of TWIVGB I liked a work by a internet magazine about a solider and his reaction to the Call of Duty games in light of his tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. I didn’t wait and posted the link for all to see saying they should read it immediately. I got this response some minutes later and I quote,

@TheGameCritique where do you find this stuff?

You want my secret behind being able to find such an out of the way and off the game criticism beaten path. Trick question, the answer is I don’t. The editor of the magazine emailed the article/essay to me, because he hoped I would like it enough to spread it to my readership. He overestimated the readership of my site, but got lucky with regards to Critical-Distance. (I ended up working that week.) I would have never found it otherwise. I doubt any of the usual contributors would have found it, nor anyone I follow on twitter. The source was just so far out of way at a site that had never published anything relating to games before and I never heard of before to boot. Without that editor, we could have and most likely would have missed it.

I tell this story to highlight a point. This is an instance where we found the piece outside our comfort zones; the places we frequent, the people who frequent us. How many did we miss all those other weeks? I don’t know, but I know we did. Just three weeks ago I found a piece that was back from December of last year. It was interesting and on a blog that has since gone quite, but a blog no one had heard of before. We posted it that week some 10 months late. It doesn’t matter. If we find it late and it’s quality we will post it, we’ve proven that, but we can’t find it all. Ben was one person doing it by himself in the beginning. Then he asked for help. Then for a few weeks out of the year he passed off the reigns to Ian and myself. It is an impossible task for one man to do. It gets no more possible with three.

I use my RSS feed for nearly all my blog reading. It is a central location so I can find everything simple and easy. I don’t have to go to the 100 gaming blogs in there (Holy shit it’s 100 even as of writing this.) they come to me. Of course a number of them are dead, retired, or just on extended hiatus. Plus, I’m adding a new one on a nearly weekly basis. New quality criticism blogs are being created all the time. Sometimes I find them and sometimes they find me. (My twitter/site name causes this to happen a lot thanks to google.) Daniel Golding’s Mapping the Brainysphere is woefully out of date as Ben points out and it’s less than two years old. But because of my method of reading and gathering there are limits. I can’t read blogs that don’t have an RSS feed no matter how much I want to. (I’m looking at you Psychology of Video Games.) I also lose out on the comments, because they don’t appear and I can’t click on each item.

Early on I made a conscience decision to diversify my RSS feed as much as I could. I went out and searched for different opinions, view points, backgrounds, and approaches to criticism. I follow people who I fundamentally disagree with in regards to games and only seem to argue with. Having a different opinion doesn’t disqualify you from my RSS feed. Not having one, a blog that has died, or not having anything to say are my only disqualifying requirements. Even then some of the blogs/site I follow have little to no critical component, but are a vastly different viewpoint and that alone makes them worth following. Some are writing experiments on a single game. Some are places to work out opinion pieces for other sites. I have a diversity of blogs from all over the world, opinions and backgrounds.

And it is not enough.

You could call this a plea to help with our search and get your own voice in the selection process by sending us links. But we say that almost every week. All I’m really doing here is notifying people of a situation. I paint it in as truthful a light I can and let you make your own judgment. Most, maybe all of you will be fine with things as they are and what we lose in the process is acceptable given the nature of the situation.

Now comes the harder discussion.

The Aggregation

The post was going to end there when I had first conceived of it last week. Then I was asked to wire last week’s TWIVGB. All was going well until Saturday when I sat down to compile it. I started early around 4 pm so I could get it done long before midnight EST, which is the usual target time. Or at least is the target as I perceive it. 12 hours later at 4 am I wrapped it up, posted it for editorial review and went to bed. This is the story of what happened in those 12 hours.

To be fair it wasn’t the whole 12 hours, I had dinner, walked away from the computer for an hour or so to stretch, had to pick up ice cream for my parents. But even so my first week, the largest TWIVGB we had took 3 hour to compile and post. I got faster and could do it in under an hour and half. Even the time I promised to do it and ended up going to Boston to sort out my graduation (because BU bureaucracy is three different types of pain in the ass), had no wi-fi and ended up stealing it from various Panera Breads around campus. Even then it took an hour 45. So what happened?

I had my list of links set up in one word document and I began writing in the other. I quickly reread some of them to group the related ones together. Then I checked and got Ben’s email of everything that was sent to him. Most of it was what I had already collected. There were some new additions as there always are. I opened them and read them. Then over the course of the hours a few more were sent in to the twitter account. That is where the problem came from.

There were a total of ten pieces not already in my list. Four made it in. If a suggestion comes in, 99 times out a hundred it is included if not this week then the next week if it missed the cut off time. I rejected six in one week, each for a different reason. That is probably more than double than all the other weeks I’ve ever done combined. Those ten posts cost me about 10 hours.

The four that went in consisted of two I hadn’t seen before, one that I had open in my web browser but hadn’t gotten to read yet and the three part interview from Gamer Melodico that I had read but hadn’t added. The first three are understandable and probably would have been on my list had I read them before. But I want to talk about Kirk Hamilton’s interview. I don’t really read interviews with the view of a critical mindset for submission possibilities. Probably because most interviews are glorified PR stints, but this one was sent in, which means someone thought it was worth enough to be included. I added it.

In contrast we have the other six pieces that editorially I felt were lacking and opted to not include them. I’m going to go one by one and explain myself. Again I could avoid all of this by simply keeping my mouth shut.

The first was this one about Activision’s oversight on a preorder bonus of 360 avatar costumes. It was discriminatory, but the piece was short and didn’t say anything about it other than the problem existed. It also has an update showing the codes Activison released when they realized their mistake. Sexism in the industry, even in something as small as forgetting to have female avatar costumes, is a problem. I see at least a dozen posts each week pointing out instances and the faults in each instance. The thing is, all these posts do is point out the faults. Very few go beyond that and the ones I recommend are the ones that are more than two paragraphs pointing out that such and such exists. Pointing it out and not explaining or exploring the problem is not enough. The thing is, there are a number of different points in the post that if expanded and connected could have given a great picture of midnight launch experience from her end, but she doesn’t. Had I found and read this post during the week on my own I would never have given it a second glace. But that wasn’t the case. It was suggested, someone thought it was worth the time to read. Remember for the most part this isn’t for the critical gaming sphere. I read it and reread it about half a dozen times debating with myself. In the end I thought that while yes it points out an example of a larger trend it says nothing about it.

Second was a review of Fable 3. I’ll quote Ben from the email here.

We don’t normally include ‘reviews’ under the heading of criticism, but have a look and decide whether you think appropriate. I leave the decision to your capable judgment.

Aside: I’ve gained a reputation within Critical-Distance for my somewhat outrageous reading habits, continual quality suggestions, weekly diligence and willingness to step in to help. I’ve gotten props within in the TWIVGB posts several times for my contributions in collecting. In one instance Ben included a piece he didn’t think was worth much based on my recommendation alone and said so in the post, saying “Still, the piece comes recommended by Eric Swain, so that counts for something.” He has a lot more confidence in me than I have in myself, to the point that I never suggest anything I’ve written because of…ethics I guess. End Aside.

Point being I read the review at least three times looking for something beyond a normal consumer review. I’ve included reviews before in my TWIVGBs, one making a satirical point about reviews and the other as an example of what a review could be. This one had an interesting idea or two, but does nothing with them. He states a feature of the game, says something interesting about that feature and then stays with it for exactly one sentence before moving to the next feature or thing the game does. A lot of what I read does this. They set up something about game, make a very interesting point and never explore it. And they always seem to be a point that could be a whole essay in their own right. It used to make me bang my head against the wall for the missed opportunity. Now I’m sort of used to it.

The next two come from Bitmob. They have a habit of submitting everything slightly critical from their site that week. So we take everything with a grain of salt and carefully read them. They submitted four pieces this week. Two made it in and two didn’t. The two that didn’t were about explaining why developers or rather publishers keep secrets when it comes to their the flow of information regarding their games and the other talking about death in video games. The former in my opinion was common knowledge and just a stating of facts, (don’t know if they are all true or not, giving the full benefit of the doubt) and the later is about such a well worn topic that not only manages not to say anything new, but anything constructive at all. Again it is a matter of listing facts, and then making an interesting a point before walking away from it instead of saying anything with regards to that point. I had to read it again to make sure I didn’t miss anything or there wasn’t a second page somewhere.

It really is noticeable, especially with regards to the other two pieces they submitted. One about a system of exploring the verisimilitude of games through the mechanic’s feel between the player, controller and game with an example to demonstrate. The other looks at the topic of betrayal, one not covered often, through the eyes of personal experience and the similarities between the feelings in what boarders on New Games Journalism. And no I don’t think either of those are exaggerations the big words make them sound like. They weren’t exceptional works that will be looked back for weeks or months to come like some I could mention that get reference again and again and probably would be included in an anthology, but they are worth including.

Finally we come to the last two, both from Electron Dance about amateur games. These were the time suckers of the evening. Both posts have something in common. Both are another type I see a lot of during a week. The here is a game, here is what it’s like, it’s really good, give it a try. They are the equivalent of the AAA press releases, but for indie/amateur game that no one has seen yet. Now these are the bread and butter for the independent, bedroom programmers towards getting exposure and I will not denigrate them one bit. As critics it is our job to find gems and point them out, but that is all they are. They aren’t critical; these posts point out a game’s existence and tell you what it is about. They don’t say anything about the game itself. Now the two posts in question do go a step further. The same step I mentioned above. The author makes an interesting point for a sentence or two and then walks away from it. Again this is like an IGN writer giving their two cents about a AAA game’s press release.

It didn’t help that the game in question were Marvel Brothel (NSFW), which I would have included despite the content if the post had said something about the game in any amount of depth. It didn’t help that by the time I got the link the game had been taken down due to copyright infringement. I will make no value judgment on a game I have not played, but it really would have taken some writing on the game instead of just about it to be included.

The other was about a game called Dungeoneer (NSFW, trigger warning for torture, trigger warning for rape, trigger warning for other vile things I’m not sure I have name for) had the same problems as Marvel Brothel in that it says little about the game before moving on. Again it’s okay to give attention to game, but not for a critical aggregation. I will admit there was a large personal preference in not including it for content. I was intrigued by what the game could offer as a unique experience, but I will never touch it with a 100 foot Ethernet cord if I can help it. I wrote and experimental game idea about torture for Blogs of the Round Table, and even that made me feel physically ill. I don’t want to think what a game like this would do to me.

Six rejections. This post is about editorship as much as anything else so I want to go a week further back and look at a blog post Ian Miles Cheong chose to include. It is about Minecraft as a secret Christian game meant to sucker the larger player base in to the word of the Lord. Now a Christian reading of Minecraft would be interesting in it’s own right. Criticism is as much as what you read into a game as it is what the game is about. I can understand some of the insight as legitimate, but some of it is just bat shit like the Alpha in Minecraft Alpha as a reference to Jesus being the Alpha and the Omega, when really it’s a software term for working first draft and as soon as Notch fixes enough bugs and programs enough features in will become Minecraft Beta anyway. Or the outrageous nudge nudge wink wink he gives Notch for secretly putting all this Christian stuff in to subtly win people over. The thing about readings is you can support most things. If I wanted I could say and support the exact opposite and given that he lives in Sweden, a country with a history towards Christianity and I could make a case, as stupid as it is. Also, this isn’t a joke post I looked at some of the rest of the site and the guy is as serious as they come.

I wouldn’t have included it, but Ian did. What does that say? We who write TWIVGB have a lot of power over the many, many people who read it for the articles. As much as I hate it, we are the gatekeepers. Our writing not only determines what posts get included, but also helps how many hits it gets. Which posts do you think get the most hits? The ones with quotes. I know this because one week I had three posts in TWIVGB all about inFamous. One got a quote. Guess which post got three times as many hits and the others. The size of the link also effects how many people click on it. A link that is a sentence is more likely to get clicked than one that is a single word. Of course, even I answer to people when it comes to TWIVGB. I have gatekeepers myself. What I write still has to be confirmed by an editor. I assume they read it first. Plus, like I said Critical-Distance is the small fry of the three places TWIVGB gets posted to. GameSetWatch and Gamasutra where most people get it from go through an editing process of their own. On one occasion my slightly snarky comment got cut out and another my editorializing went through as is, so I don’t know. There is nothing we can really do about this. A human being is still writing TWIVGB and these human beings have opinions. All I can do is be open.

I wrote TWIVGB, I rejected suggestions and I have explained myself satisfactorily, I hope. I don’t want to wish I kept my mouth shut. I leave the final word to Ben Abraham, the editor I answer to.

It’s a hard line to walk though. Between being comprehensive and also discriminating in linking to really quality stuff. Anyway, I need to go get ready.

countdown to zero divx online

One final note: I know what it’s like seeing one’s name recognized for the work you’ve done, and what a thrill it is to see something you’ve written linked like that even in something as small as TWIVGB. So please take credit for your work. Don’t make me hunt into the deepest reaches of your site for a name or try the Purloined Letter gambit and hide it in plain sight, but disguised. Also, I realize this might be an issue, but I like to know the author’s gender, so I’m not that guy, the guy who sees Sam and writes ‘he’ when the full name is Samantha. I don’t want to be that asshole.

For those of you who do not follow my twitter feed, the documentaries in question are:
-Maxed Out
-Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
-Food, Inc.
-Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Each of these films at some point spotlight companies looking out for their profit margins to the detriment of their customers and employees. One of them pointed out, I think it was Food, Inc., that companies make these decisions because their decisions do not affect anyone making them. Sometimes it is insidious and one has to wonder why anyone could make these choices. Sometimes it’s about unintended consequences, such as rampant lethal bacteria in our food due to an effort to sanitize the animals by overusing antibiotics.

I’m not going to lecture or inform, the movies above to a good enough job covering their subjects without my input. I do want to point out the correlations corporate decisions and in game ones. Neither affects the decision maker. Corporate executives aren’t affected, because they exist in a whole other world to those they affect and gamers, because they can simply reload a save. Many others have already talked about death as a non-consequence and the many ways to get around the ludonarrative dissonance of it. But anytime something happened you don’t like you can go back to a previous save and rectify the decision.

Without permanence, consequence is taken out of the picture. Without consequence, action lacks meaning.

The Fable series is a perfect example of the lack of power decisions can have, because you alter the world’s perception of you from good to evil and back without having to reload. Any decision you make is non-lasting and can be erased by simply doing something else.

Heavy Rain has some interesting ideas on how to circumvent the notion by not ending the game at any point and allowing it to continue despite player choice or even death. The game continues and adjusts accordingly. Of course in both of these examples we are looking at story based interaction.

Failure in ludic games in fairly straight forward since the continued interaction in evident, but that can be the equivalent of the corporate bottom line. Anytime a game seeks to go beyond the goal of continued play it has difficulty in creating meaningful consequences that either have an effect or aren’t infuriating enough for the player to turn off the game.

I thought it was an interesting fact that corporate executives and gamers would have this in common. I think the fact that we don’t have a solution to either one is telling about our view on consequence and responsibility. Our mentality is: if it doesn’t affect me, it doesn’t matter.

Brutal Legend

I wanted this game ever since I first heard about it, when I was looking up what Tim Shafer’s next game was going to be. When I heard the concept all I could think to say was: ROCK ON! There has been a lot of criticism directed at the game, though to be fair it would be better directed at the marketing. Despite that and a few control issues the game is awesome. Of course I am a metal head so that may explain some part of my excitement and love for this game. I love driving around looking at the scenery and listening to the music. You can feel the creativity just ooze from the title. Everything about the game is epic and the Tim Shafer humor doesn’t hurt it either. No game since the original God of War has me leaping up in victory like a Viking warrior. Any game with that can do that purely by its pathos is a winner in my book.

Dragon Age: Origins

I’ve been called biased towards this title, because of my ungodly love for Baldur’s Gate, but honestly I wasn’t expecting the second coming with this title. I think I kept my expectations well within reason for Dragon Age. I knew it was going to be another generic fantasy setting and the plot was going to involve saving the world from some evil demonic creatures. But in a way that’s good, because it means they could really nail the details without having to explain the elves, dwarves and the rest from scratch. I haven’t finished the game. It’s long and I haven’t had the time needed for it, but from what I have played of it Dragon Age has some of the greatest storytelling of any game I’ve played. It sucks you into a world and I think may be the first game where I decided roleplaying was a higher priority than making sure I chose an optimal dialogue option or armor. In fact I got rid of armor that hindered my enjoyment of playing my character.

Flower

Sublime is a word that gets thrown around a lot when talking about Flower. But more than anything else, something I had forgotten until I booted it up the other day, it’s a peaceful game. The lovely serenity that permeates the entire experience also sinks into you while playing. It’s an effort of simplicity with controls that even my dad could figure out on the modern Dualshock. The metanarrative of naturalism and dreams somehow meld into the nature of the game and are a reminder of our own dreams and desires.  It also represents the concept that maybe we all need to slow down a little. It’s one of the few games that just make me feel peaceful. The game may be short and can be beaten in three hours or so, but if you did, you’ve missed the point.

Small Worlds

Never heard of it, check it out. It’s a game that will take you at most 20 minutes to play, but after I finished it I immediately refreshed and played again. I hesitated putting it among my best games of the year, because it was a quick flash game for a competition and debated whether or not its seemingly insubstantiality made it worthy of being a contender. Then I remember that a game is a game and it came out between Jan 1st and Dec 31st of this year. The fact that it makes me question myself given its humble origins and that it made my top 5 says something about the game. Two weeks after playing it, I went and played it again. There’s barely a narrative and no characters, yet somehow it elated me, confused me, cooed me and chilled me to the bone. From the basic idea of exploration came a game that said more than any number of space marines could hope to say.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Again I have to warn all about my potential bias towards this title. I loved the first one and love pulp adventure. I’ve taken classes on the genres and have studied the style. So my love of Uncharted 2 is no mystery. It puts you into the shoes of an adventurer in the vein of Indiana Jones and Flash Gordon on a quest of riches, greed, villainy and the extra-natural. The action set pieces are wonderful and the scope of the game so grand you can’t help but feel like you are on a wild ride. And despite what anyone says, it is well written and well voice acted. Yes it’s not Shakespeare, Faulkner or The Godfather, but then it’s not trying to be. It’s about sending you on an adventure and having a rip-roaring time along the way.

And the winner is:

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Dragon Age: Origins