The Apparent Anti-Intellectualism of Gamer Culture

[Hair Jordan]

@ Hair Jordan:

I don't know man, I haven't read any reviews that eschew commentary on story and focus primarily on the game play nuance. Not for games that focus equally on both. If I ever came across a review for something like say Bioshock or The Witcher 3 and the integration of story wasn't taken into account and the focus was only on gamevplay nuance, that would come across as pretty weird to me and I certainly would have remembered it. Since most of your post focuses on this phenomena, I'd need you to link me to some of those reviews before I can comment on some of your points.

Fwiw, I wasn't making the case that reviews completely ignore the narrative ramifications of games, just that it often takes a backseat to the more technical aspects of games.

Take this review of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare by IGN
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/03/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-review

They do mention that "The topics and themes of Advanced Warfare?s futuristic single-player story are lent a gravity by their reflection of contemporary real-world news: weapons of mass destruction, a dysfunctional Congress, growing private militaries, and American interventionism. It?s delivered with Call of Duty?s typical over-the-top bravado, but there?s a layer of truth beneath it all that?s genuinely scary."

That being said, this is the extent that such themes are explored in this particular review. The rest of the piece is mainly a technical review of the game and it's mechanics. I'm not making the case this is a poorly done review, or that the methodology is flawed. It's simply an example of a contrasting review to the OP's reference piece, as requested.

Hypothetically speaking, as a reviewer, I may find the ramifications of such "reflections" to have more importance than the mechanical aspects of the game, and choose to focus my review around them. Again, the critical question here is to exactly what the role of criticism is supposed to be. You'd have to make a strong, supported, argument as to why a reviewer should prioritize certain elements of a game over others, if it conflicted with their own personal conclusions.

For example, you could make the case that games journalists need to remain relatively objective, or neutral, in reference to sociopolitical concerns. However, if you want to maintain intellectual rigor, you have to be prepared to properly counter the myriad reasons a journalist can argue against traditional forms of journalistic objectivity, such as those proposed by advocacy journalists and other media critics.

Merely disagreeing, especially in a flippant manner, isn't enough, and it is this lack of rigor that the OP is calling into question, to begin with. After all, this is supposed to be the subject of the entire thread.

When you say "not for games that focus on both" you're making a somewhat telling statement. This implies that games have a predetermined amount of attention you should give to their internals, based upon genre factors, or some other form of intentional categorization. I believe this underlies the contention many people are having with the OP's referenced article.

It would appear that he is focusing heavily on the narrative ramifications of a game that, we can assume, was not supposed to have these elements "focused" upon, perhaps due to a conflict with expectations, due to it's genre. It may go without saying, but it would appear that the journalist in question feels as though the ramifications of the narrative elements, and the purportedly unintentional commentary on our current culture, are more important, for the purposes of review, than the quality of the game's mechanics.

There's no obvious reason I've seen, so far, as to why this isn't a valid argument, again, regardless of whether or not you agree with his points.

 

[Zombie Proof]

@ Hair Jordan:

I don't know man, I haven't read any reviews that eschew commentary on story and focus primarily on the game play nuance. Not for games that focus equally on both. If I ever came across a review for something like say Bioshock or The Witcher 3 and the integration of story wasn't taken into account and the focus was only on gamevplay nuance, that would come across as pretty weird to me and I certainly would have remembered it. Since most of your post focuses on this phenomena, I'd need you to link me to some of those reviews before I can comment on some of your points.

Fwiw, I wasn't making the case that reviews completely ignore the narrative ramifications of games, just that it often takes a backseat to the more technical aspects of games.

Take this review of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare by IGN
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/03/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-review

They do mention that "The topics and themes of Advanced Warfare?s futuristic single-player story are lent a gravity by their reflection of contemporary real-world news: weapons of mass destruction, a dysfunctional Congress, growing private militaries, and American interventionism. It?s delivered with Call of Duty?s typical over-the-top bravado, but there?s a layer of truth beneath it all that?s genuinely scary."

That being said, this is the extent that such themes are explored in this particular review. The rest of the piece is mainly a technical review of the game and it's mechanics. I'm not making the case this is a poorly done review, or that the methodology is flawed. It's simply an example of a contrasting review to the OP's reference piece, as requested.

Hypothetically speaking, as a reviewer, I may find the ramifications of such "reflections" to have more importance than the mechanical aspects of the game, and choose to focus my review around them. Again, the critical question here is to exactly what the role of criticism is supposed to be. You'd have to make a strong, supported, argument as to why a reviewer should prioritize certain elements of a game over others, if it conflicted with their own personal conclusions.

For example, you could make the case that games journalists need to remain relatively objective, or neutral, in reference to sociopolitical concerns. However, if you want to maintain intellectual rigor, you have to be prepared to properly counter the myriad reasons a journalist can argue against traditional forms of journalistic objectivity, such as those proposed by advocacy journalists and other media critics.

Merely disagreeing, especially in a flippant manner, isn't enough, and it is this lack of rigor that the OP is calling into question, to begin with. After all, this is supposed to be the subject of the entire thread.

When you say "not for games that focus on both" you're making a somewhat telling statement. This implies that games have a predetermined amount of attention you should give to their internals, based upon genre factors, or some other form of intentional categorization. I believe this underlies the contention many people are having with the OP's referenced article.

It would appear that he is focusing heavily on the narrative ramifications of a game that, we can assume, was not supposed to have these elements "focused" upon, perhaps due to a conflict with expectations, due to it's genre. It may go without saying, but it would appear that the journalist in question feels as though the ramifications of the narrative elements, and the purportedly unintentional commentary on our current culture, are more important, for the purposes of review, than the quality of the game's mechanics.

There's no obvious reason I've seen, so far, as to why this isn't a valid argument, again, regardless of whether or not you agree with his points.

If you knew nothing about The Division but was looking to buy it, would you have found the review informative enough?

*edit*
Also, what criteria do you consider important when weighing in on the functionality of a review?

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

The culture isn't anti-intellectual, it's just that games are mass-media entertainment and aren't expected to a) have good stories or b) be challenging. The Division and Destiny are both especially banal games that offer simple, mindless mechanics and have been aggressively marketed to be as accessible and as widespread as possible. Games with strong stories and consistent themes are quite rare, least of all because themes are traditionally best conveyed through a non-interactive medium, i.e. a book or a film. Games have to pull mechanics and failure states in order to keep the player engaged, so the most effective way to go about metaphors is to use mechanics, think; Dark Souls; Spec Ops The Line; Metal Gear Solid 3; Thomas Was Alone; Journey; etc. Those games are all praised for their story and narrative alongside their mechanics because they gel together so well. However, with increasing development costs, expanding markets and the demand for shinier graphics, a game that is merely functional and just engaging can already be a colossal effort. It's difficult to sit down with 100+ people and create a cohesive and meaningful narrative without too many cooks spoiling the broth, least of all because of how expensive it would be.

There are other avenues for this, like the indie side of gaming, but that is so experimental and chaotic that for every Transistor or Hotline Miami we get 50 DayZ and Minecraft ripoffs. Sifting for meaningful and moving material there is difficult, because devs either don't have the resources necessary to make an artsy game, or because they just don't want to, either out of the need to shift units before making something personal and visionary or because the current generation of game developers were raised on Nintendo and/or Golden Age PC games, all of which focused on entertainment and generally just being about thrills rather than confronting you with intellectually engaging matter. Not to say that it's some sort of vacuum; Deus Ex was verbose for what it was, as was System Shock 2, but they both dealt with their respective subject matter in about the same manner as would a B-movie, which is consistent, because a lot of games of that time were inspired by whatever movies the designers liked. Simply put, gaming heritage is rooted in the 80s, specifically 80s nostalgia. We are slowly moving away from that, but for the time being, outside of games produced outside of the West bar a few exceptions, games are intrinsically tied to popular culture and are yet to make their own identity in terms of what stories can be told exclusively through the medium. Now, you can argue that games were tailored made for Campbellian epics as you can see in Zelda and basically almost every RPG ever made, but those games still make up a rather small portion of the market, at least right now.

And gamers are currently on the same level, and I don't blame them. There's a time and a place for stuff that is confrontational like your Silent Hill 2s or Spec Opses, but applying that sort of language that you would use to discuss a narrative that deals with the deepest recesses of human morality to a game that is so removed from reality that you shoot paintball rounds at bullet sponges in a post-epidemic New York is just bad writing. It's not having an understanding of the audience inteded for this game, and it's on par with a critic who primarily watches foreign language documentaries scoring down a recent superhero flick because of its detachment from the real world. It's a valid opinion, as is the final judgement, but it's a missapplication of your duties as a journalist. Your primary duty is to the public, to be as objective and as unbiased as possible and not to treat these values as binary states but rather as ideals. Engaging with the story as the main focus in a review about a game that is effectively just there to make money in exchange for light entertainment is missing the trees for the woods. Most people aren't going to care, but if you do have genuine problems with the story, then discuss that separately and treat it as appropiately academic material.

I'm no authority on how to write reviews, but I know where this mindset comes from in the few times I have been writing recently. However, I avoid that pitfall by refocusing on what the game is meant to be and appropiately marking my own nitpicks with any thematic inconsistencies clearly in what I write. At the same time, I try to write in such a way that I try to entertain how or why people might like the things I dislike, or if they simply don't care about what's going on. To give an example, I remember how much I focused on trying to write something good about Receiver's story, but after a while I realised that ultimately people will play the game just for the mechanics and use the background story as a collectible for achievement hunting and as an arbitrary way to mark progress. It is irrelevant to the greater discussion at hand, which is, do I think people should spend their money on this?

And that's really the crux of the argument right now. Leading back into my earlier point of costs, the simple truth is that games are a luxury. It's all well and good to entertain how a game might be interesting if you consider it's story or other elements outside of the context of the game, but at the end of the day, it's a $60 purchase that promises to keep you engaged for x amount of hours, which means that it is effectively a value judgement. This is not anti-intellectual so much as it is a reality of the times, and the comments taking umbrage with this approach is something I can understand. I don't have a lot of money to spend on luxuries myself and what I don't want is a person in a position of authority, in that they have established themselves to have a good understanding of the medium and that they have unlimited access to games, yapping off for umpteen pages about a piece of entertainment like it's a novel, when at the end of the day, I'd just want to shoot stuff.

 

[Hair Jordan]

If you knew nothing about The Division but was looking to buy it, would you have found the review informative enough?

All concerns about a loaded question aside, I'd personally argue that no single review should bear the burden of being entirely responsible for forming one's view, when accessing media is concerned. It's usually best to get a second opinion.

So the answer is no - but it's a technicality.

 

[Hair Jordan]

Also, what criteria do you consider important when weighing in on the functionality of a review?

If I'm understanding you correctly, what I'd mainly be concerned with, with a critical piece like the OP's, is whether or not they are making valid arguments.

By that, I mean that their arguments are logical, internally consistent, and if they reference evidence, it's cited, and so on, and so forth. These are the things your English professor are going to be looking for, in other words.

From there, I'll contemplate whether or not I agree with the author, and consider some major counter-arguments, if necessary.

 

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

I think the problem with this write up is that it's a really interesting editorial with some real thought provoking points on the tools used in gaming and what they signify. As a review though, it fails on all fronts because it's only focused on a few aspects of the game. There is no objective viewpoint on how the game plays and how those elements juxtapose with the themes therein. All of the articles energy is focused on themes and symbolism and in terms of what we'd expect from a full "review" falls short for it.

The problem with it is that it's pseudo-intellectual drivel. The guy concludes that Ubi hates poor and black people because gangs do gang stuff and sanitation workers take their job a little too literally (very witty, Ubi) in the middle of a Flying Pork Flu outbreak that wiped out 95% of New York. Somehow, that means that janitors are just waiting for a chance to murder you and steal your shit. Obviously.

It's not as if every plague in games everything has SOMEONE pick up the napalm and said someone is a monster instead of a hero only because the protagonist inevitably discovers there's a perfect cure for the plague. Or people who take advantage of the plague to create their own command structure and advance their own interests.

Well ya there will be a villain, but who you pick for a villain and what their motivation writes the message of the story.

Yes and no. The relative moral-ambiguity of post-societal-collapse settings is basically always a major theme. The author of the article/review seems to think that the game revels in the fantasy of the unchecked power of the division, when in reality it raises questions as to how just its actions are.

Or, more eloquently put:

That article is magical because it condemns the game for silently creating a political narrative of waging war on the poor, while simultaneously leaving out anything that conflicts with the story the article is telling. Without going in depth, the two forces which make up the 'ultimate bad guy' in The Division are a multi-billion dollar PMC, and Division agents themselves, corrupted by the unchecked power they were given.

So while I wont comment on the broader issue, I can certainly get behind that article getting a negative reaction since it blatantly misleads its audience.

Or:

Yeah, stellar review right there. I really came away with a greater understanding of the game. I've played the game for over 20 hours, and there are many things which this writer lies about or just fails to understand. Your job as a Division agent is not to "kill the poor looters trying to survive", rather it is to find evidence of the bioterrorists responsible for the outbreak, and to eliminate other terrorist elements who are literally going around burning everyone alive. In the meantime, you are tasked with helping people receive food and aid - and you routinely pass by "looters" who are not considered threats. You also routinely give supplies to the needy.

Furthermore, the charges laid on the story that the Division is just some form of statist propaganda, glorifying totalitarian agencies is nonsense. The plot goes on to show that the Division is flawed, and has too much power - a topic routinely discussed throughout the game's narrative, challenging the notion of federal agencies with unlimited power.

This pretentious writer just comes off as a subversive, insufferable communist puke using an unrelated medium to espouse his destructive agenda. As does the inflammatory OP starting with the presumption that his way is the one way, and everyone else is just 'anti-intellectual' and 'doesn't want to understand'. Nice kafka trap, you'd definitely be given a top supervisory role in a fucking gulag.

What would be interesting to know is how the author of the article managed to miss this entirely. If he genuinely missed it I would find that amusing. If he's lying to himself and us so that he can go on the tangent he desired to go on, well... That's shitty.

I do believe I learned a lot more about the author than I did about the game from reading that. What do you think, Elijin/Nexus?

 

[Zombie Proof]

Also, what criteria do you consider important when weighing in on the functionality of a review?

If I'm understanding you correctly, what I'd mainly be concerned with, with a critical piece like the OP's, is whether or not they are making valid arguments.

By that, I mean that their arguments are logical, internally consistent, and if they reference evidence, it's cited, and so on, and so forth. These are the things your English professor are going to be looking for, in other words.

From there, I'll contemplate whether or not I agree with the author, and consider some major counter-arguments, if necessary.

Ugh, you sophists are so wriggly lol. Hey, at least I have fun reading all the words y'all write hahahaha.

Fair enough though.

 

[Gengisgame]

I don't think it is anti-intellectualism as much as it is anti-progressivism. There's a vocal minority of gamers that do not want their hobby to change, especially not in a way that would suggest that "SJWs" have had a say in how games are designed or perceived. Attacking someone for analyzing the ideological underpinnings of a game is not dissimilar from attacking someone for analyzing the content of a game from a feminist perspective. Some of the people attacking these takes on game criticism are (or at least like to consider themselves) quite intellectual, but they are opposed to anything they consider "politicization" of games, especially if it is in the name of progressivism.

This is false. The vocal minority is actually the people wishing to add "progressive" views to games as they themselves admit.

Best example is GTA, they want it changed, they want it changed to show that certain things should not be allowed. If they weren't the vocal minority then why would they wouldn't need to have popular products altered to push there views.

No one is anti-intellectual or anti-progressive in the same way this vocal minority is anti-(I'll say masculine, violence, sexual content aimed at men), your stuff just doesn't sell as well in the gaming market. To me these people are more childish and entitled than people who complain about there being too many shooters and not enough RPG's because they have the pretentious view that there tastes are morally superior.

 

[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.

Look, I get what you are saying here, don't reduce a review of something on a small part of it and then value the whole thing, but the example you choose is rather ill-fited. It is perfectly valid to do that to a bridge, if a part of a bridge, especially the weakest part, is damaged, then this bridge is unfit to be used by the public. Because, you know, bridges can collapse when they have a weak spot. You don't have to examine the whole bridge when you find a structural weakness to declare it dangerous. So again, not the best choice of metaphor to suit your argument. This is more akin to rating a book on the font used for the text, without actually having read any word of it.

That's why, in the bridge metaphor in this case, I said that the story was the railing of the bridge. I may not have made that part clear.

Yes, but the problem still remains. You said "weakest part", which I interpeted as "structually weakest part". I guess you meant "the most unimportant part", but that too is one more reason why the bridge metaphor doesn't work in this case. There are no unimportant parts of a bridge, everything has to function correctly, or else lives could be in danger. Case in point, the railing of a bridge is very important too, unless you want to take a fall as soon as you lean on it.

Look, I don't want to start beef or something, I just wanted to point out that your choice of metaphor ultimately weakens your argument of "don't examine a small part and judge the whole on that", because a bridge is one of the cases where it IS not only valid, but in fact necessary to do just that. It is not that your argument has no merit, your choice of metaphor is just working against it. I just wanted to give you some advice, sorry if I came of as insulting.

No, I'm literally saying that I used the railing in this case. It wasn't implied, it's right there in the paragraph. Yeah, it wouldn't work normally, and again, I probably should have made it more clear that the story was the railing in this case, but I still said that the story was the railing. Reread the paragraph and you should see it.

 

[cleric of the order]

Op, if this is a semi academic examination of the division then why do people think it's a review?
Personally I don't want to reed some half-arse academic's "critique" as a review, when i go to a review i want a to come out with a rough understanding of what the game plays like and what it is.
You can call that anti-intellectualism but this place is not the hallowed halls of academia you see.
Gaming attracts quite a swath of people, despicably the under educated,folks like myself that aren't inserted in a critical theorist examination of a videogame and folks smarter and better educated than me that frankly wouldn't likely read this at all.
The pretense of some hackademic is especially not the concern of the poorer members of our hobby which have to choose the games they buy carefully, if they do. The empty proselytizing from the ivory tower does not help them, which is funny given their conclusions is the narrative fucks the poor as the only one fucking the poor is the idiot that just wasted their bandwidth and time where they could have come to some REAL conclusions about a prospective game.
Sitting here, I had to really ask who this is written for, and honestly i couldn't tell you.
This should be tucked away somewhere else because it is intellectual masturbation.

 

[Tsun Tzu]

Ya know, if you were going to present a case for the gaming community being "anti-intellectual" then you should have included an actual piece representative of intellectualism, rather than this first year pseudo-analytical drek.

I mean, I get that this author is a closet sociopath and all, but it doesn't really help the argument.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Wait, is this actually true? I thought this was supposed to be a "serious" game, not a Monty Python sketch.

It is. I can assure you that in the actual game there's nothing fun about the cleaners and some of the more chilling collectibles are the ones displaying or covering Cleaners burning people to death. The Cleaners are a good example of how an idea might appear farcical at first glance but gets sold on presentation alone.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

I just want to throw in, The Division has some pretty progressive elements in places... The leader of the cleaners is an enemy you fight who's anti-big government. Theres also the lady doctor at HQ that seemingly goes out of her way to make sure you know that not only is she not a people person, and career driven woman, she's also gay. Just as random examples. The game even started me at the character screen defaulted to Lady-Gender. I only mentioned it because while playing it I noticed it and it felt like pandering, and I contemplated making a topic about it but figured, ya know. Fuck it. Maybe they'll be able to pander with a bit more subtleness next time.

Is there a string of anti-intellectualism or whatever you want to call it? Of course. Does no one read plato's cave? The guy escapes the cave, and goes back in to lead everyone out of it and the people inside the cave KILL THAT FUCKER. paraphrase Bill Hicks, "We can't leave this cave! We've got a lot invested in this Cave being everything."

 

[Elijin]

snip

What would be interesting to know is how the author of the article managed to miss this entirely. If he genuinely missed it I would find that amusing. If he's lying to himself and us so that he can go on the tangent he desired to go on, well... That's shitty.

I do believe I learned a lot more about the author than I did about the game from reading that. What do you think, Elijin/Nexus?

Given how complete the omission is (he refers to the game having 3 factions, completely ignoring the Last Man Battalion, a PMC who has taken over significant portions of the island and declared themselves the martial rulers), I wouldnt find it hard to believe he played it for 2-3 hours, decided he knew it all and stormed on ahead.
In the early game, you do come swooping as the super agent, here to set the city straight. Its only as the game progresses (or if you are super into collecting various audio diaries) that you start to see the ideas really expand, and the darker notions rear their head. In fact having replayed the missions because, ugh repetition on hard mode rpg/mmo, Im actually finding more and more of the early dialogue hints that people have no faith in your agency. Because you're the second wave, the remains of the first wave having already fallen to corruption and being at the head of the current obstacles.

But essentially this guy is either intentionally manipulating the narrative for his own gains, or a lazy lazy critic who browsed the first chapters and wrote a scathing expose, only to look a bit silly when the completed story provides the context to tell a very different tale.

Either way I feel the reviewer put the concept of them having a tasty little political dissection in their portfolio well ahead of accuracy in reviewing on this one.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

The game even started me at the character screen defaulted to Lady-Gender. I only mentioned it because while playing it I noticed it and it felt like pandering, and I contemplated making a topic about it but figured, ya know. Fuck it. Maybe they'll be able to pander with a bit more subtleness next time.

My first character started the character generator as a black man, my second as an Asian man. My take is that the Char Gen simply randomizes a character for you and that it can be either man or woman.

 

[jklinders]

Based on a quick skim of the site, this does not look like the kind of place you would go to get actual gameplay reviews. In other words, why go to this site if that is what you are looking for? I never heard of this guy before and will not take the time to look into his back issues right now. The entire purpose of the article was to analyze the "morality" of the game. That's your first problem right there. Not because not everyone is going to agree with your sense of morals but because he is doing this in a vacuum of his own particular lens.

Now what do I mean by that? Sure I better spell myself out. The full name of the game is Tom Clancy's The Division. Anybody anywhere in any time that looks for any kind of progressive bent in any work based on the works of Tom Clancy is fucking moron regardless of how articulate they may be at writing. He is a fucking Cold War era suspense writer who is so pro establishment that even as he takes the piss at US intelligence agencies he is still glorifying their goals. I would have a better chance of finding progressive views from his works than say those of Sarah Palin, but that is a really low bar to clear.

So with the above in mind, we now know that Killscreen was going for some pretty low hanging fruit. Congratulations, you have just attracted the lowest common denominator of your own free will. I'm not going to criticize his looking for progressive morality from the source of an inherently regressive writer. But I will criticize the time and effort he wastes in doing so. The Division does nothing to hide it's purpose. This means the article is not only irrelevant as a gameplay review but utterly worthless as it is utterly uninformative. The shitposting he attracted was probably actually desired. he got some additional attention; I mean fuck, I know who he is now which I did not previously. Weirdly I am interested in what he has to say but at the end of the day I don't think it has more than the very most basic of entertainment value. it won't change my buying habits and he tells me nothing useful about the game.

 

[ShadyNinja]

I prefer reviews that are as subjective as possible.

 

[inmunitas]

I prefer reviews that are as subjective as possible.

Well you're in luck, apparently knowing anything about a game, or even playing it beforehand, in order to write review of it is subjective.

 

[Maze1125]

I think what really causes this problem is the fact that the article is labeled as a review. There really isn't anything about the game that is reviewed here, instead it is a deep and fairly decent analysis of the setting and motives of the themes within the game and not actually the game itself. Honestly if they had tagged this article "Opinion" instead of review then those people commenting probably wouldn't be bitching.

This should be /thread. You shouldn't discuss the subjective political views or plot to a game and then rate how "good the game is". If you are ranking the plot or subject material in an opinion article, fine. If you are evaluating the game design, no. If you want to discuss political views and such, why not discuss the ones in reality where your voice plays a part instead of whatever McGuffin some game designer came up with this month?

That's total bullshit.
If a game has a story then that story is just as deserving of review as the gameplay.

Games have gone well beyond being just a medium for play and that's a good thing. But, equally, it means the value of a game has to be consider by more than just it's gameplay mechanics.

Some games are just games, but when a game purposely includes more than that it absolutely deserves to be judged on everything the designers have chosen to include. If you don't like reviews that do that then just ignore those reviews, don't claim they shouldn't exist.

 

[inmunitas]

I think what really causes this problem is the fact that the article is labeled as a review. There really isn't anything about the game that is reviewed here, instead it is a deep and fairly decent analysis of the setting and motives of the themes within the game and not actually the game itself. Honestly if they had tagged this article "Opinion" instead of review then those people commenting probably wouldn't be bitching.

This should be /thread. You shouldn't discuss the subjective political views or plot to a game and then rate how "good the game is". If you are ranking the plot or subject material in an opinion article, fine. If you are evaluating the game design, no. If you want to discuss political views and such, why not discuss the ones in reality where your voice plays a part instead of whatever McGuffin some game designer came up with this month?

That's total bullshit.
If a game has a story then that story is just as deserving of review as the gameplay.

Games have gone well beyond being just a medium for play and that's a good thing. But, equally, it means the value of a game has to be consider by more than just it's gameplay mechanics.

Some games are just games, but when a game purposely includes more than that it absolutely deserves to be judged on everything the designers have chosen to include. If you don't like reviews that do that then just ignore those reviews, don't claim they shouldn't exist.

A story is not a game, if all you're doing is focusing on the story then you're not writing a game review. All games are just games, the differences you see between BioShock and BioShock Infinite are the same differences you see between Monopoly and Star Wars Monopoly.