The Apparent Anti-Intellectualism of Gamer Culture

[Supernova1138]

So what if Killscreen is only talking about narrative and themes? They've got so many other outlets that specialize in just-gameplay reviews and yet they keep insisting that all media outlets must review games the same way, and that its reviews should not be on Metacritic simply because they said so.

Killscreen's reviews really shouldn't be on Metacritic as Killscreen scores games entirely on their political views, and have pretty much outright stated in one of their articles that they are trying to use their review scores as a cudgel to force game developers to make games that adhere to Progressive political views. In other words they want game developers to make propaganda for the Progressive movement, and any developer who doesn't do that needs to be punished.

Killscreen's Progressive views are not universally shared amongst all gamers, at best there is a loud minority that supports Progressivism, a loud minority that vociferously opposes it, and a silent majority that doesn't care either way. If we're going to introduce politics into video game review scores and review score aggregation, there needs to be a much larger diversity in political thought in the gaming press.

As it stands right now, the mainstream gaming press is more or less 100% Progressive. If we were to have politicized review scores weighing in heavily on places like Metacritic, it's going to lead to a lot of self censorship from developers who will feel forced to remove anything that will offend Progressive sensibilities (which are notoriously fickle) in order to avoid getting negative reviews. The end result is we get a bunch of very bland games that are designed to not offend anybody, and ironically the only developers left who'd be able to take any risks in terms of theme or storytelling would be the big triple-A studios who have established franchises that will sell well even if the critics pan the game for political reasons.

Right now there is no opposite number to sites like Killscreen, nobody who would try to offer a counterpoint to their views in terms of mainstream games writing. As such, Killscreen really shouldn't be on Metacritic unless Metacritic can find a site that is willing to act as a counterbalance to Killscreen. There is room for deeper analysis in games regarding themes and narrative, but it shouldn't be done entirely through a Marxist/Feminist/Progressive lens at the exclusion of every other viewpoint.

I'd probably just avoid the whole mess and not bother putting a site that reviews games solely on political merits on Metacritic at all. As a score aggregator, it does seem rather odd to include a site that reviews games on entirely different merits compared to just about every other site that Metacritic aggregates. The next closest thing to Killscreen on Metacritic would probably be Polygon, and even they don't dedicate the entirety of their reviews to what part of the game offended them or what elements made the game politically disagreeable to them, their reviews also offer their opinions on gameplay and technical aspects of a traditional review.

 

[CaitSeith]

snip

There is also the detail that these articles appear in Metacritic. So from Metacritic perspective, it is a review. I think they do the same with movie articles of the same kind.

Imagine if you had a test about The Division, and your only study guide was that article. What could you tell me about the game?

Well, if that article is the only study guide, then that means the test expects me to talk about its similarities with the neo-liberal dogma. And if it expected me to talk about gameplay, graphics or mechanics; I'd call out the test creators for sending me the wrong article (and to you, I would say nothing; because only a fool would use only that article to make an opinion about the game).

 

[CaitSeith]

I was about to say

by their logic Lewis "Linkara" Lovhaug shouldn't have bothered to look for deeper themes in meaning in this Power Rangers retrospective ( http://atopthefourthwall.com/category/hopr/ ), or Jaymes "Captain Logan" Logan shouldn't have bothered to give the superhero movie genre any in-depth analysis ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up5yiowFDpQ&list=PLE6AD3F273B4DA8DE )

Well, there's ya problem. It's supposed to be a review, not an analysis, so it's expected from it to cover more than just a supposed "message" the game delivers...

But then i've checked a link underneath the article(don't know if it was there when you've made your post): https://killscreen.com/articles/note-about-our-reviews-policy/.
Basicly it explains in first paragraph that this site doesn't care about technical or, however weird that sounds, gameplay aspect of games in their "reviews". And although quotation marks are there to express my disagreement with their definition of a review, i think most people who complain in the comments have themselves to blame. Not sure if i'd agree their attitudes anti-intellectual, though.

It doesn't help that the "review" appears in Metacritic either. The people who frequent Metacritic probably are the ones with the least patience towards such analysis.

 

[Mechamorph]

The criticisms cited against the article in question are not anti-intellectual. They simply state the opinion that the reader did not particularly enjoy hearing about the reviewer's soapboxing where he promulgates his political views and castigates the developer's. Read the right way, the article could be seen as "I think the developer is guilty of a thoughtcrime and I would not be too upset if he is punished for it." I am not in the least bit surprised that many gamers are simply tired of polemics, I agree with the notion that the silent majority just do not care for it.

To address the concept that internet comments can somehow indicate an anti-intellectual bias in gaming culture, I have to respectfully disagree. Gaming is a medium and like any medium there is a very large variation in the consumer base. Gamers who primarily play 4X games are not necessarily the same sort of people who generally play FPS games. That is like saying that fans of Sidney Sheldon, Terry Prachett and Tom Clancy are all exactly the same sort of people because they all read books. People who read Twilight are the same as the people who read Game of Thrones by that measure. It is frankly intellectually dishonest, it is the equivalent of taking a youtube comment section on a pirated episode of South Park and then proclaiming that everyone who watches television has the intelligence of a brain-damaged rhesus monkey based upon that tiny sample size.

Let us distill the comments given to us in the OP as examples shall we?

1) What criteria exactly are you basing your review score on? Why do you think games have some sort of obligation to satisfy your political inclinations?

2) I am not interested in your politics but I am interested in learning more about the game.

3) I was expecting a review about a game and wound up reading about how the Division offends someone's political sensitivities. I am not happy about that fact.

4) This is a good political analysis of the underlying themes of the Division. However it only covers that particular subject and I wish that it would also cover the gameplay aspects which after all, is expected of something that purports to be a review.

These do not strike me as particularly anti-intellectual at all. If anything several comments praise the technical skills of the reviewer but complain about the article's contents. Just because games are supposed to be art, people cannot ask for such things or express criticism? If an art piece were reviewed solely on its merits as a statement against or for a political ideology but not on its technical merits, would that be a fair criticism? A review of a painting that says nothing of its brushwork, colour or perspective but does nothing but extol the subject of the painting is likely to be called out. Games are no different.

Edit:
Replying to post above by Supernova

As it stands right now, the mainstream gaming press is more or less 100% Progressive. If we were to have politicized review scores weighing in heavily on places like Metacritic, it's going to lead to a lot of self censorship from developers who will feel forced to remove anything that will offend Progressive sensibilities (which are notoriously fickle) in order to avoid getting negative reviews. The end result is we get a bunch of very bland games that are designed to not offend anybody, and ironically the only developers left who'd be able to take any risks in terms of theme or storytelling would be the big triple-A studios who have established franchises that will sell well even if the critics pan the game for political reasons.

I agree with Supernova's stance that political hit pieces and activism have no place masquerading as a review of any sort. However I disagree with the analysis of the consequences. If enough of such "reviews" cause aggregators like Metacritic to be unreliable then gamers will stop relying on them. Consumers are not stupid, they know a con job when they see one. All it will do is to shift the audience to other aggregator sites that do not allow for such shenanigans or to individual reviewers. The games industry in particular tends to be run with very little slack, one or two failed games are enough to sink a studio and a few are enough to kill a publisher. Overly catering to a vocal minority will lead to the shutdown of developers which ought to be enough to convince the rest that while the internet hate mob might be loud, it does not translate to sales. In fact it can translate to a very large loss in sales if a game is perceived to be overly preachy. After all the free market is in theory self-correcting.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

Save the soapboxing for opinion pieces.

As opposed to reviews?

Yes, as opposed to reviews.

And exactly what is the basis of a review if not the critic's opinion?

A basis maybe, but an analysis with the understanding that most everyone (interested in the subject) cares about how effective the creator made their work but far fewer care if the politics align with the reviewers.

Like I said in the part you cut out, talking about how well the story was done is one thing, going off about politics is another.

Right, you said " I feel like reviews like that should focus on how effectively it tells it's story rather than what the story is about. Are the characters compelling? Does the plot stay within it's own logic? Does the plot flow well?" but I don't see why reviewers should feel obligated to avoid discussing politics when politics are an important part of the game. If the politics ruined the game for the reviewer, it could ruin it for some of their readers as well, and I think that this is valuable information to have. Have you ever seen "GATE?" It's fun to watch fighter jets shooting down dragons, but I feel like I could have enjoyed this anime a whole lot more if not for its completely ridiculous politics. Politics can be just as much a factor in enjoying a piece of fiction as GATE's boring characters, awkward pandering fanservice, and boring one sided battles.

It's rare to have a work who's politics and themes aren't obvious from the description, and those can usually be discussed in a review with "The work is initially misleading". In other words, politics are something you should easily go in knowing and you shouldn't need a critic to tell you what your political opinion on a work should be.

 

[WhiteNachos]

Originally I had a much longer rant written about this but since brevity is the soul of wit I'll keep this s#!t short.

Why is it that Kilscreen.com can write a review critiquing The Division's problematic narrative

Way to keep things unbiased there. At any rate calling something problematic is just intellectually lazy in my opinion. It's a way to simply call something 'bad' while trying to sound sophisticated and in some cases without having to explain yourself.

( https://killscreen.com/articles/the-perverse-ideology-of-the-division/ ) and the resulting reaction is 80% s#!t like this (and yes those are all real comments):

So your score is reflective of nothing that has to do with the game play... Solid review, sad that you think that games and gaming industry need to make some sort of moral statement. Go back to reading books.

This review was nothing more than a way to state your political and moral views. Has nothing to do with the game. It's just a game and nothing more. Made for entertainment. This article is ridiculous.

Can we please have real gamers review games, versus failed english majors.

Can you actually review the gameplay and not comment on it as a philosophical piece? This is article is extremely articulate and direly misplaced. Rate the gameplay, not the ideology, after all, ideology =/= game mechanics or fun.

That last one is especially confounding in its idiocy given that the title of the Review is "The Perverse Ideology of The Division".

Which brings me to my point, is our culture anti-intellectual? I mean that's the only explanation I can think of for why the reaction to a review like this even exists.

I'll be honest I didn't read the entire review but judging from the comments and what I have skimmed the author is ONLY/mostly talking about the morality of the game. And the thing is not everyone cares about the story in games, at least not enough to base an entire review or buying decision on. And there are some people who do care about story, politics and morality but can enjoy a game that preaches things they disagree. I enjoy the movie Se7en, I really disagree with its message (at least what I think its message is) but I still enjoy it and I don't mark it down for it. So for people like me saying "this game has a terrible message 5/10" is a very bad review and stinks of agenda pushing. Imagine if they did this with every game "Tony Hawk games glorify skateboarding on public property and vandalism, that's disgusting, 5/10" "GTA games glorify violence 1/10" "such and such game thinks conservatism/liberalism/progressivism is a good thing 2/10" and so on.

You want to talk about the narrative behind a games fine, but acting like that's all that matters is agenda pushing. A good review will talk about gameplay, graphics, story, whatever might matter to people, and give a score about how enjoyable/fun/engaging the game is. If they can't get past the morality then maybe say "I'd have fun if the morality wasn't getting to me" or maybe hand it off to someone else.

It's the kind of hypocrisy in which gamers say that games are art so that they're not exempt from anti-censorship laws but scoff at the notion of anyone treating them like art.

No the argument isn't just "you shouldn't censor art" it's "you shouldn't censor art or free expression". Statements on twitter aren't art, burning a flag isn't art, a t-shirt with the phrase "fuck the draft" usually isn't art but they are all protected by the first amendment. So it's not hypocritical.

Besides most people won't argue that ALL games are art.

And now I have to ask: why is it that video game reviews aren't allowed to talk mostly about narrative and or provide in-depth analysis of the work and it's themes?

People do that all the time without causing controversy, it's when you use "I think the themes are disagreeable" as a main reason to mark down the game that people don't like it.

Why does this stigma against anything but the most clinical, bare-bones, just-the-facts, gameplay-only reviews even exists?

Why wouldn't there be? People use the reviews to determine if you should play/buy the game. And if someone marks a game down because of political disagreements then someone who doesn't care about politics or doesn't disagree with the politics will be getting a bad review.

 

[Andy Shandy]

I don't know if I'd call it anti-intellectualism, but I would say that most people seem to want their game reviewed more like a toaster or a television than like a film or a book. And it's kinda understandable. I mean games are technological, like the former two. But the great part about games is that they are also art - despite what Roger Ebert said - like the latter. Meaning there should be room for reviews like Killscreen's.

 

[Silence]

Wait, that wasn't a critique/article, that Killscreen thing was an actual review?

Meh. Meh, I say. I'm totally for such articles, but not with reviewscores attached to it.

As for Anti-Intellectualism: Gamers come from all parts of life, that is what is what makes the culture partly unique in some way. Though it also makes intellectuals a minority.
There is no problem with that, as long as people are self-aware. Which this kind of intellectual apparently is not.

When I skimmed the article first, I did not see the review score.
Now I think it's pretty stupid.

 

[Zhukov]

Probably, but I'm not sure this is it.

This looks more like garden variety defend-The-Precious fanboyism.

One of the main reasons people read reviews is for confirmation of their opinion. When that doesn't occur they get angry. (Incidentally, this is why you get people furiously shitting themselves inside out whenever a reviewer fails to give 10/10 for an anticipated game that hasn't even been released yet.)

If the article had been praising the story and themes of The Division then those same people would have welcomed it or at least ignored it. But the article was critical so it must be discredited and purged and the author told to to shut their mouths.

A number of people want games to be their 'safe space', somewhere where their beliefs and politics won't be challenged.

It's kinda funny how folks have gone from insisting games are meaningful works of art in order to deflect criticism from non-gamers to insisting games are mindless products for mindless amusement in order to deflect criticism from other gamers.

 

[madwarper]

Why is it that Kilscreen.com can write a review critiquing The Division's problematic narrative ( https://killscreen.com/articles/the-perverse-ideology-of-the-division/ ) and the resulting reaction is 80% s#!t like this (and yes those are all real comments):

[...]

Which brings me to my point, is our culture anti-intellectual?

Wait, let me get this straight... You want to to paint our (gamer) entire culture as being "anti-intellectual", and to provide proof of such a claim, your provide comments of some people I've never met, that were responding to an article I've never heard of, written by someone I've never met, on some site I never heard of.

What about the members of our culture that don't visit that website?
What about those that visit that site, but haven't read the article?
What about those that read the article, but chose to not comment on it?

I do hope you do realize that you are attempting to paint us all, based on the actions of a subsection of a subsection of a subsection.

 

[Ryallen]

What can I say that hasn't been said already? It seems to me that the readers of the review weren't looking for an analysis of the themes and plot of the game, but rather how well it functioned as an enjoyable experience. Yes, that included the story, but from what I understand, the author reviewed the game with little to no real concern on how anyone else would see the things that he saw. All he did was just talk about the moral implications of something that the mass media was going to pay little mind to. What he did was take the weakest part of a bridge and examine it thoroughly and declare that the entire bridge is unfit to be used by the public. Normally, this would be acceptable, as everything in a creation needs to work well. But all he did was examine the singular piece rather than the bridge as a whole, as a review should, before declaring it unfit completely, while the rest of the bridge was functioning and safe, albeit unexciting and ultimately not worth one's time, with the one part that he examined being the railings on the side. Nice to have, but ultimately not what people are there for. I don't think that gamers as a whole are anti-intellectual. Quite the opposite. Spec Ops: The Line is a big example of games that are intellectual and were successful. The problem is that he looked at the wrong thing, ignored everything else, and didn't bother to review the game under any guidelines other than his own as someone who had their sensibilities offended.

 

[Fox12]

Well Dark Souls has always seemed to me as a good example of a game that is often misjudged. There is a steam review of Dark Souls 2 that sums it up quite neatly. It goes as follows: Bearer... Seek... Seek... Lest... From what I've played of Dark Souls 2 (which was the first 70% and the first 30% twice, I've watched my roommate play the rest), the strenght of that game was it's gameplay, and secondarily its theme and atmosphere. The dialogue was cringeworthy and pretentious, the story was barely there and whatever themes it has are still mostly explored by killing things and walking into various death traps for 40 hours which is far longer than the story and themes require to be shown. I certainly didn't see any 'deep philosophy' and most of its thematic strength started to wear thin after twenty hours. I've seen various analyses of Dark Souls and unless Dark souls 1 is very different from Dark Souls 2 (and the first couple of hours where damn near identical to Dark Souls 2, I didn't play it after that) I think the narrative elements of Dark Souls are not nearly as important to the game as people tell themselves. Had the gameplay been ever so slightly less engaging, then I doubt it would have had anywhere near its popularity.

Dark Souls 1 and Dark Souls 2 are very different games. The first one was written by a modern gaming genius. The second one... not so much.

Dark Souls is a game that needs time to sink in. It won't tell you almost anything. It's too subtle for that. Instead you have to figure things out on your own. The clues are in the item descriptions. They're in the architecture of the buildings. They're in the placement of bodies. They're in the designs of the armor or clothing. Very small things add up to a big picture. You have to put together the story based on context clues. The game challenges you to figure things out for yourself. It usually takes a long time for you to gather enough information to put it all together and understand what's going on, but for a lot of people there's a moment where the game "clicks," and it suddenly makes sense. The problem is that we've been conditioned to having everything told to us. Dark Souls is all about showing, and very little about telling. The dialogue is very sparse, and even when you get it, there's typically a double meaning to everything you've been told. Indeed, if you play Dark Souls like a normal game then you're pretty much guaranteed to miss most of the story.

Spoiler

Once you understand the story, there's quite a lot of depth. It's drenched Existentialism and Nihilism. The plot exists as a metaphor for the entropic decay of the universe, and the inevitable extinction of humanity. This isn't immediately clear. You have to figure it out on your own. Once you understand the horrible truth, the game asks how you intend to deal with it. Do you succumb to despair, like the crestfallen warrior, once you realize that there's nothing you can do? Do you stop playing, and presumably go hollow? Or do you continue fighting until the very last moment, like Lord Gwyn, even though you know that, in the end, you will lose? Or, alternatively, do you try to find your own meaning in this finite world, like Solaire? One is nihilism, the other existentialism. The brutal gameplay actually factors into the plot, because you ultimately discover that its all for nothing. The game itself represents a kind of absurd sisyphean struggle. Dark Souls, at its very core, is about the human condition.

It's heavily steeped in the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as other existentialists. It's about finding meaning in a meaningless universe. It's about about the fall of the "Gods," and the rise of the age of man. It's about how we all choose to face death, and what brings us happiness. Would eternal life give us meaning? The Undead are immortal, and they go crazy searching for mortality. Would death bring us joy? Seethe the Scaless is mortal, and he goes insane searching for immortality. They exist as foils of one another. Neither state of being can bring happiness, because both are equally devoid of meaning... unless an individual can discover their own meaning in life. Indeed, most of the horrible things that happen in the game are a result of people trying to prevent the natural cycle of death. Perhaps, then, the answer is to embrace life and death, and not to fight it at all.

If you don't care for this kind of philosophy then you probably won't care for Dark Souls. If your religious then you might even find it actively offensive. There is, however, a huge amount of philosophy in the game. Philosophy that is entirely absent in Dark Souls 2, which managed to miss the point entirely. I would argue that Dark Souls manages to have one of the most complex plots in all of gaming. It asks some very difficult questions in an industry that's terrified of controversy, or of making the player uncomfortable.

It also understands that brevity is the soul of whit, and that writing isn't good because it is long. Dark Souls says what it needs to say, and moves on. It's more about implication anyway...

 

[josemlopes]

But does the review actually talk about the gameplay?

Because you dont see many reviews of movies or books just focusing on a particular aspect, or even just story. They talk about how well it is told and how it expresses with clarity what is going on (in the case of books) without going into "high art" stuff.

Same with movies, go see any Pacific Rim review and how much of it is about the story. It can be about the acting, the special effects, story telling, pacing, and many other things, stuff that is more technical and isnt exactly intellectual.

So no, I dont think that gaming culture is anti-intelectual when a review misses the point of being a review and is more of an analysis of a very specific aspect of the game, something that could be made as a special article after a proper review. For a review a very quick summary of all that text could have fitted inside the rest of a more broad analysis of the overall product.

So yeah, get off your high horse.

 

[vallorn]

That article is a horrible example of "Intellectualism", it's a Post Modernist think piece at best and should never have been classified as a review. It's just word salad at times and at other times it's just a mess of caricatures.

I think that gaming culture is less "Anti intellectual" than it is "anti relativist" with Post Modernism taking most of the heat for relativism, in gaming everything needs to be backed up. You say you are the best? Prove it?, you say this weapon does this? Show me some numbers. You say Dark Souls means this? You'd better back it up with the item descriptions buster! You say Mass Effect 3's ending is good? Good luck proving that without the Indoctrination Explanation.

Gaming is about metrics generally, numbers, mathematics, logic at its finest. "I feel this weapon does more damage" means nothing if the numbers don't add up. Because of that, the whole "My experience is this" is generally dismissed unless solid numbers are pulled up to back it up. And because such people are generally English or Humanities majors they lack the grasp of mathematics required to back up their arguments statistically. These arguments then get discarded by the gamers who read them which gets fobbed off by the self righteous people who right them as "anti intellectualism".

Unfortunately that's just the way things go.

 

[Joccaren]

I'm largely with what has been said here.
Its ok to talk about the ideology of a game. There are actually a number of entities who do so fairly successfully at times. This 'review' site though?

I think the best test of why people are annoyed is this: Why did the game get 50/100, what does that 50/100 mean?
Literally, it got 50/100 because it didn't agree with the reviewer's ideology. Sure, in a purely technical term of 'review' its a review if you just say something about something retrospectively, however this is a clear, commercial review, and they have expectations. Its being put on Metacritic, with a score. That score needs to mean something, if they're putting it up in places where its intended to inform buyers about the product they're purchasing.

Whilst from what I understand the game as a whole has a bunch of issues, none of them are even glossed over here. No technical or mechanical issues are covered. How effectively it tells its story isn't covered. Design and art are barely covered. In fact, even an ideological analysis is barely covered - its less an analysis, review or critique, and more a "YOU DON'T AGREE WITH ME SO HAVE A BAD SCORE". As others have said, the site itself has said this is what it is doing. THAT is anti-intellectual, discouraging discussion and trying to censor others so that only your view is heard, and its 100% justified for gamers to call out that bullshit - even if their method of doing so isn't the best.

Had it also analysed the game, clearly stated what gave it that score, or perhaps most importantly, discussed the ideology without literally stating that the creators are guilty of thought crime and should be punished... Maybe I could see your point. As the review is? Ha, no. Its garbage. Worse, its garbage with an agenda, that aims to use what modicum of power it has to censor others. That is what is wrong here, not the comments.

I agree with Supernova's stance that political hit pieces and activism have no place masquerading as a review of any sort. However I disagree with the analysis of the consequences. If enough of such "reviews" cause aggregators like Metacritic to be unreliable then gamers will stop relying on them. Consumers are not stupid, they know a con job when they see one. All it will do is to shift the audience to other aggregator sites that do not allow for such shenanigans or to individual reviewers. The games industry in particular tends to be run with very little slack, one or two failed games are enough to sink a studio and a few are enough to kill a publisher. Overly catering to a vocal minority will lead to the shutdown of developers which ought to be enough to convince the rest that while the internet hate mob might be loud, it does not translate to sales. In fact it can translate to a very large loss in sales if a game is perceived to be overly preachy. After all the free market is in theory self-correcting.

The issue is that not only do gamers go to Metacritic for their games, but publishers look at Metacritic scores as a measure of how well a developer did as well. Yeah, sales are the bottom line, but a well selling game with a low Metacritic score will see developers have more control taken from them so the publisher can design by committee, or the publisher may decide that the sales were only from brand name recognition, and the devs didn't do a good job, and put a new team on it. To be honest, I don't know ANYONE who uses Metacritic as anything but entertainment, but seeing as a bunch of people put reviews there I'm going to assume they exist. But the larger issue is that publishers take note of it, and if certain review sites start tilting reviews negatively in order to push a political agenda, publishers will take note and think that's the agenda they should be pushing.

Unless things have changed over the last couple of years and publishers have gained half a hint, but I've heard nothing about that so... Imma just assume this is still the case.

 

[EbonBehelit]

I'd say it's more pop culture in general being extremely anti-intellectual of late. Gaming is popular now as well, and thus inherits a slice of the pie.

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

snip

snip

It doesn't help that the "review" appears in Metacritic either. The people who frequent Metacritic probably are the ones with the least patience towards such analysis.

What's interesting, they do criticise modern rating system and how iflated it tends to be(Which i generally agree with. Numbers summaring reviews are bullshit.) in this article: https://killscreen.com/articles/note-reviews/. Then, they rate DNF with whooping '-1000' score. I dunno, does that mean all the numbers there should be treated as a jab?

And a small digression: In the bigger picture i don't like how "serious" game criticism tends to put gameplay element aside . After all it's what differentiates this branch of (pop)culture from other, like books, or movies it so much aspires to. I think games should've stand on their own legs as a medium if you want them to be perceived than more just a mere copycats of "higher" art-forms.

 

[Fox12]

Dark Souls is a game that needs time to sink in. It won't tell you almost anything. It's too subtle for that. Instead you have to figure things out on your own.

It also understands that brevity is the soul of whit, and that writing isn't good because it is long. Dark Souls says what it needs to say, and moves on. It's more about implication anyway...

If it hardly tells you anything, how do you know that anything is actually implied, and you're not just creating a wholecloth narrative out of an Inkblot?

The details are scant, not non-existant. Besides, if you find a wounded character inside a building, surrounded by rubble, and there's a hole in the roof above his head, and there's a giant monster on the roof, then you can probably piece together what happened. Also, the director has confirmed certain details.

All it takes is a very basic understanding of how symbolism works : )

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I always love to see how many gamers get absolutely infuriated and indignant over game critics daring to critique a game in a way they personally disprove of.

Given how many gamers demand that video games be treated with "respect" and viewed as a "mature form of art", it's confusing that a significant portion of that lot will then turn around and say "just focus on playing, stop thinking about the other stuff too much". Mature media is examined from a variety of angles; a discussion about the lighting and camera angles of a Transformers movie is just as valid as to whether they got Optimus Prime's coloration wrong, and we can talk about historical themes reflected in Game of Thrones just like we can talk about how our favorite character died horribly.

But apparently wanting to examine anything about games aside from what happens when you press X to not die somehow "sucks the fun out of it".

 

[John Markley]

It's the kind of hypocrisy in which gamers say that games are art so that they're not exempt from anti-censorship laws but scoff at the notion of anyone treating them like art.

If Kill Screen were treating games "like art," they wouldn't be capping off their exploration of a game's deep themes by giving it a numerical rating on a scale of 1 to 100. ("Hamlet: Compelling meditation on mortality and obsession, marred by patriarchal assumptions and boring Fortinbras subplot. 78/100.)" If Kill Zone chooses to adopt the trappings of a review, something to help consumers decide if a game is worth their time and money, they deserve to be criticized for delivering an ideological lecture instead.

And it is hardly "anti-intellectual" (if that term even means anything at this point) to dislike art criticism that focuses around attacking something because the critic disagrees with its politics disagree with it's politics. If somebody wrote an essay about how Apocalypse Now is bad cinema because its negative depiction of the Vietnam War is unpatriotic and plays into the hands of the commies, that would not be considered good film criticism by most cinephiles.

And now I have to ask: why is it that video game reviews aren't allowed to talk mostly about narrative and or provide in-depth analysis of the work and it's themes? Why does this stigma against anything but the most clinical, bare-bones, just-the-facts, gameplay-only reviews even exists?

If I wrote a review of Wagner's Ring cycle that was mostly complaining that it doesn't follow actual Norse mythology very faithfully and declared that it wasn't worth listening to because of that, rather than talking about music, that would be a very poor opera review. Even if my criticisms of Wagner's treatment of his source material was accurate and insightful, it would STILL be a very poor opera review.