The Big Picture: Baggage

[DjinnFor]

Thanks Bob, now when someone says they want an objective review I can just point them to this video.

And accomplish nothing because it's a poorly argued strawman. Relevant to the discussion about objectivity in critiques:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/critical-miss/10511-How-to-Talk-About-Games-1

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/critical-miss/10529-How-to-Talk-About-Games-3

I'd like to hear what was so poorly argued about it, because I didn't see anything.

It's his usual strawman. "There's no such thing as objectivity all reviews are entirely personal and subjective opinions." It's just an excuse for laziness. The purpose of a critic is to reflect on out exactly why he or she did and didn't enjoy the movie, consider whether those reasons would be valid and widespread outside of his own biases and perspectives, and then to explain these different perspectives clearly and succinctly. Sure, you rely on your personal experience, but you use that experience to give advice to a broader audience. You don't need to pitch your summational opinion to the lowest common denominator; you do, however, need to identify points of interest that would divide the viewership in two.

A simple example:

For Django Unchained, the violence is likely to be a dividing theme; it's very much a story about glorifying revenge and violent retribution, which will entice some and put off others. Similarly, the story seems to focus more on Dr. Schultz for the most part; Django Unchained really isn't about a black man reclaiming his freedom, it?s about a white man working through his own racial demons and white guilt. Django has his time to be a badass and act out his revenge fantasy, sure, but Schultz is such an integral part of the story. This might make the film appear disingenuous to some; the black man has his revenge and physical conflict, appeasing our bloodlust, while the white man has all the moral and intellectual conflicts? I felt a sense of uneasiness with this arrangement once I noticed it.

By identifying points of interest that he anticipates will divide the fans and non-fans, he can give useful & practical advice while at the same time striving to remain objective.

 

[Strazdas]

I think he meant bjective criticism instead, because lets be honest, "objectivism philosophy" is the worst naming ever in history of humanity. It can be many things but it is far from beign objective.

But that isn't what he wrote, and it's particularly ironic as when he said this, he was criticising Bob's education, and suggesting he do more study.

In any case, "objective criticism" of art is either impossible or worthless. An objective critique of an art piece would be something like "The sculpture is 8.5 feet tall, and is coloured blue. It is made of several geometric solids." Not exactly what people are looking for in criticism or a review.

The nature of art is subjective. An "objective" response to it is pointless.

So i wrote a long response and forums ate it. Sigh. Ill try keeping it short.

Bobs education: He does need to study a lot before his videos. However he seems to realize that. On multiple cases ive seen him say something on Big Picture, the audience lashing out pointing how wrong he was (constructive criticism, mind you, gota love escapist, no "omg noob idiot fuck you" here), and hen next week he would come back to the subject more educated making good points. And that means hes already above most people making videos on the internet, however there is still a problem of it would have been better if he had done this before the first video was out though.

Objective reviews do look funny. See:
http://www.destructoid.com/100-objective-review-final-fantasy-xiii-179178.phtml

I would however prefer way more objectivity in reviews im reading. Im much more interested in reviewing talking about the game features than "i enjoyed killing enemy soldiers".

Objectivity here isnt a question though. Whats in question is bobs needs to instead of reviewing a movie and talking about a movie, he would then rip movie to pieces based on what the auhor of the book the movie is based on did in real life. I dont know about you, but i dont want this type of subjectivity in my reviews. I adore critics who watch movies based on books before reading the books. they judge the movie based on how the movie was made and not how the book was made and i think that is much more sincere.
An example coudl be given with Battlefield Earth. The book is fantastic (my number 1 book of all time). The movie is.... dreadful. The movie however does not even have same chracters or plot as the book, so had it been called something else, it would have been your average z grade horror movie, however since people were comparing it to the book, its "worst movie out there" now. When i saw it i did also had the feeling of "omg how could they do this to this book", which made my opinion of this movie unsincere. It is a bad movie mind you but most people give it way more flack than it deserves just because the book was so good.

Before arguing with someone who is arguing stats and figures you might bother to look up those stats and figures you're claiming they're wrong about.

Carrie
Critics 46 vs Audience 56
The Conjuring 87 vs 83
The Purge 38 vs 37
Insidious ch 2 37 vs 64
Evil Dead 62 vs 65

Heck go to http://www.movieweb.com/movies/2013/horror
Then pull up the RT scores for each on the first page. Random sampling, or a census would take too long. But feel free to do it if you want. Choosing weather or not World War Z or Warm Bodies should be horror or not would only induce selection bias, and wouldn't matter anyways.
The Results for horror films in 2013
The Average RT critic score is 53.9
The Average Viewer score is 55.3
Which is typical of movies regardless of genera. Critics are usually more harsh than users, and I say it's because they can't opt out of movies they know they don't like before hand. Users have a selection bias towards genera's they know they like.

Games have a far more serious problem critics typically give 1 point out of 10 higher than user scores. The users scores have no reason to not have a selection bias towards a given game like movies do, but game critics giving reviews for games they did not complete results in an even higher bias towards any given game. It's like rating the performance of the Cubs on the first 5 innings, and results in skewed scores. There's defiantly more issues, but that's a long and boring argument most of the people here are fully aware of.

Two mistakes in this statistics.
1. your list seems to be what people consider cult classics. If we were to, say, include all the shlock where you see 5000 dollar movies twice a week (that has quite a follwing mind you) you would see the opposite.
your second mistake is taking RT was a measure of, well, anything. RT uses few selected critics that cater to tastes of, i dont even know who, and hardly ever give reasonable results, and even then often by chance. I would suggest noone to use rotten tomatoes as a measure of anything film as that site is, well, as it name says - rotten.
While you have a point about users prefering the genre they like, there is another factor that lowers critics scores and that is oversaturation. critics get to see a lot of movies and can see reocurring cliches and faults mcuh easier. Not trying to boost or anything but my viting history is now approaching 4000, and i started to feel effect of "yep i just guessed every single action of the character...." because its just like another 100 movies ive seen.

Games criticism problems seems to be complex. There exists people who buy review scores, there exists people who bully others into review scores, there are people who rate games based on first 20 minute. Ive even head of critics reviewing a game after watching a let's play of it to save time.

Though as far as the user side goes the skewing is not game-limited problem. There are plenty of people who rate movie a 1 after walking out in first 10 minutes, there are people who rate it badly because it was filemd by director they dont like (they dont even go to see the movie). the worst are still those rating competitions. Remmeber TDK and its campaigns of "rate shawnsank redemption and godfather a 1 to get our movie ahead"? Those happen for a lot of movies just on a far smaller scale. Heck, we saw this on The Wire versus Breaking Bad tv shows, when BB fans would go and vote 1 on The Wire, increasing people who vote 1 from 0.7% to 8.7% in a matter of 3 weeks. They did suceed in throwing the show down to 5th place on IMDB.

 

[MatsVS]

The phony is a phony is a phony. Probably.

He used the word 'Marxism' when talking about White House Down.

...yeah...

 

[rddj623]

This is important stuff to consider for how we receive critique as well as give it. Objectivity in news reporting is a very different thing than criticism. Facts should never have agenda attached. Critique involves much more than the factual. Art is powerfully in the eye of the beholder. There are certain things that are universally accepted in regards to good or bad but those are almost always technical details. I find Bob a good dichotomy with whom I agree with about 50% of the time wholeheartedly and 50% of the time disagree with vehemently. This is why I like him so much as a critic, he both represents what I look for and brings a fresh and different perspective to what he reviews than I would see on my own. That is how we grow.

 

[Kittyhawk]

I kinda agree. We need only look as far as the recent GTAV reviews, to see that while the game was good, many reviews glossed over the games faults and rehashed beans servings. I think we'd be happier if we perhaps got a review alongside a deeper close up of what a game like GTA is trying to say to everyone. There's no harm in digging deeper, as great gems of understanding are waiting to be discovered.

 

[medv4380]

Two mistakes in this statistics.
1. your list seems to be what people consider cult classics.

You never clearly stated what you think the second mistake is, but to summaries your word salad it's that you're offended that some people watch something and without even finishing it make a snap decision.

You're making two very big statistical mistakes.

When doing any type of statistical measurement you must first define clearly what it is your measuring. In the case of Horror movies I need a clear list to measure from that ideally I have ZERO decision making power in its creation. If you have a "clearer" list that you personally have ZERO control over what gets classified into it. As a note, your augment against cult classics is nonsensical since Horror is considered a Cult genera. Also, I don't see how 2013 films could be considered "classic" at this point cult maybe but they're too young for classic.

Complaining about the "quality" of votes is meaningless in this kind of statistic. Where dealing with human opinion, and it won't matter if that opinion is well informed or not.

Here's a test you can do yourself. Take the remains of your Halloween candy and put it in a jar. Then ask twenty people to guess how many pieces of candy are in the jar, and have them put their answers in another container via secret vote. Then take all of their votes and average them. Then count the candy, and you'll see that the numbers are remarkably close. You probably wont have a single person who is able to guess the correct number. You'll have many absurd over estimates, and underestimates.

Now if you start screwing around with the number, and start picking and choosing which is going to be in the average and which isn't you're going to screw up the average, and it probably won't match. It doesn't matter that some little kid guessed 500 when there was no way it could have been any where near that high. It doesn't matter that some old man thinks your hiding a big 3 Musketeers in there, and guesses absurdly low. But if you arbitrarily cut them out of the stat it probably wont work. Leaving them in is the only valid option.

The people who give absurdly low or high ratings for movies, and games don't matter. They are countered by their polar opposite. Even people who create bots to artificially inflate score are countered by their competition who create bots to artificially deflate scores. A problem comes in if you try to find and remove bots because, unless you perfectly remove them all, you're going to mess up their natural balance.

 

[HBaskerville]

7 minutes to say "Everyone has a right to their opinion and who am I to judge?" Wow, what a waste of time.

 

[Pebkio]

Yeah, I only seem to watch movie reviewers who talk about the style choices and acting these days. I don't really care if it'll be fun/thrilling/tragic to watch. I want to hear about the appearance of any heart or passion.

---

I agree with Bob, for the most part, except when it comes to video games. No, not because of the concept but because of the exectution. The problem comes from ignorance: while we DO all know and have opinions on characters and motivations and whatnot, we don't all know and have opinions on game design and mechanics.

We can't have a theory-based discussion on games because we didn't all study advanced game creation. We know our story-telling well enough but there is more to a game than what characters are doing in the cutscenes. To some extent this also applies to movies, but movies are still, largely, about telling a story; a game is more about being a game you play and interact with.

We can keep trying but we don't even have a map that tells us how certain mechanics can be interpretted in and out of context.

 

[Strazdas]

Two mistakes in this statistics.
1. your list seems to be what people consider cult classics.

You never clearly stated what you think the second mistake is, but to summaries your word salad it's that you're offended that some people watch something and without even finishing it make a snap decision.

You're making two very big statistical mistakes.

When doing any type of statistical measurement you must first define clearly what it is your measuring. In the case of Horror movies I need a clear list to measure from that ideally I have ZERO decision making power in its creation. If you have a "clearer" list that you personally have ZERO control over what gets classified into it. As a note, your augment against cult classics is nonsensical since Horror is considered a Cult genera. Also, I don't see how 2013 films could be considered "classic" at this point cult maybe but they're too young for classic.

Complaining about the "quality" of votes is meaningless in this kind of statistic. Where dealing with human opinion, and it won't matter if that opinion is well informed or not.

Here's a test you can do yourself. Take the remains of your Halloween candy and put it in a jar. Then ask twenty people to guess how many pieces of candy are in the jar, and have them put their answers in another container via secret vote. Then take all of their votes and average them. Then count the candy, and you'll see that the numbers are remarkably close. You probably wont have a single person who is able to guess the correct number. You'll have many absurd over estimates, and underestimates.

Now if you start screwing around with the number, and start picking and choosing which is going to be in the average and which isn't you're going to screw up the average, and it probably won't match. It doesn't matter that some little kid guessed 500 when there was no way it could have been any where near that high. It doesn't matter that some old man thinks your hiding a big 3 Musketeers in there, and guesses absurdly low. But if you arbitrarily cut them out of the stat it probably wont work. Leaving them in is the only valid option.

The people who give absurdly low or high ratings for movies, and games don't matter. They are countered by their polar opposite. Even people who create bots to artificially inflate score are countered by their competition who create bots to artificially deflate scores. A problem comes in if you try to find and remove bots because, unless you perfectly remove them all, you're going to mess up their natural balance.

I do have a problem of articulaing my thoughts clearly, and im sorry for that.
You have a point about the movie dates, i was thinking of the original, older movies for these aforgetting that in fact we did got new carrie movie which im yet to see.

List of movies classified as horror is all well and good, what i had problem with is list of critics that you picked, particullary - rotten tomatoes, who pick only specific critics and shoul not be a good representation of critical average. As far as user average you are far beter off using IMDB, as that one has far more voters, thus higher representation. It does have a problem with american bias, since based on poll this year over 40% of site users are from USA.

Your test is a good example of statistical extremities. Absurd overestimates and understimates. In actual statistics such extremities are thrown away as bad data and do not enter the calculation.
Quality of votes do matter once you factor in the size of campaigns that was throw to downvote special titles and how much do we see people voting a movie bad based on director alone Uwe Boll is good example, Shayamalan or w.e.e his name is is another. We dont even need to look far, just look how biased Bobs opinion about JJ Abrams is.

Statistical extremities does not always lead to statistical average. For example in wage statistics we have very high extremities on the up side and none on the down side. This would raise the average significantly if they were not counted out. I recently did a statistical analysis of games i played. Counting the average of hours i spent per game, the average came absurdly high due to one game having over 5000 hours counted. Once i threw away top 5% and lowest 5% the average came surprisingly close to actual average.

I guess what im trying to say, is that people who give absurdly low or high scores MATTER, becuase they are not countered efficiently enough. There is no natural balance to begin with.

 

[Atmos Duality]

It's his usual strawman. "There's no such thing as objectivity all reviews are entirely personal and subjective opinions." It's just an excuse for laziness.

^Bullseye.
The "it's just an opinion" argument paradoxically defends itself by insisting that it's indefensible.

If everything in critical analysis is "just an opinion", then why the fuck should I care? Why should anyone care? Why does anyone even watch MovieBob, or Total Biscuit, or listened to the late Roger Ebert?

What gives an opinion any value? Its reasoning, in context.
And the thing MovieBob glosses over is that "perspective" only has value to an audience if the audience understands the context that created that perspective.

Absolutely nothing in MovieBob's spiel about Orson Scott Card's character and agenda had ANYTHING AT ALL to do with the merits or qualities of the Ender's Game movie.

I don't mind that MovieBob has an axe to grind with Mr. Card or anything for that matter. Card is pushing an anti-progressive agenda and you don't like it? Great! Please Mr. Chipman, tell the world what you think, but make sure that it's actually the subject of what you are supposed to be talking about.

To use an analogy: It'd make just as much sense to start espousing my intense dislike of Cherry Pie in the middle of my critique of a film about George Washington, just because it brought up the myth of him chopping down a cherry tree.

Why not? It's just my opinion after all.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

It's his usual strawman. "There's no such thing as objectivity all reviews are entirely personal and subjective opinions."

This would not be an issue, if there was not a cohort of commenters on every such thread claiming that an entirely objective review is both possible and of any value.

All I'm trying to do is establish a baseline for reasonable argument. We shouldn't even need to be debating this point. We could move on to a more nuanced discussion if it weren't for all the people screaming "OMG!! Subjectivity in a review! How dare you? Damn you for having an opinion of your own!"

This is eerily similar to the Sarkeesian situation. The most vocal detractors only give their target more power. Bob's arguments would be much weaker if it weren't for the brigade of people who, without fail, come here to say how reviews should be completely objective. His "opponents" are just giving him ammunition, and showing how relevant his words are. None of this should be relevant today, if it weren't for this. Just like Sarkeesian would be completely irrelevant, if it were not for the army of hate giving force to her words.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

Objectivity here isnt a question though. Whats in question is bobs needs to instead of reviewing a movie and talking about a movie, he would then rip movie to pieces based on what the auhor of the book the movie is based on did in real life. I dont know about you, but i dont want this type of subjectivity in my reviews.

Except that's exactly what Bob didn't do. He mentioned controversy about the author in the preface, and then went on to review the movie based on its own merits, not taking the author's personal beliefs or actions into account.

 

[Manji187]

Excellent video. I'm tired of the popular resistance to critical analysis, and this idea that looking for deeper meanings or relating works to broader, real world topics is just "reading too much into it."

Or that as soon as uncommon words such as ludonarrative dissonance are used, some people go "whoa dude, cut the pretentious crap and just have fun". I wish more people would be willing to discuss more complex gaming topics in depth, especially on the Escapist...no such luck though, not really.

 

[Manji187]

Excellent video. I'm tired of the popular resistance to critical analysis, and this idea that looking for deeper meanings or relating works to broader, real world topics is just "reading too much into it."

Or that as soon as uncommon words such as ludonarrative dissonance are used, some people go "whoa dude, cut the pretentious crap and just have fun". I wish more people would be willing to discuss more complex gaming topics in depth, especially on the Escapist...no such luck though, not really.

That is because games aren't really complex in the sense you are talking about.

An elaboration would be nice instead of a single statement, but ultimately I think you misunderstood me. I was talking about "more complex gaming TOPICS". Topics about gaming that are more complex than say graphics and/ or gameplay (camera, controls, boss fights etc).

 

[Strazdas]

Objectivity here isnt a question though. Whats in question is bobs needs to instead of reviewing a movie and talking about a movie, he would then rip movie to pieces based on what the auhor of the book the movie is based on did in real life. I dont know about you, but i dont want this type of subjectivity in my reviews.

Except that's exactly what Bob didn't do. He mentioned controversy about the author in the preface, and then went on to review the movie based on its own merits, not taking the author's personal beliefs or actions into account.

except that he said he woudl support boycotting this movie based on author of the book its based on (not even the movie author, the guy was credited for writing a book, he had nothing to do with the movie). He mentioned the contraversy at the begining wanting to make an illusino of seperation, but then still included that into its review. And that would ahve been gone past, but then he created this video where he claims that he was right to do it.

capchA: filthy dirty mess

its sentient i tell you.

 

[GryffinDarkBreed]

*gets to 4:30 mark, stops video*

I'm going to stop you right there, MovieBob. What fucking privilege does "Being a male gamer" provide? There's no status to it, there's no upside to it outside of perhaps better hand-eye coordination than a non-gamer. What PRIVILEGE does a male gamer have that female gamers don't? Please enlighten us you bloody blind feminist.

Stop drinking the Kool-Aid, Bob. Feminism is a political group whose agenda is securing as many rights and privileges for females as possible, even though they're already a heavily privileged class.

If you want true equal rights, try Egalitarianism or Universal Humanism, not Feminism.

Even those NAFALTs out there are still simple minded, arrogant fools who think you can fix all the gender equality issues by just focusing on one side of the scale.

 

[GryffinDarkBreed]

@Andrew: Agreed. There is a difference between a critique with a bias and a critique aimed at pushing the reviewer's own bias upon the audience.

What's the difference?

A review with a bias
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/7196-Boob-Wars-and-Dragon-Crowns

A reviewer pushing their bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropes_vs._Women_in_Video_Games

One uses thoughtful insight on the matter, the other twists and bends what they are reviewing to try to make the audience believe that what they are saying is the truth.

Two issues, the first is kinda semantic as one is a review and one is a industry wide critique. I'm not sure if you can compare something that is focused on one game as a case study, and what that is a survey of many games.

The second is, what if I think Anita's is truthful and insightful? What if what she says is true to me?

Truth is objective. If it's 'True' to you, but 'Untrue' to someone else, then it is subjective opinion and thus is not fact.

I'd advise you look into the various myriad critiques, rebuttals and debunkings of Sarkeesian. Do not look at just one person's position without looking into the legitimate disassemblies of their arguments. Here, let me get a few for you:


Dangerous Analysis disassembles Anita's work using an academic standard.


Thunderf00t also took a good swing at her strawwomen.

 

[Something Amyss]

But selective reading is a wonderful thing isn?t it.

You mean like you just did when you selectively criticised that part devoid of the rest of my comment
Yeah, you probably shouldn't do that if you think it's so bad.

It also doesn't stop what I said from being true, so I guess that's two strikes.

 

[Therarchos]

I'm sorry Bob. Love your show and yes. Pure objectivity doesn't exist, but there is a huge difference between Subjectivity and attempted objectivity. You can not state your point of view in criticism or journalism without putting forth your point of view put that is a lazy excuse for not trying to. I might not agree with a journalist arguments on the Bush era, but that should not be a reason for not accepting the factual truths of said arguments (if factual and true) The old critics said I don't like said movie (or game) for xxx reason but at least I had the chance of making a stand. Accepting or deny the evidence put forth. Most critics or journalists today do not even try to but forth the evidence because "objectivity" doesn't exist.

They are wrong. I might like Spec Ops: the line. for putting games on the arts/social criticism board but that doesn't change the fact that the gameplay is clunky and incomplete (love the game though).

 

[Farther than stars]

When you make a claim against critics that they aren't behavior statisticians you're inadvertently giving credit to Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic. The average scores of users, and critics, is the statisticians way of removing the bias to show the "Normal", or "Objective" view. That's really the only way to do it, but I wouldn't expect a movie critic to understand the wisdom, and madness of the crowd.

Actually, that's only the case if the statistician also takes into account the makeup of the crowd. So, if it were true that men view action films more often (than women) and women view rom-coms more often (than men), then without taking that variance into account, the totals of Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic are still inadvertently skewered.