Revisions #1

I’m beginning now to use this blog as a temporary holding place for future content on a new site. I will be working through it bit by bit to revise and update as necessary the stuff I’ve written so that it is either deleted if necessary, or revised as appropriate to reflect a more complete (though still much yet unfinished) theoretical background that I’ve acquired since starting the blog.

The about page has been deleted — nothing of value there.

The scoring system has been updated to include two extra ratings: lol and LOL, both sub-zero scores for games not worth seriously reviewing (unless you have to, as is sometimes the case), such as student games, etc.

The review policy has been changed a bit to make more sense.

My first review, for Call of Duty: Black Ops, has been completely re-written. My reviews back then were too short and my writing suffered some severe inhibitions that are beginning now to disappear. My theoretical framework has also moved around, which means that scores will have to shift.

The reason for all this is that a recent comment has apparently taken my site stats from 15 page views on August 3 to over 500 on August 4. Kind of embarrassing for so many people to see old trash laying around my room. More revisions and deletions to come.

On game reviewing in general

Screw what I said in the last post. (And you know what, screw what I said about art and games too.)

I’ve changed my mind about exactly what I want to do with this experiment. I’m starting to sympathize with what George Orwell said in “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”: “The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews — 1,000 words is a bare minimum — to the few that seem to matter.”

Oh, yes, yes yes yes. And how applicable this is to the realm of videogames. Every major new game gets its new rounds of game reviews from the corporate sites — although at least they’re smart enough to ignore the usual shovelware that gets released daily by student developers posing as real developers. But they’re not smart enough to ignore most games in general, and only pay attention to the ones that “seem to matter.”

A note on that last phrase: it does not matter whether a game really matters or not – only whether it seems to matter to most people, necessitating a review by an expert to tell you whether it really does or not.

But I have other reasons for changing my mind (as I have done many times in the past). I’m not knowledgeable enough of most genres (you’ll notice I review first-person shooters almost exclusively), and I don’t want to further clutter the Internet with the irrelevant ramblings of an uneducated peasant. Of course, that’s why I play tons of different types of games, but see the thing is that not only are some games better than others, but some entire genres are better than others.

The other problem is that games are a very special discipline. To be a good critic of anything requires a broad knowledge of the world and a certain wisdom about it. (And good writings skills, etc.) But as artforms become more complex, so must the skills of the reviewer increase. A critic of books does not need as much specialized knowledge as a critic of film — and that is why film critics tend to be so much more shoddy than book critics. Knowledge of books is easier to acquire than knowledge of film, so the average Joe is less equipped to review films. And with the higher relative popularity of film, thus follows the flooding of the Internet with uneducated ramblings about film, and so on and so forth.

The requisite knowledge for reviewing videogames is immeasurably higher than the requisite knowledge for reviewing books, theater, painting, sculpture, film, etc., because videogames are immeasurably more complex than any of those artforms. With videogames’ extremely high popularity, especially with the crowd of people who hang out on the Internet, there is then an even greater flood of idiots taking a dump all over the Internet with their insane shrieking about this videogame and that one. And that is why videogame criticism is worse than the critical fields for all other artforms put together. (There is also the videogame journalism racket that videogamers have to deal with, which doesn’t infect the other critical fields quite as effectively.)

All of this means that the only people who should be offering critical opinion on individual videogames (or books, film, theater, etc. etc.) are people who are, at minimum, absolute experts on the genre. Beyond genre expertise, there is another factor that must be taken into consideration for videogames (and not so much for other artforms): since every game can be completely mechanically different, the amount of time that must be spent with the game before offering a review is directly proportional to the complexity of the game. This is different from, say, books, which are all operated with the same mechanic: read. Or with movies or plays: watch and listen. Or with paintings: look. With videogames, the mechanics can only be encompassed by the word respond, which can take any number of forms.

That is why I don’t read most videogame criticism, generally. There is no way, with limited time constraints, that videogame critics can acquire the hardcore expertise of highly complex games, enough to review them properly. There is also the problem of bugs, in that very few games are as bug-free at release as they are a year later. (It is generally good policy, anyway, for a videogame critic to take in good faith that a game’s release-day bugs will be ironed out in time.) But some mechanics never get fixed because they are part of the game, but they are so deep into the game that only the hardcore will have played the games enough to know about them. I speak, of course, only of high-complexity games, unlike generic corridor shooters, for instance.

Hopefully that explains why user reviews from evidently ultra-hardcore gamers are the very best videogame reviews, despite being generally poorly written. Only they have the same level of expertise as, say, a highly educated book critic. Not the laymen who get hired by IGN, GameStop, etc., to write the corporate reviews. And certainly not the buffoons who start blogs (like this one) to review games they know nothing about.

Back to the genre problem. Fact: some genres just suck, like “JRPGs.” There is no reason whatsoever for a good critic to review every single “JRPG” that comes out — not even the major, big-budget releases. It would be sufficient for him to simply offer a giant middle-finger to the entire genre, except occasionally when a “JRPG” comes along that “seems to matter” a great deal.

Why review every game? Sometimes even screenshots are sufficient to tell you that a game will be horrible. We have a certain amount of instinct — we can sometimes tell when a game’s aesthetic just doesn’t work regardless of its mechanical operation. Nobody needs a review for a game that everyone already knows is terrible. In fact, I would say there are only two types of games we usually need reviews for: games which everyone assumes are really good, but are actually quite terrible, such as Limbo (LOL), or (rarely) reviews for really good games that everyone would assume are horrible, such as Drakensang: The River of Time. There may also be the occasional exceptional review for games that are very good, but shouldn’t be good in theory, and yet they really are good, and as an example for this I will offer Frozen Synapse. So that brings our total to three types of game reviews, with the third being ultra-rare since most “indie” games are absolutely nothing like Frozen Synapse.

Granted, my assessments of Drakensang and Frozen are, apart from playing them, based partially on the assessments of hardcore gamers. That brings me to my new goal — to reinvent the whole idea of game reviews altogether. Not with any naive goal of becoming famous, or anything like that, since I know that all but a few will ever read my material, but simply for the sake of offering a slightly better alternative to what’s already out there.

Now, you might have noticed that I seem to have a little Kierkegaard in me. (Not Søren.) Sort of, but not really. I have read his major material. Prior to ever coming in contact with his site, my opinions on most games were very similar to his. After coming into contact with it, they did not change very much — they just became more pronounced (less moderate — which is an effect he seems to have on a lot of people). What did change was my understanding of why certain games suck, and why people pretend they don’t suck. The George Orwell essay I referenced earlier was something I read on his site — but that’s Orwell influencing me, not so much Kierkegaard apart from his choice to post it. Kierkegaard’s videogame reviews are very old-fashioned. Not my style. But his Genealogy is a work of genius. Even though my taste in games didn’t change much from reading his material (since much of what he says about casual vs. hardcore gaming is quite obvious to people who aren’t complete idiots), his “Genealogy” absolutely changed my life with regard to the earlier artforms. Now I have a legit reason when asked why I hate Modern “Art.” It isn’t just that it’s ugly to me, it’s that its inability to give pleasure is exactly what defines it as bad. That essay tore off my hipster society-imposed guilt in hating Modern “Art,” so now I can just hate it happily! And when the hipsters deride me, I can just hate them too — and feel good about it!

That brings me to my intentions for the future. I will never be a videogame critic, whether niche or as a job, nor will I continue to run this blog as I was before. What I am interested in is a website that collects the views and judgments of hardcore genre experts on various games of today and, in some cases, of yesterday. “Various” as in a few – only those that “seem to matter.” Screw the “indie” scene, the “art” games, or what I generally call student games and antigames respectively. A five-star rating scale does not go low enough to describe these games. They are almost without exception below the level of zero stars, hence the need for extra sub-zero ratings to describe them, such as “lol” for a game like HOARD (as in, not even worth looking at the screenshots for it, such is its level of shovelware) or “LOL” for games like Flower, that are both extremely bad and extremely evil, if you get what I mean by that. (And, just to be clear, zero stars as distinguished from “lol” or “LOL” would therefore belong to a game like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 singleplayer or multiplayer, since it is so bad, i.e. primitive, compared to the state of first-person shooters of 2009 that it warrants the lowest possible rating).

Whether or not I can pull off making this website, I will have to see. My life is more important than any of this so screw it all if it gets in the way of living.

April update

I have been seriously thinking about what I want to do with this website and have drawn some conclusions:

1. I am enjoying it and wish to continue. It started as an experiment and will continue as such.
2. Except for games I’ve already pre-ordered (Darkspore, mostly), I am not able to buy any more games for a while. I’m spent for now and have about 200 games I need to get through (lol). Many of them are classics that will allow me to knowledgeably review modern games later on.
3. I don’t think I want to be a game critic for a living because I think what I want to do (as will be explained in the next points) would stand opposed to my goals, which by their nature, are “niche” and require the spirit of the independent.
4. I am extremely dissatisfied with my own reviews, and in particular, my approach to writing them. I am even more dissatisfied with game reviews in general, in their current state. I want to use this website to develop a comprehensive system for writing high-quality reviews, and my path to achieving that goal will be to refine my own reviews. They are my guinea pigs. I will probably continue to revise them obsessively.
5. Most of all I am dissatisfied with genre classifications. Most of the reviews I don’t like (both my own and from other sites) come down to problems with genre – for example, not understanding that a particular game isn’t an RPG and therefore shouldn’t be judged by the same criteria one would use to judge an RPG. My long- (LONG-) term goal is to develop a consistent, scalable, and mostly complete genre classification that allows me to write better reviews.

I am probably going to be reviewing mostly old games from now on, with only the very occasional review of a new game. I plan on reviewing Homefront, Crysis 2, and Hoard, and also do some one-minute reviews of unimportant titles like Battle: Los Angeles (lol).

Dinner Date Review

Score:

What is it? Indie that uses a dinner date scenario to experiment with a different kind of user interaction that relegates the player to being the avatar’s subconscious

Target audience: People who have asked someone out and been stood up are probably the best candidates for Dinner Date. Gamers should never, ever play it, since now they’ll never feel confident enough to ask someone out.

Fulfillment of target audience’s demands: Good

Shelf-life for me as target audience: Half an hour

What works: The various nervous tics you are given control of transition smoothly to and from other actions. Voice acting is fine.

What doesn’t work: Dull and washed out aesthetic that looks like an old photograph, when looking like an old photograph makes no sense in context; the actions you are able to take are repetitive due to a lack of randomness (e.g. same piece of magically-reappearing bread); controls are horrible and I want to be able to flicker the avatar’s eyes back and forth with the mouse.

„Dinner Date” — which I will from now on simply refer to as Dinner Date — is not an art game as I may have previously attested elsewhere. I have just attempted a second play-through and realized after prematurely quitting out of boredom that Dinner Date is neither art nor a game, but simply an experiment in user interaction, a preliminary fulfillment of Jeroen Stout’s essay calling for more research on the subject matter.

The need for self-censure

I have made one major deletion of a post and one major edit to a post. I deleted “Why Spore was the most important game of the decade” because the technological marvel of the game’s user-generated content system is no longer enough to convince me of that statement, considering that it was not pushing anything forward, but was merely copying what was already being done with Web 2.0 technologies. While I do think that future games need to look at how Spore utilized the creativity of its players, I don’t think its potential impact is broad enough to cover games as a whole.

I also had to edit a sentence in my Bulletstorm review to make it less sweeping, as I gave someone a very poor impression of what I meant when I said that first-person shooter innovation needs to be transferable to multiplayer. What I meant of course was the purely mechanical aspects — the aspects that define it as a first-person shooter as opposed to other elements of the game’s design. Bulletstorm‘s Skillshot+leash system is just a gimmick to get people to waste $60 on a short game. It cannot reasonably be taken forward into other games except for a sequel. It’s dead-end innovation that won’t do anything for the first-person shooter genre. That’s what I’m saying.

As I develop my craft of writing reviews I hope I will need to do this less and less. But in the meantime, I feel it’s important to communicate (to my non-existent audience) that as I try to increase the scope and value of my reviews, I’m not sacrificing truth.

Bulletstorm Review

Score:

What is it? Testosterone-filled shooter in mostly sci-fi urban environments with unique Skillshot system

Target audience: Mainstream shooter fans

Fulfillment of target audience’s demands: What you see is what you get.

Singleplayer: Average-length singleplayer campaign consisting of standard story with standard characters. Echoes gamemode lets players replay sections of the singleplayer games to get higher points.

Multiplayer: Co-op against waves of freaks. No player-versus-player mode.

Shelf-life for me as target audience: If I were a mainstream shooter fan I would be playing this for about a week. Singleplayer campaign is unacceptably short as usual, although it felt long since I didn’t like it. Multiplayer offers almost no replay value after a couple days.

What works: Bulletstorm works on a technical level in every way. Great visuals (although I’m getting tired of the Unreal engine); great sound; variety of locales; interesting weaponry.

What doesn’t work: Seventh-grade humor isn’t funny anymore; aesthetic style appeals to crowds younger than the “mature” ESRB rating; shockingly incompetent console-geared menu system that requires you to use the task manager to kill the inaptly named “ShippingPC-StormGame.exe” (i.e. the Bulletstorm process — what the hell?) if your Games for Windows LIVE software isn’t up-to-date; all-too-familiar-sounding voice acting; boring singleplayer campaign and abysmal multiplayer.

I am almost certain that Bulletstorm is a parody of Modern Warfare 2. Yes, the Bulletstorm development team created an explicit parody called Duty Calls. But I believe that they didn’t stop there. Modern Warfare 2 in multiple scenarios includes “click LMB” and “click RMB” instructions to tell the in-game character’s respective hands to move. Bulletstorm borrows those unsatisfying moments and takes stupid to the extreme by rewarding you points for clicking quicker (someone shoot me). Bulletstorm and Modern Warfare 2 both involve rogue operatives taking revenge on a wayward general. Both, in fact, take their own plots way too seriously in light of the silliness of the rest of the game. Both have a scene, towards the end, of the player running disinterestedly through an area of two groups shooting at each other, later coming to a scene around the end of the player hazily crawling on the ground as the wayward general fights your ally. Both attempt to be offensive to appeal to hip attitudes.

Fox News tries to start a Bulletstorm

Nothing more needs to be said on the facts of this amusing frenzy of journalistic arm-wrestling, as you can read about it yourself.

Instead what I want to add is that all news sources can be assumed, by default, to have some kind of focus or level of acceptable “bias.” Unless every single fact and angle in the universe is reported, a news source must by necessity have the perceived bias of reporting on the details that they choose to focus on. Some are more oriented towards entertainment news, others towards international affairs, and others towards the internal happenings of a region.

I read Al Jazeera for international affairs, knowing of course that this is a Middle Eastern publication and does not have an American background. So the bias I’m used to in American sources isn’t there, and sometimes it’s a little unsettling. However I do not benefit from only reading sources that appeal to my background. I would never learn anything that way.

American news sources are biased towards an American focus — how could it be any other way? And liberals are going to want to report on stories appealing to them, and conservatives the same way. For them to attempt to cover their story from every possible angle would be an impossible and inefficient task. Nothing would ever get reported. It’s better to accept a reasonable level of bias and utilize multiple news outlets than to idolize one single news source as the end-all-be-all.

The main article at Fox News being discussed isn’t a biased article; it’s merely infused with personal opinion in a very explicit way. It has a viewpoint, and unless I’m missing something, it doesn’t pretend to be neutral. The problem isn’t that Fox News is biased. The problem is that it’s a terrible news source with second-rate journalists.

Now, about that game. We’ve all experienced embarrassingly unnecessary violence, sexuality, and cursing in games. Truly, none of that is new to us, not even to children, and Bulletstorm simply adds its name onto that list. Children shouldn’t avoid Bulletstorm because of the violence and curse words. Children should avoid Bulletstorm because Bulletstorm is dumb.

Darkspore beta impressions

I said on my about page that I don’t do previews of games, but what the heck. I played the Darkspore closed beta on Friday night and Saturday night and need something to write about before the storm of late February through March, where there will be at least 7 or 8 games that I want to review all packed into a very tight space.

I should give you a little background of where I’m coming from. Let me be completely honest and say that I played Diablo II for 45 minutes a few months ago and hated it. It was a clickfest  that used randomly-dropped loot as a hook for creating an addiction. Also, I’m someone who needs my brain to be constantly stimulated, and hack-and-slash dungeon crawlers in general make me feel like I have to stop thinking in order to play them.

Then Magicka came along like a crusader in shining bathrobes, blasting other isometric action games out of the water and showing me that fun can be had in this type of game under the right circumstances.

It also had the side-effect of softening my feelings towards action RPGs in general. I went into the Darkspore beta a little apprehensive about how they were going to handle it, but I’m pleased to report that I actually like it.

Games? As art? I’m tired of this debate.

“Do you think you could make me see beauty in that picture?” asked Ruskin’s attorney John Holker.

Painter James McNeill Whistler replied, “No … I fear it would be as impossible as for the musician to pour his notes into the ear of a deaf man.”

"I have never seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected a coxcomb to ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." --John Ruskin

That debate that took place in court in 1878 might have been as important to the art world of late Victorian Britain as today’s debate over whether games can be art.

Let me just clarify something. The title of the blog post is a lie. I am obsessed with whether or not games can be art. But instead my post’s title reflects what I think most people are feeling–that it’s time for the debate to come to an end.

In 1875 painter James McNeill Whistler created the Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. John Ruskin, England’s most important art critic, hated it and wrote a vicious review of Whistler’s work in 1877. Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, resulting in the courtroom exchange quoted above.

That debate was, like this one, about the definition of art. The critic Ruskin felt that art had to promote moral truth in addition to being beautiful. On the other end, Whistler felt that art exists for itself and serves no utility to a society.

Whether or not games can be art is important, because art is one of the defining features of a civilization. If we’re in the age of a new art form, we can be certain that it will never die out and that future generations will feel a massive impact from the seemingly arbitrary advances made by today’s game developers.

I cannot possibly hope to put a stop to this debate, especially since no one in the universe reads my blog. But having been an artist of the classical music variety, and now a gamer, I feel like I ought to do my best to put together a comprehensive theory of games as art that is satisfying both to those who know what games are and to those who know what art is.

Magicka Review

Score:

What is it? Satiric isometric action with skill-based spell-conjuring; almost zero traditional CRPG elements.

Target audience: Basically everyone from casual to hardcore, unless you don’t like prancing around the forest in bathrobes

Fulfillment of target audience’s demands: Good, after bugfixing

Singleplayer: Exactly the same as the co-op adventure and challenge modes; therefore, harder.

Multiplayer: All modes in this game are co-op, none PvP, although nothing in the game will stop you from selecting an empty area in the adventure mode and duking it out with friends using your own rules. Modes are adventure and challenge. Challenge mode consists of waves of enemies.

Shelf-life for me as target audience: About two weeks on adventure mode, although this might have been shortened if it hadn’t been buggy on release. A few days attempting challenge mode, although if I really wanted to go hardcore with this I could spend weeks.

What works: The humor, visuals, spell-conjuring mechanics, and chaotic fun.

What doesn’t work: Enemies fall too easily to a handful of ultra-powerful spells.

I really did not want to like Magicka when I first saw the screenshots. I generally don’t like the idea of the arbitrary mechanics that traditional (stat-heavy) CRPG game developers use to get people addicted to games, like variable ratio contingencies — i.e. random loot that keeps you coming back for more loot so that you can kill enemies to get more loot, etc. Then when I saw what it really was, I loved it.