Ug-g-gg-ghhhh.
"This is why we can't have nice things..."
One:
"Criticism is just a subjective opinion..."
No, no, for fuck's sake, no, for now and all time. If all a critic has to offer is a subjective opinion, they should lose their goddamn job.
Go to metacritic and look at an assortment of reviews. There will be a spread, but there will also be a lot of agreement, especially at the top and the bottom. Is this because of a universal conspiracy between game critics and publishers? No, it's because a lot of things, critics can agree on. If a game spreads its functions over twelve buttons when it only needed four. If the graphics look like they were shot through a camera lens coated in half an inch of Vaseline. If the save system squanders the player's time and effort. If the user interface is confusing and hides or mispresents important information.
...If the game fails to integrate features that have become standard in its genre. If its muddy textures would have been acceptable a generation before, but are inexcusable in a machine with modern levels of memory and processing power. If it's principal characters are going through the motions in a tired old story that has been done a thousand times before.
The latter sort of thing is because a critic ought to be able to give an informed opinion- because that's part of the reason you're going to a critic and not your friend Joe in the first place. The former is because certain things are, if not objective matters, at least pretty close. Objectivity and subjectivity are not absolutes. Maybe one critic has monkey-hands on their feet and has no problem at all with the intricacies of that gratuitious twelve-button interface, but the others will tell you otherwise.
A critic's "opinion" should matter; it should have some weight. If it doesn't, they should get out of the business.
Which brings us to:
Two:
Criticism is not, and should not be, immune to criticism itself.
Obligatory:
Do not threaten people you don't like. Do not do violence to people who disagree with you. In fact, try to resist the temptation to go straight for the ad hominem attack, kthanx?
That said? (Yeah, deal.)
Some criticism is narrow, ill-informed, misguided, and/or just plain irresponsible. Most of the criticism that insists that a character is representative of any and all people who share their characteristics, for a start, or that anything a protagonist does must be something the author explicitly approves. (Go read Gavia Baker-Whitelaw's critique of the "misogynist" Guardians of the Galaxy for a shining example. Just don't threaten or harass her about it, please.)
Criticism is weighted more than "just someone's opinion"; others use criticism to shape their opinion of where they'll spend their money and how the discussion will be shaped when they talk about it. Publishers use it to decide what they'll publish next time, what is worth the trouble, what their brand will be associated with. People who have never played "Grand Theft Auto" will still presume to know that it's that game that made played by misogynists, or that game that made that kid shoot his grandmother.
And criticism can be wrong.
It's all but inevitable that a critic will give their own slant to something. Maybe they lost their virginity after seeing Interview With the Vampire and have given vampire movies a pass ever since. Maybe their little brother was killed by falling stack of casual games.
But a critic worth their salt will try to be aware of their subtle biases, to make their reader aware of them and account for them. And maybe even recuse themselves if they simply can't.
A good critic isn't trying to tell you whether they liked or didn't like something. They're giving you the information as to whether you will or won't like something.
If all their weight is on the parts of their review that are the most subjective, they've failed.
Three:
Negative reaction to criticism is not automatically a sign of insecurity or irrational fear.
How many people in this topic have referred to Bayonetta as "masturbatory material"?
Most critics are a bit less obviously critical of a game's players than implying they're buying a game to indulge in solitary sexual activity (with the attendant associations.) But in the current climate...? Maybe not so much. It borders on willful ignorance to suggest that there's always a clear division between suggesting that a game is misogynistic or racist and that those who appreciate it without taking a similar stance aren't also racist or misogynistic.
That ought to be as painfully, explicitly clear as "I don't condone violence towards those who disagree with me". But it's become all too common to suggest it's the job of the aggrieved to sort themselves out when a critic uses scattershot language in their criticism. "Oh, I didn't mean you. Or maybe I did! Maybe you're self-selecting for being someone I'm talking about by showing this insecurity."
When you've managed to create that sort of self-perpetuating circuit in your logic, congratulations: you've achieved a closed mind, and become worthless to anything resembling actual discussion.
Polygon's review of Bayonetta 2 is just one of many; it's currently running at 91 on Metacritic, and I completely agree that people calling for Nintendo to blacklist Polygon are going way off their hinges.
And yes, there is and should be room for different opinions, and people are free to loathe things I like, and speak out about them.
But maybe, just maybe, the people whose job it is to drip-feed us information so we can make informed choices should take their jobs seriously enough to bear their responsibility in mind when they're considering if, how, and when they're addressing their audience.
