Second Quest

Reddit, Kotaku, and Gabe Newell’s Beard

Yesterday, Kotaku Editor-in-Chief Stephen Totilo fired up his computer, sat down, and wrote a response to a Reddit discussion, a response  which was almost so pathetically earnest as to be endearingly sad.

Reddit, Totilo asserted, was being unfair to Kotaku. That Kotaku wasn’t getting its due. Totilo pointed out a number of recent articles that he felt were of exceptionally high-quality. He was a bit put out that Reddit was concentrating on mistakes and not acknowledging any successes.

During the less-than-two-months that Totilo has been Editor-in-Chief, a lot of questionable decisions have been made–programming blocks, an odd change to reviews, Kotaku Core. This post, which was all-but-guaranteed to make its way to a broader audience, is just another step in Totilo’s pattern of poor choices. It feels almost like walking right up to the jocks’ table in high school and asking them, reasonably, to stop making fun of you. It wasn’t a good idea when I tried that in 1998 and it isn’t a good idea for Totilo now. It goes beyond the fact that Reddit already has no respect for the site–tactics like this come across as fairly unprofessional and not a little immature.

How We Review Fighting Games: Soulcalibur V

The videogame culture has become so obsessed with the storytelling elements of games that what it seeks out to analyze no longer falls under the expansive umbrella that is videogames. This longing for story to drive the gameplay has trickled over into one genre where videogame stories are traditionally irrelevant and cursory elements — the fighting genre. As videogame journalists and critics, we should strive to review videogames based on the expectations of the genre. We wouldn’t, for instance, review a puzzle game with the same criticisms we would levy against an MMORPG. So why then do we review games in the fighting genre as if they are anything other than fighting games? There’s a fragmentation at play and a flawed genre-bending mentality that affects the way fighting games are reviewed.

As far as storytelling in its traditional narrative function is concerned, developers of fighting games do the player an injustice by minimizing the core focus of the fighting genre with any narrative focused too outwardly from the ludic aspects of the game. It’s not necessarily the developers fault, but rather the diverse group of videogame players that make up the market today. Though, when we market to everyone, we market to no one. It’s an adage that seems to be lost on all sides of the fighting genre.

Programming Blockheads

For those of us who follow such things, Kotaku has been very interesting since Stephen Totilo became the Editor in Chief in January. There have been a series of changes which seem designed towards changing the focus of the site and downplaying specialty content.

One of the biggest criticisms people launch at Kotaku is its continued publication of stories that are only tangentially related to videogames. One of the biggest targets is Brian Ashcraft, whose articles are not-always-incorrectly stereotyped as being inappropriately obssed with Japanese schoolgirls (because most videogames come from Japan), but Kotaku also publishes things such as reviews of comics (because both games and comics are enjoyed by geeks) and crime reports (because the criminal in question stole an XBox game or something). Not all of the stories are as egregious as my favorite article of all time–Columbia School of Journalism Graduate Owen Good’s thoughts on credit card ownership–but the connections to the videogame world are tenuous at best, and both sides of the debate are fairly vehement. Kotaku built a community around a space where geeky interests can flourish, but those panty shots are not only alienating to people who simply want to get screenshots of upcoming videogames, but they don’t really make any strides towards shedding the stereotype of gamers as creepy basement dwellers.

How Kotaku Will Change Nothing

If there’s one acronym that sets my teeth on edge, it’s TL;DR.

You know what it makes me think of? That kid from high school, you know the one I’m talking about, he went to your school too. He was supremely unintelligent, ugly, unpleasant to be around but inexplicably popular. He’d put no effort into his schoolwork, convinced as he was that he’d be a football star when he grew up. Reading is boring, he’d say–something you took as almost a personal affront, given that you always had your nose in a book growing up, given that you were writing your first tentative short stories and giving serious thought to becoming a writer when you grew up. Whenever I see TL;DR, I picture this kid, staring, slack-jawed, at anything more than a sentence or two long, scratching his head. When I go into the comments of a Kotaku or a Destructoid, I picture a clone army of this kid, all of them batting at their keyboards in clumsy unison, calling me a fag.

Re: “RE: ‘”Your Story Sucks” Sucks’”

In response to my post “‘Your Story Sucks’ Sucks“, which was itself a response to his post “Your Story Sucks“, Jason Schreier says the following, in an article called “RE: ‘”Your Story Sucks” Sucks’“:

I’m advocating…the analysis of narrative using more critical language. Goodness claims that I’m veering too far into the land of optimism, calling my piece “a masterpiece of complacency,” but I would argue quite the opposite. My point is that we should be fighting for harsher criticism than “this is good” or “this is bad.” Those are not the questions we should be asking.

Schreier then goes on to suggest some possible questions–such as how the setting and theme reflect each other, how the game integrates interactivity into its story sequences, how well character motivations are drawn–that critics and reviewers can ask when evaluating a game’s narrative. These questions, and others like them, offer a good starting point for how to begin to develop deeper criticism of games.

Schreier is calling, ultimately, for a more qualified criticism, and I agree with him. The purpose of reviews vs. criticism is too complex of a subject to get into here, but I often get the sense that reviews lean towards absolutes. That’s what readers seem to want–on some sites, any opinion the reader disagrees with gets called out as bias, along with an exhortation for the writer to be more “objective”. The very concept of scoring games is itself a problem. We may want deeper and more insightful criticism, but we’re only paying lip service to that concept if we then distill the review into a number at the end.

Because that evaluative number ends up becoming the focal point. It–and maybe two representative sentences–becomes what people see on Metacritic. It–and not the reasons behind it–becomes the insult discussed on forums. Score numbers imply objectivity, that you can make that blanket statement about whether or not a game sucks–after all, a game that’s scored a 5 sucks compared to a perfect 10, does it not?

I hated The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, but I was more dismayed by the fact that most of the reviews I read of the game were so content-free. They spoke in absolutes–praised the game without saying much more than, “Welp, it’s a Zelda game, and those are always awesome.” That they were praising the game–and its storyline–as unqualifiedly Good was alienating–instead of pointing out something I missed, the reviews simply made me feel like I was missing some kind of in-joke. Michael Abbot’s post, “To dream again” was a much more interesting take–he evalutated the game’s appeal to a die-hard Zelda fan. While it didn’t change my opinion of the game, it helped me to at least understand why someone would enjoy playing it.

And his piece does not score the game. What kind of score could you even give? He explicitly states that the game is “Not the best game and certainly not the most innovative, but nevertheless the game that delighted me more than any other.” If you’re looking at the game in isolation, you almost have to give it a low score–but that ignores the Zelda fan who’s playing the newest installment of a series which never fails to speak to them. If you talk about the game as one which soothes your “yearn[ing] for the next great adventure,” then you might give it a perfect score–but that ignores those who simply don’t enjoy the Zelda experience. And so we can only engage with the critique–and that critique is able to be much more nuanced than it would if it were looking at a game as if it were–in Schreier’s terms–”a phone or a set of steak knives”.

So in that regard I agree–as critics, we can’t just go for a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. We should strive towards a more nuanced analysis. At the same time, criticism should have an evaluative element to it. As long as we’re able to explain our opinion, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a critic to say that a game’s story sucks.

“Your Story Sucks” Sucks

The more I play and write about videogames, the less I find myself interested in videogame narrative. I play games to play, not to watch a little movie. I also find myself less and less interested in the narratives themselves. It’s really rare that I’ll find a game which speaks to something deeper, more human–rare that I’ll find a game which I find applicable to my life. Final Fantasy‘s melodramatic bombast, The Legend of Zelda‘s desperate attempts to create artificial importance to its own cliched myth, The Elder Scrolls’s dry and dull fantasy novel approach set in a world whose characters never come alive well enough to make us care for them–I find these to be the rule rather than the exception. For every Bioshock, for every Bastion, for every Mass Effect–in short, for every well-written game that creates a world we enjoy spending time in, there’s a dozen games whose storyline is an afterthought, one which grabs the player’s head and forces them to watch a cutscene that’s often nowhere near as compelling as the designers think it is.