The problems with the supposedly "unbiased" review

[RagingTiger]

bi·as
ˈbīəs
noun
1.
prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.
"there was evidence of bias against foreign applicants"
synonyms: prejudice, partiality, partisanship, favoritism, unfairness, one-sidedness

Basically I don't want games getting bad reviews because someone was eating meat in the game and the writer is a vegan, yes reviews will need a certain degree of personal opinion to make it entertaining to read, there is an old saying where I'm from "Never talk about politics or religion at the bar" simply because these will be different for different people, the same rule can be applied to reviews, just because it offended you doesn't mean it will offend me, and with that I won't have the same experience of the game. Rather talk about the things we will both see in the game.

 

[GloatingSwine]

That's a very extreme example. In the fighting game genre, it's hard for a fighting game fan to ignore inherent problems in a fighting game, because those problems determine whether they win or lose. A long time Tekken fan can detect even the smallest change in gameplay upon the next iteration of Tekken. This is something they could pick up as opposed to someone who does not like fighting games at all, but I digress.

Right, but that's a review that's only useful to people who are as invested in Tekken as the reviewer. But a good reviewer doesn't write reviews only for fans of the thing they're reviewing unless they are publishing in a limited environment where those shared biases can be expected.

To anyone who isn't sufficiently into the genre to expect the conventions of fighting games "crap tutorial and singleplayer" might be relevant information (because those are gateway things that could turn them into fighting game fans) but a reviewer whose biases were "is a fighting game fan" might not think to comment much on them in the review because they expect them.

 

[QuintonMcLeod]

Objective reviews are boring since you'd basically be limited to saying what the thing is. It is a game, where you are X and you proceed by shooting Y's and navigating environments.

Isn't that... I dunno... What a review is suppose to be?

No a review is an evaluation, not a description.

But I've never really view reviews as being descriptions of what games are. You can certainly give your opinion on graphics, sound, gameplay, replayability and etc. without sounding boring, don't you agree?

Once you start giving opinions... you become a biased review.

But you can't evaluate without giving an opinion.

Reviews are inherently subjective and biased, there is no way for them not to be. A good reviewer is aware of their own biases and applies critical thought to how those biases affected their opinion of the product, and says so in the review.

Exactly my point. A good reviewer either makes no pretense at being unbias and wears their bias proudly like say Yahtzee or Moviebob, or tries to make sure to state their biases and try to exclude them from their evaluation.. which is impossible,. Human psyche works in a funny way.. we aren't consciously aware of more than half our own biases so it is impossible to exclude them or be up front. Best solution is to simply roll with them... if someone recognizes your biases and shares those biases then your review will be more useful to them and to those that don't well they are very well aware of your biases.

Everyone has bias, but that's not what objectivity means. When reviewing a game, objectivity, in this sense, doesn't mean to be free of bias. It simply means to be fair. Let me provide you a few more examples:

If you ding GTA5 for poor controls (for example) and you remove points from that game, then every game you review after that with poor controls should also be dinged. If you're willing to ignore glaring defects in a game simply because you enjoyed the game while condemning another game for having those same issues, then that's when your review is no longer objective.

Nope... sorry. see, whether a game has poor control or not is a subjective issue. Though not as subjective as others. The question is, the impact of the control and it's foibles on the game play. If the impact is minimal then well it's not an issue is it?

The Polygon reviewer that reviewed Bayonetta 2 had reviewed other games that totally sexualized its characters, but he turned a blind eye to it. When it came to Bayonetta 2, he suddenly had a problem with it. That's the issue here (among many I've listed in my previous post).

Perfectly fair... again.. we're getting into the realms of subjective perception and taste.. what you perceive as sexualized may not be what I or someone else perceives as sexualized. It's like spicy food.

I think we're agreeing with each other, but for perhaps the wrong reasons...

 

[QuintonMcLeod]

bi·as
ˈbīəs
noun
1.
prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.
"there was evidence of bias against foreign applicants"
synonyms: prejudice, partiality, partisanship, favoritism, unfairness, one-sidedness

Basically I don't want games getting bad reviews because someone was eating meat in the game and the writer is a vegan, yes reviews will need a certain degree of personal opinion to make it entertaining to read, there is an old saying where I'm from "Never talk about politics or religion at the bar" simply because these will be different for different people, the same rule can be applied to reviews, just because it offended you doesn't mean it will offend me, and with that I won't have the same experience of the game. Rather talk about the things we will both see in the game.

This is precisely what I'm saying. Unfortunately, the industry is filled without people attempting to force their ideals onto other gamers who simply do not share them. Instead, they ought to just talk about the games they're reviewing.

 

[EternallyBored]

I think you and I agree a lot more than we may both think. What are your opinion's on Polygon's Bayonetta 2 review?

After having just read it, it's a review that covers a lot of the gameplay points, and misses others, given that its a WiiU game, I can understand why graphics weren't a major consideration, the bulk of the review seemed to swing from talking about gameplay to the problems the reviewer had with the sexualization. The review also doesn't talk about the story as much as I usually like in my reviews.

The sexualization complaints are ones I both agree with the author on some points and disagree on others, and I can understand why it would hurt his enjoyment of the game, the text praises much of the game whilst deriding the presentation of bayonetta herself, and that while he enjoyed the action, the propensity for the game to have heavily sexualized moments interspersed during the fights seriously impacted his enjoyment of the game.

The podcast at the end features the reviewer talking about how he really liked the mechanics, but that there was a subjective component that seriously caused him issues, and he justifies his views fairly well even if I disagree with the degree with which they may impact. He also talks about how a couple of other negatives for the game were not mentioned for space reasons and how the scoring system works.

The score seems unusually low, but that's not so much Bayonetta specifically as it seems to be an issue with polygon in general, or at least a few reviewers on it. Polygon is sort of the anti-IGN, where IGN takes flak for criticizing a game heavily in the written review but still giving it an 8.5-9.5. Polygon seems to have a lot of reviews that heavily praise a game whilst only listing a few negatives, or negatives that don't seem like a big deal, and then sticking it with a 7-8 range score. Even games that don't list ideological complaints will often get very low end scores of 7-8.5 on Polygon, so that seems more like just how their scoring rubric breaks down. As a side note, the person who writes the text of the review isn't the sole arbiter of the score review, Polygon uses some kind of weird median score system amongst multiple staff members.

Overall, it's not my cup of tea, but I can easily see how such a review would be useful to some people, especially if taken in consideration with a range of other reviews and viewpoints on the game, from the other people giving it a 7-8 to the people giving it perfect scores.

I have to disagree with you. Saying Bayonetta 2 is over sexualized and then doxing it is the same as saying GTA is too violent and doxing that. If the series is known to be sexual (as Bayonetta 1 clearly shows), why punish the sequel for incorporating a tone the original already has? This is exactly what happens in this Polygon review. Saying a character is too sexy and then calling the game "bad" because of it is disingenuous to the gamers who really only want to know if the game is good or not.

I think you are missing several things, firstly, he never calls the game bad, not even enough to warrant putting it in quotes, he only mentions that the sexualization detracted from his enjoyment, he goes out of his way to remark that this is an entirely subjective point, and includes the caveat that it hurt his personal enjoyment, as he explains in the post review podcast, it is like when people docked points from Ninja Gaiden for being too difficult, as you say, difficulty was the point of ninja gaiden, but plenty of mainstream sites docked the game points for being frustrating or too difficult.

Much like some people thought NG was too difficult, the reviewer here thought the game was too sexualized and that the sexualization hurt the game rather than helped it, saying "that's the point of the game", does not make it immune from criticism, you can still launch a critique of why GTA's over the top violence may detract from the game, or why sexualization does not work as well as the gamemakers intended. It is perfectly valid to criticize a game that does something intentionally if you still think the game isn't doing it well, or you think that the intention is wrong and subtracts from the other elements, in this case, that would be the reviewer's opinion of the quality of the combat system. That does not mean that such criticism is always right, but the intention of a game does not suddenly make it immune from being disliked either.

Finally, Polygon doesn't just dock points due to a single reviewer, as I said in my previous post, the score system that Polygon uses is a consensus between multiple staff on the sight, and it is also not supposed to be a determination of how good or bad a game is, they say multiple times that the score is a recommendation for how much the staff think the game is worth picking up, and a 7.5 is still a recommendation according to their review scale. Now, you can think that points system is silly, and I would agree, Polygon seems to have a lot of odd quirks to its points scale and how the final point score is determined, which would explain why a their reviews end up being controversial from time to time.

EDIT: also it's docking points, not doxing them. Doxxing is when you reveal someone's personal information over the internet, and docking is when you subtract something from the whole. Although this is also actually explicitly wrong, as the Polygon review specifically brings out in the podcast that their numerical score system does not work on a basis of starting at 10 and docking points from there, so even the word docking is not technically accurate because they are not subtracting points from a potential score of 10.

 

[Hades]

Every review is subjective and that's a good thing but only if it remains reasonably so.

At the end of the day your reviewing a game, your not writing it to showcase your political beliefs. Reviewers can tell us if they have a philosophical issue with the game but I don't think it should detract from the score. Is it fair to withhold points for something as inherently subjective as a political or social stance?

 

[Kerethos]

bi·as
ˈbīəs
noun
1.
prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.
"there was evidence of bias against foreign applicants"
synonyms: prejudice, partiality, partisanship, favoritism, unfairness, one-sidedness

Basically I don't want games getting bad reviews because someone was eating meat in the game and the writer is a vegan, yes reviews will need a certain degree of personal opinion to make it entertaining to read, there is an old saying where I'm from "Never talk about politics or religion at the bar" simply because these will be different for different people, the same rule can be applied to reviews, just because it offended you doesn't mean it will offend me, and with that I won't have the same experience of the game. Rather talk about the things we will both see in the game.

This is precisely what I'm saying. Unfortunately, the industry is filled without people attempting to force their ideals onto other gamers who simply do not share them. Instead, they ought to just talk about the games they're reviewing.

First off, you don't want no bias, you want no negative bias and plenty of positive bias that might make one overlook things you don't find important.

And here's an example:
I enjoy third person games and I'd probably guess they are, by far, the types of games I've spent the most hours of my life playing. Ranging from shooters to platformers to RPG's. By your logic of no bias I can directly think of a game that should never get anything above average in score, a game I'm currently playing (for the first time); Dark Souls.

It doesn't have good texture quality, controls are sluggish, tutorial tells you how to move (after you've figured it out), it runs like shit on any system due to poor optimization, the story is minimal, some enemies and traps just murder you without warning (unless you know where they are before you can see them, basically you've been murdered at least once already). It's a technical mess. But it's still a fun game; if you're a hateful masochist that enjoys trying to figure out wtf any of it means or what you're actually supposed to do or even where to go.

Based on your unbiased criteria's I should rate the game at best average, if I go by mechanics and technical aspects and ignore my own bias. At best, because that's being damn generous.

But even though most of it is, quite frankly, (and I'm being kind here) poorly done I - as evidently a hateful masochist that enjoys being slightly lost, angry, not knowing wtf I'm doing or going, unfair deaths and am able to forgive tanking framerates - still find the game quite enjoyable.

And so would, with all my bias, rate it fairly high (around 4/5) and gladly make sure people know the game has a load of problems you'll have to just suffer through. And that it pretty much requires you have a bias towards games that hates you, and don't want to tell you how the mechanics actually works, yet has an intriguing and strange world you want to burn and murder your way through in the hopes of getting that sweet revenge and perhaps finding out what most of the stuff actually does or is for. (Because good luck on that without a wiki or multiple playthroughs).

But that kind of positive bias is apparently acceptable. But if I didn't have the bias to overlook all these problems, I should not give an opinion on it. Because then the review would be tainted by my negative bias or political views.

Perhaps I just expect too much hand holding from games? Value story too much? Am a framerate junkie PC elitist? Can't see the artistic value through the poor textures and sluggish controls? I'm not good enough to play these challenging games and therefore should not?
Just to mention a few of the claims made of supposed "bias" that apparently means a reviewer should not review a game.

Dark Souls - a below average game that a lot of people, myself included, still think is great. All thanks to "the bias".

Captcha: "take care" - Yes, you certainly should while playing a Souls game. They are not for everyone, and you have every right to think they are terrible games.

 

[DementedSheep]

bi·as
ˈbīəs
noun
1.
prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.
"there was evidence of bias against foreign applicants"
synonyms: prejudice, partiality, partisanship, favoritism, unfairness, one-sidedness

Basically I don't want games getting bad reviews because someone was eating meat in the game and the writer is a vegan, yes reviews will need a certain degree of personal opinion to make it entertaining to read, there is an old saying where I'm from "Never talk about politics or religion at the bar" simply because these will be different for different people, the same rule can be applied to reviews, just because it offended you doesn't mean it will offend me, and with that I won't have the same experience of the game. Rather talk about the things we will both see in the game.

This is precisely what I'm saying. Unfortunately, the industry is filled without people attempting to force their ideals onto other gamers who simply do not share them. Instead, they ought to just talk about the games they're reviewing.

And I see a whole bunch of people trying dictate to reviewer what is and isn't important enough to mention in their own review regardless of whether it affects their enjoyment or not because you don't care = it's "bias". It doesn't offend you? well good for you but the review isn't made for you. Other people might actually want know about this shit. If it's in the game they are talking about the goddamn game. So long as the reviewer isn't lying, doesn't gloss over and down play everything else to talk about one point and makes it clear what is affecting the score it's not an issue. If you don't agree with them that's fine. Feel free to adjust how good or bad you think the game will be based on how much you care about that problem or whether you like things they don't.

 

[QuintonMcLeod]

I think you and I agree a lot more than we may both think. What are your opinion's on Polygon's Bayonetta 2 review?

After having just read it, it's a review that covers a lot of the gameplay points, and misses others, given that its a WiiU game, I can understand why graphics weren't a major consideration, the bulk of the review seemed to swing from talking about gameplay to the problems the reviewer had with the sexualization. The review also doesn't talk about the story as much as I usually like in my reviews.

The sexualization complaints are ones I both agree with the author on some points and disagree on others, and I can understand why it would hurt his enjoyment of the game, the text praises much of the game whilst deriding the presentation of bayonetta herself, and that while he enjoyed the action, the propensity for the game to have heavily sexualized moments interspersed during the fights seriously impacted his enjoyment of the game.

The podcast at the end features the reviewer talking about how he really liked the mechanics, but that there was a subjective component that seriously caused him issues, and he justifies his views fairly well even if I disagree with the degree with which they may impact. He also talks about how a couple of other negatives for the game were not mentioned for space reasons and how the scoring system works.

The score seems unusually low, but that's not so much Bayonetta specifically as it seems to be an issue with polygon in general, or at least a few reviewers on it. Polygon is sort of the anti-IGN, where IGN takes flak for criticizing a game heavily in the written review but still giving it an 8.5-9.5. Polygon seems to have a lot of reviews that heavily praise a game whilst only listing a few negatives, or negatives that don't seem like a big deal, and then sticking it with a 7-8 range score. Even games that don't list ideological complaints will often get very low end scores of 7-8.5 on Polygon, so that seems more like just how their scoring rubric breaks down. As a side note, the person who writes the text of the review isn't the sole arbiter of the score review, Polygon uses some kind of weird median score system amongst multiple staff members.

Overall, it's not my cup of tea, but I can easily see how such a review would be useful to some people, especially if taken in consideration with a range of other reviews and viewpoints on the game, from the other people giving it a 7-8 to the people giving it perfect scores.

I have to disagree with you. Saying Bayonetta 2 is over sexualized and then doxing it is the same as saying GTA is too violent and doxing that. If the series is known to be sexual (as Bayonetta 1 clearly shows), why punish the sequel for incorporating a tone the original already has? This is exactly what happens in this Polygon review. Saying a character is too sexy and then calling the game "bad" because of it is disingenuous to the gamers who really only want to know if the game is good or not.

I think you are missing several things, firstly, he never calls the game bad, not even enough to warrant putting it in quotes, he only mentions that the sexualization detracted from his enjoyment, he goes out of his way to remark that this is an entirely subjective point, and includes the caveat that it hurt his personal enjoyment, as he explains in the post review podcast, it is like when people docked points from Ninja Gaiden for being too difficult, as you say, difficulty was the point of ninja gaiden, but plenty of mainstream sites docked the game points for being frustrating or too difficult.

Much like some people thought NG was too difficult, the reviewer here thought the game was too sexualized and that the sexualization hurt the game rather than helped it, saying "that's the point of the game", does not make it immune from criticism, you can still launch a critique of why GTA's over the top violence may detract from the game, or why sexualization does not work as well as the gamemakers intended. It is perfectly valid to criticize a game that does something intentionally if you still think the game isn't doing it well, or you think that the intention is wrong and subtracts from the other elements, in this case, that would be the reviewer's opinion of the quality of the combat system. That does not mean that such criticism is always right, but the intention of a game does not suddenly make it immune from being disliked either.

Finally, Polygon doesn't just dock points due to a single reviewer, as I said in my previous post, the score system that Polygon uses is a consensus between multiple staff on the sight, and it is also not supposed to be a determination of how good or bad a game is, they say multiple times that the score is a recommendation for how much the staff think the game is worth picking up, and a 7.5 is still a recommendation according to their review scale. Now, you can think that points system is silly, and I would agree, Polygon seems to have a lot of odd quirks to its points scale and how the final point score is determined, which would explain why a their reviews end up being controversial from time to time.

No, I believe you're actually missing the point entirely.

1) He has reviewed older games which had just as much or even more sexuality than what Bayonetta 2 is presenting, however, he mentions nothing about it in those games. Up comes along Bayonetta 2, and all of a sudden, it's an issue.

2) He's still pushing his own ideology upon the game in question, and he is "docking" points because of it. If he had played the game and completely skipped the cutscenes, would the game score this low? Of course not, because what he's reviewing is no longer the game, but rather, the sexuality surrounding the game.

 

[EternallyBored]

No, I believe you're actually missing the point entirely.

1) He has reviewed older games which had just as much or even more sexuality than what Bayonetta 2 is presenting, however, he mentions nothing about it in those games. Up comes along Bayonetta 2, and all of a sudden, it's an issue.

2) He's still pushing his own ideology upon the game in question, and he is "docking" points because of it. If he had played the game and completely skipped the cutscenes, would the game score this low? Of course not, because what he's reviewing is no longer the game, but rather, the sexuality surrounding the game.

1. you are going to have to provide context here, I do not know what other games he has reviewed with "more" sexualization than Bayonetta 2, which is a loaded and subjective statement on your part as I'm not sure I can honestly think of many games that are more sexualized than Bayonetta. Other than porn games, I would put Bayonetta's sexualization above pretty much every game out there, even games like DOA extreme beach volleyball and fighting games like Soul Caliber don't feature actual stripping and poll dancing throughout the games from the main character, so what you see as more sexualized games being overlooked, the reviewer may see as cases of less sexualized games that don't detract as much from his experience.

2. the sexuality is a much greater part of the game than the cutscenes, have you played Bayonetta? It is irrevocably linked to the gameplay, attack moves, enemies, story, cutscenes, and character designs, it is impossible to skip the cutscenes and still avoid the sexualization, so yes, he likely would have been just as hard on the game if he had skipped them.

Not that this point makes any sense anyway, if you have to skip a segment of the game in order to enjoy it more, that doesn't mean you are inserting ideology into it, if I skip the cutscenes in FF XIII that eliminates most of my problems with the games story, but if I were reviewing it, it would still be valid for me to critique the story because it is a part of the game, having to excise a portion of the game to improve your opinion on it is not a strike against the reviewer, and it doesn't mean he is pushing his ideology upon the game.

 

[Silvanus]

If he had played the game and completely skipped the cutscenes, would the game score this low? Of course not, because what he's reviewing is no longer the game, but rather, the sexuality surrounding the game.

Why is this relevant? The cutscenes are in the game, and there's no reason to discount them when writing a review.

 

[EternallyBored]

If he had played the game and completely skipped the cutscenes, would the game score this low? Of course not, because what he's reviewing is no longer the game, but rather, the sexuality surrounding the game.

Why is this relevant? The cutscenes are in the game, and there's no reason to discount them when writing a review.

I'm honestly confused by this as well, I'm not sure what he means by separating the sexuality surrounding the game. The sexualization is part of the game, interwoven into the animation, fights, and even the camera system, there isn't any way to separate the sexuality surrounding the game, because it's not surrounding it, its embedded into the very mechanics of the game itself.

The best interpretation I can come up with is that he thinks that the sexualization should be separated from the praises of the mechanical elements of the combat system and that they should both be rated separately, I'm not exactly sure, the cutscene line confuses me.

 

[Erttheking]

I think you and I agree a lot more than we may both think. What are your opinion's on Polygon's Bayonetta 2 review?

After having just read it, it's a review that covers a lot of the gameplay points, and misses others, given that its a WiiU game, I can understand why graphics weren't a major consideration, the bulk of the review seemed to swing from talking about gameplay to the problems the reviewer had with the sexualization. The review also doesn't talk about the story as much as I usually like in my reviews.

The sexualization complaints are ones I both agree with the author on some points and disagree on others, and I can understand why it would hurt his enjoyment of the game, the text praises much of the game whilst deriding the presentation of bayonetta herself, and that while he enjoyed the action, the propensity for the game to have heavily sexualized moments interspersed during the fights seriously impacted his enjoyment of the game.

The podcast at the end features the reviewer talking about how he really liked the mechanics, but that there was a subjective component that seriously caused him issues, and he justifies his views fairly well even if I disagree with the degree with which they may impact. He also talks about how a couple of other negatives for the game were not mentioned for space reasons and how the scoring system works.

The score seems unusually low, but that's not so much Bayonetta specifically as it seems to be an issue with polygon in general, or at least a few reviewers on it. Polygon is sort of the anti-IGN, where IGN takes flak for criticizing a game heavily in the written review but still giving it an 8.5-9.5. Polygon seems to have a lot of reviews that heavily praise a game whilst only listing a few negatives, or negatives that don't seem like a big deal, and then sticking it with a 7-8 range score. Even games that don't list ideological complaints will often get very low end scores of 7-8.5 on Polygon, so that seems more like just how their scoring rubric breaks down. As a side note, the person who writes the text of the review isn't the sole arbiter of the score review, Polygon uses some kind of weird median score system amongst multiple staff members.

Overall, it's not my cup of tea, but I can easily see how such a review would be useful to some people, especially if taken in consideration with a range of other reviews and viewpoints on the game, from the other people giving it a 7-8 to the people giving it perfect scores.

I have to disagree with you. Saying Bayonetta 2 is over sexualized and then doxing it is the same as saying GTA is too violent and doxing that. If the series is known to be sexual (as Bayonetta 1 clearly shows), why punish the sequel for incorporating a tone the original already has? This is exactly what happens in this Polygon review. Saying a character is too sexy and then calling the game "bad" because of it is disingenuous to the gamers who really only want to know if the game is good or not.

I think you are missing several things, firstly, he never calls the game bad, not even enough to warrant putting it in quotes, he only mentions that the sexualization detracted from his enjoyment, he goes out of his way to remark that this is an entirely subjective point, and includes the caveat that it hurt his personal enjoyment, as he explains in the post review podcast, it is like when people docked points from Ninja Gaiden for being too difficult, as you say, difficulty was the point of ninja gaiden, but plenty of mainstream sites docked the game points for being frustrating or too difficult.

Much like some people thought NG was too difficult, the reviewer here thought the game was too sexualized and that the sexualization hurt the game rather than helped it, saying "that's the point of the game", does not make it immune from criticism, you can still launch a critique of why GTA's over the top violence may detract from the game, or why sexualization does not work as well as the gamemakers intended. It is perfectly valid to criticize a game that does something intentionally if you still think the game isn't doing it well, or you think that the intention is wrong and subtracts from the other elements, in this case, that would be the reviewer's opinion of the quality of the combat system. That does not mean that such criticism is always right, but the intention of a game does not suddenly make it immune from being disliked either.

Finally, Polygon doesn't just dock points due to a single reviewer, as I said in my previous post, the score system that Polygon uses is a consensus between multiple staff on the sight, and it is also not supposed to be a determination of how good or bad a game is, they say multiple times that the score is a recommendation for how much the staff think the game is worth picking up, and a 7.5 is still a recommendation according to their review scale. Now, you can think that points system is silly, and I would agree, Polygon seems to have a lot of odd quirks to its points scale and how the final point score is determined, which would explain why a their reviews end up being controversial from time to time.

No, I believe you're actually missing the point entirely.

1) He has reviewed older games which had just as much or even more sexuality than what Bayonetta 2 is presenting, however, he mentions nothing about it in those games. Up comes along Bayonetta 2, and all of a sudden, it's an issue.

2) He's still pushing his own ideology upon the game in question, and he is "docking" points because of it. If he had played the game and completely skipped the cutscenes, would the game score this low? Of course not, because what he's reviewing is no longer the game, but rather, the sexuality surrounding the game.

You cannot put opinions down to statistics. You want to know why he reviewed games with sexualization but didn't bring it up then? Because clearly he didn't get bothered by it then. There are some things that are ok in some games or just work that don't in other games. You can just sit down and go "If there is a 15% increase in boob shots then your opinion must change accordingly". Human beings are not robots.

I've yet to have someone explain to me why this is such a horrible thing. Reviewers tend to bring their "personal ideology" in when it comes to reviewing games. Namely on what they think is a good game. Technically every reviewer who praised Bayonetta is pushing their personaly ideology because according to their ideology, Bayonetta is a good character. But people don't complain about THAT do they? He doesn't like it...and? You've got countless other reviewers singing Bayonetta's praises, why is one reviewer giving it a not even that negative review such a big deal. Because he didn't like Bayonetta's design? Well if the developers wanted him to not have the cutscenes as part of the experience, they shouldn't have put cutscenes in.

 

[Scootinfroodie]

This is the second charge of "condescension" from you, and I was made curious. I read back through your posts in this thread, and then your post history in general. I don't know if you're oblivious to your own posting style, or simply calling out behavior your recognize in yourself. Yes, I am being condescending. I am most definitely not alone in that. Alas, I can't control your behavior, I can only control my own, so I'll try to be less of an ass. I would appreciate it if you would return the favor.

Your initial contribution to the thread was dismissal and condescension. Your responses made heavy use of shaming language and attribution of ideology. I have been attempting to discuss your views on this matter and how they may relate to your opponent's views, but cannot when I am met with deflection and anger rather than more concrete statements. Comments about political affiliation coming out of left field and used to bolster further condescension does nothing to promote any sort of discussion

For myself, "too much" would be that point at which the bias distracted from my enjoyment of the review. Either by completely obfuscating the information I'd come to find, or by presenting an ideological perspective I found unpalatable.

So your complaints, on some level, are a reflection of your own ideas on the issue

In general, not at all. It's not for me to police the internet and decide what people should or shouldn't be reading.

I feel like you grossly misunderstand the purpose of these sorts of discussions
If I talk to my friend about how a local restaurant ought to start listing vegetarian and non vegetarian dishes, I'm not attempting to police restaurants and deciding what people should and should not eat. I'm merely stating what I feel to be true. If enough people feel this way about it, the restaurant has a choice between accepting this idea or losing customers to a restaurant that will appropriately label their vegetarian dishes. No website should be getting their panties in a bunch over a 5 page thread, and I think it's absurd to suggest that anyone here thinks they will.

Okay, this is one of several points that provoked my "bad faith" comment. I know from your posting history that you have spent time in the Gamer Gate threads, including the mega thread. From your tone and the people you choose to debate, I'm relatively certain I know which side of the debate you land on. I know you're aware of the existence of a media blacklist, and I know you're aware there have been calls to drum people out of the industry. I know you're one of the major reasons for that call is a presumed "ideological bias" in the media, and that the ideology in question is "liberal". I know you're aware that there have been calls to have people fired, to crumble websites, to "go to war".

Lets break this down

I know from your posting history that you have spent time in the Gamer Gate threads, including the mega thread.

So have you, so has Zachary Amaranth, etc. etc. etc.
This is also irrelevant. We're discussing games media and not a twitter hashtag or the mega thread

From your tone and the people you choose to debate, I'm relatively certain I know which side of the debate you land on.

Please elaborate. Am I not allowed to argue with certain people on the forums without being placed in a certain box? I wasn't aware of the existence of sacred political cows

I know you're aware of the existence of a media blacklist, and I know you're aware there have been calls to drum people out of the industry.

By some, yes. In some cases they're for reasons that have been used as grounds for termination very recently. This, however is also irrelevant to the topic at hand

I know you're one of the major reasons for that call is a presumed "ideological bias" in the media, and that the ideology in question is "liberal".

Would you like to explain why liberals and flat-out Marxists are attempting to drum "liberals" out of the games media?
If you'd like to know my political affiliation, I can grant that as well. I can guarantee I'm not a Stephen Harper supporter (I'm Canadian). I don't see how it should be relevant overall however

As for crumbling websites, there are definitely people who want some of these websites to go away entirely. Many of these people held these opinions before August. I don't really believe that these people have the power to actually make these sites go away, and from what I've seen most people would rather that the sites improved in quality and included a set of checks and balances to ensure that nobody runs rampant or ruins the already sketchy reputation of the publication by writing about a lover, patron or roommate.

I'm not going to data mine 1600 pages of thread to provide you quotes. I'm sure you're a lovely guy, but my investment in proving this point to you does not run that deep. You can dismiss it all you want on grounds of insufficient evidence, if that is your preference. Burden of proof is on me, and I'm unwilling to provide it, because it's a lot of fucking effort for something that ultimately doesn't matter very much to either of us. If you wish to characterize me as a fabulist, you may do so. I know what I read. There is a reason for my rancor on this issue.

It matters only to the extent that it's distracting from the core conversation. You later talk about me wading in here "swinging" but your response for the past few posts has been to try to implicitly label me in some way when it has nothing to do with the discussion. This isn't really easy to see as a non-hostile action, particularly with the number of attempts at ad hominem based on political affiliation strewn about these discussions

There's a reviewer named Tom Chick. He's been plying his trade in this industry for a long time. He's known for a couple of things...idiosyncratic taste in games, and a propensity for being honest whilst employing his entire 5 point scale. He often gives popular games he didn't enjoy bad scores, most famously Deus Ex. He is LOATHED for it. On this website, a year or two ago, there was a thread discussing his review of some Halo game or other. He was called a troll and a malingerer, a clickbaiter and an attention whore. Some people don't like "honest". Some people like confirmation of their existing beliefs. Quite frequently when someone charges a review with being "too biased", what they mean is "too not what I believe".

These things will always be said, but that does not invalidate the conversation. Feel absolutely free to call out instances like that for discussion. I would say, personally, that a number of these instances stem from a severe lack of trust, which is both a combination of the appearance of wrongdoing and the lack of transparency that permeates basically everything in the games industry and surrounding landscape

That's fine, as long as you acknowledge this isn't any more reliable than Alexa. If I offered up "my own experiences" or "word of mouth" to contradict your beliefs on this subject I highly doubt you'd put any stock in them.

Except the claim is simply that "people are leaving". I posted on RPS as Beemann a grand total of twice. I read the site for about 6 months to a year and I tend to post quite actively on sites I visit regularly (I'll probably pick up the pace further on the escapist once I spread out to more boards)
If you check RPS, you wont find posts from me on there from about the time of the Skullgirls review onwards. This is because I don't visit. I talk to people who share their browsing habits for the purposes of highlighting quality sites. I have no reason to believe that they're sneaking back for a quickie with John Walker's rants. It may be that the abundance of clickbait is causing a spike in traffic, but that doesn't prove that people are not leaving these sites.

As far as bulk users go, the only thing available is the pulling of ads. I don't recall making a comment about everyone leaving though, just that these sites were unnecessarily losing users. If I made a qualitative statement concerning website traffic (aside from the 10% boost that Archon posted about) that's my bad

I'm referring to Gamer Gate in general. The commonly accepted narrative is that Gamer Gate "won", and that the sites who wronged them were devastated and bleeding customers. I've never seen any concrete evidence to support that.

I've never seen this claimed outside of jokes and shills. The hastag is still rolling along and has been for months now. It doesn't seem like anyone has "won" to me

Yes, I attributed a sympathetic if not wholly involved stance in Gamer Gate to you. That was unfair of me.

Totalbiscuit, Eric Kain, Boogie2988, Christina Hoff Sommers, Alexander Macris, Intel, Kraft, Mercedez Benz etc. all believe in an evil liberal conspiracy?

Yes, a quick Google search confirms this to be true. I'm certainly not married to Alexa, the first time I even used it was when I Googled something along the lines of "site traffic" when wanting to see if sites really were taking it on the nose. If there a better tool, I'll happily use the better tool.

That's certainly valid, however my point was not that it was not definitive proof that there has been no issue with the readership of the sites in question. I would trust companies like Intel to be more unbiased about who they support moreso than I'd trust easily gamed metrics.

My OP, despite hanging on a particular interpretation of the terms...one employed almost universally through the thread up to that point...was not unreasonable. Yes, I exhibited astonishment that there was even debate. I also clarified my opinion and provided context. Your response to this was to wade in swinging and say I was being "absurd". I was already in a bad mood due to the poor judgment I showed earlier in the day reading the contents of a variety of Gamer Gate threads on the Off-Topic Forum, so I was not in the mood to be snotted at about semantics. Things devolved from there.

Your tone suggested more than astonishment, and it took several posts for you to fully list the context of your statements, and another few to admit that not everyone might be posting from the same perspective. I don't really see how you don't perceive your own actions as deciding to "wade in swinging"

The unfortunate thing is I've actually tried to stay relatively moderate in this debate (not THIS debate, but the GG debate), and clearly I'm becoming a bit polarized myself if I'm reacting THAT aggressively to perceived agenda. I need to take a break from reading this shit.

I think after ~50 days of madness a break is a perfectly acceptable thing. I'll be around should you wish to continue any discussion on this issue.

 

[Fishyash]

I strongly object to this attitude of "you should only review games of genres you like and have extensive experience with".

If you normally don't enjoy platformers, and people who normally never enjoy platformers never review them, how would you ever be encouraged to broaden your horizons when someone with similar tastes as yours finds a game they actually like? I don't normally enjoy racing games, but I've still encountered some that where really fun.

By your review requirements a reviewer should only play games of genres they like, and games with broader appeal should never be reviewed by anyone who's not already likely to be a fan.

I mean if Yahtzee played a JRPG even he had to admit was fun I would be much more likely to check out. Even though I had my fill of JRPG's after FFX (which I found, for the most part, quite fun).

Hey, I'm not telling anyone what games they should review. There's clearly a place for critics who review games of genres they don't like. Hell, you explained it to yourself. I'm just stating whose opinion I would trust more.

It's not the bias alone, as I said before, the more important part is the experience. You can still hate a genre yet be very experienced in it. Your opinion will come across as well informed, although probably lacking in passion. The problem is most people who are biased against a genre tend to be not very well versed in it, and it comes across as very ignorant looking.

Let's say a new racing game came out: One critic, who adores racing games and plays lots of them, rates it a 2/5. Another critic, who doesn't really like racing games, he's only played 3 others, he rates it 5/5.
It doesn't matter what I think of racing games, I'm going to trust the person who rated it 2/5 more, and it will influence my decision on whether getting the game or not. Of course, this assumes both critics are up to the same quality standards in their writing.

 

[MerlinCross]

You want to know why he reviewed games with sexualization but didn't bring it up then? Because clearly he didn't get bothered by it then.

I'd buy that, if he reviewed said games like hmmm maybe a year ago or more. If he did it within weeks, I'd probably raise an eyebrow.

This is a guess. At time of writing, haven't looked at the reviewer's history so I don't know. Maybe go do that now.

 

[Erttheking]

You want to know why he reviewed games with sexualization but didn't bring it up then? Because clearly he didn't get bothered by it then.

I'd buy that, if he reviewed said games like hmmm maybe a year ago or more. If he did it within weeks, I'd probably raise an eyebrow.

This is a guess. At time of writing, haven't looked at the reviewer's history so I don't know. Maybe go do that now.

Things don't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes you can hate something in one situation and love it in another. Normally I hate rape jokes, but just a couple days ago I laughed my ass off at a rape joke in South Park.

 

[MerlinCross]

Things don't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes you can hate something in one situation and love it in another. Normally I hate rape jokes, but just a couple days ago I laughed my ass off at a rape joke in South Park.

So if to give an example, I can like the sexualiztion in DoA but hate it in Bayonetta 2 and not be called out on it or be called a hypocrite? Side note this is an example, don't know if the reviewer plays or even knows of DoA. Other thing, I couldn't varify that one guy's claim of the reviewer playing even more sexualized games so this might be a moot point by now.

 

[Erttheking]

Things don't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes you can hate something in one situation and love it in another. Normally I hate rape jokes, but just a couple days ago I laughed my ass off at a rape joke in South Park.

So if to give an example, I can like the sexualiztion in DoA but hate it in Bayonetta 2 and not be called out on it or be called a hypocrite? Side note this is an example, don't know if the reviewer plays or even knows of DoA. Other thing, I couldn't varify that one guy's claim of the reviewer playing even more sexualized games so this might be a moot point by now.

So long as the reason that you said you hated it in DoA was that you just think boobs are never appropriate then no, you're not a hypocrite. To be honest Bayonetta just does more with it's sexualization and in clever ways. In DoA it's just kinda there.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Your initial contribution to the thread was dismissal and condescension.

I disagree. I apologize if you felt the tone was condescending. Tone is difficult to read. Go back and read some of your replies to Zachary whatsit. Do you think you strike a condescending tone? Yes, no? Do you think telling me I have "reading comprehension" problems indicates a calm and measured form of discussion? I've admitted I've been combative. It would be nice to hear a similar admission from you.

Your responses made heavy use of shaming language and attribution of ideology.

Please define "heavy use of shaming language" and provide quotes for substantiation, because I absolutely do not see that. I'd genuinely like to know what you are referring to.

Comments about political affiliation coming out of left field and used to bolster further condescension does nothing to promote any sort of discussion.

Gamer Gate has become a politicized discussion. I already apologized for this. I'm not entirely sure why you are piling on, unless you started replying without reading in full. I've done that many times myself.

So your complaints, on some level, are a reflection of your own ideas on the issue

Perils of this short form quote discussion, but I'm not actually certain what "complaints" you're referring to. My initial foray into this thread was to rebut complaints, not issue complaints, save the one about outright removal of voices from the discussion.

If I talk to my friend about how a local restaurant ought to start listing vegetarian and non vegetarian dishes, I'm not attempting to police restaurants and deciding what people should and should not eat. I'm merely stating what I feel to be true. If enough people feel this way about it, the restaurant has a choice between accepting this idea or losing customers to a restaurant that will appropriately label their vegetarian dishes. No website should be getting their panties in a bunch over a 5 page thread, and I think it's absurd to suggest that anyone here thinks they will.

There's that absurdity again. You've been on this website for...90 posts now? 100? I've been here for years. I've been here through Fake Gamer Girls, through the rise of Anita Sarkeesian threads, through the explosion of the "SJW" bogeyman, and more. People can, and do, make those sort of assertions all the time. This is also a single five page thread on the issue. There have been a pair of 1,000 odd page threads replete with website black lists and calls for mailing campaigns to smother sponsor support for particular websites. Whether websites 'get their panties in a bunch' is not really related to my statement. My statement is that I don't feel I'm the arbiter of what should and shouldn't be allowed as criticism in gaming. Other people clearly feel differently. If I started a blacklist and attempted to smother a website off the internet because I disapproved of it, I'd be removing that voice for everyone, not just myself.

Please elaborate. Am I not allowed to argue with certain people on the forums without being placed in a certain box? I wasn't aware of the existence of sacred political cows

I'm not "putting you in a box". If I make 50 pro-Christian posts on a website, and you saw them, and supposed I was Christian (I'm not, just an example), it would be rather needlessly churlish of me to slap your face and accuse you of "putting me in a box". If I'm incorrect about your stance on a given issue just correct it and move on. I also have no idea what "sacred political cows" you are referring to, or insinuating I referred to.

By some, yes. In some cases they're for reasons that have been used as grounds for termination very recently. This, however is also irrelevant to the topic at hand.

How are they "irrelevant" to the question of determining what should or shouldn't be allowed as criticism? I made the statement there are people who believe journalists should be fired for holding certain beliefs and allowing them to influence reviews. You have labelled that statement "absurd", and openly questioned whether anyone would ever do that. I'm becoming confused. Is this a miscommunication? And why does miscommunication keep coming up as a spelling error?

Would you like to explain why liberals and flat-out Marxists are attempting to drum "liberals" out of the games media?

Marxists? What?

If you'd like to know my political affiliation, I can grant that as well. I can guarantee I'm not a Stephen Harper supporter (I'm Canadian). I don't see how it should be relevant overall however.

Hey, good to know. I'm also Canadian.

It's relevant insofar as the dialogue around Gamer Gate, and this subsequent discussion of "objective reviews" (recently raised in that recent "girls of Gamer Gate" video), has been highly politicized for weeks now. If someone is coming at it from a political, entrenched perspective, it is going to hamper effective communication. However, as previously stated, I've already apologized for assuming a particular political affiliation for you.

As for crumbling websites, there are definitely people who want some of these websites to go away entirely.

Yes they do. And in many cases the supposed "corruption" being discussed is that they are "SJW journos" pushing liberal agendas and using their websites as pulpits. I'm totally behind someone saying "I don't like this, I'll never visit again". I'm not behind "Let's cut off their sponsorships and kill their websites, these people should be fired".

Many of these people held these opinions before August. I don't really believe that these people have the power to actually make these sites go away

Whether they can or not is rather irrelevant. The crux of our disagreement is I said there are people who wanted that, and you disagreed and demanded attribution and direct quotes.

It matters only to the extent that it's distracting from the core conversation. You later talk about me wading in here "swinging" but your response for the past few posts has been to try to implicitly label me in some way when it has nothing to do with the discussion. This isn't really easy to see as a non-hostile action, particularly with the number of attempts at ad hominem based on political affiliation strewn about these discussions

I'm not sure where you read ad-hominem, but I'm also not sure where you read "shaming language". Did I call you names? Did I undercut you personally? Did I say you lacked reading comprehension, for example?

These things will always be said, but that does not invalidate the conversation. Feel absolutely free to call out instances like that for discussion. I would say, personally, that a number of these instances stem from a severe lack of trust, which is both a combination of the appearance of wrongdoing and the lack of transparency that permeates basically everything in the games industry and surrounding landscape

There is a severe lack of trust stemming a presumption of back room deals leading to manipulated scores, yes. When people throw a fit over their favorite game getting a 3/5 instead of the 10/10 they insist it deserves, I don't read that as a lack of trust. I read it as a confirmation bias going unfulfilled.

Except the claim is simply that "people are leaving".

Sure, and without any other context or data it's a completely disinteresting claim. They could be leaving for any of a vast myriad of reasons.

I play a lot of MMOs. MMOs often suffer player shed, often quite rapidly. When this happens, you will have a long line up of people telling you exactly why everyone is leaving, and the reason is always their individual pet hate. The reality is that the reasons are always multi-factoral, and no one outside the individuals themselves and possibly the people parsing their feedback have the foggiest notion what is going on. You know as well as I do that humans like to shape events they witness to fit a narrative they form in their heads, and it's often a narrative they prefer. In this case, the narrative is websites being punished for their transgressions.

As far as bulk users go, the only thing available is the pulling of ads. I don't recall making a comment about everyone leaving though, just that these sites were unnecessarily losing users.

A question arises about which users, and why. I don't doubt they ARE losing users, they made some very polarizing arguments that made it abundantly clear that a certain stripe of user was no longer welcome. Total Biscuit, a supporter of Gamer Gate, has done the same thing...many times...rounding on his audience for their behavior, banning people for their comments, and eventually locking down discussion entirely outside of Reddit because he was "sick of idiots". He's lost viewers because of those actions.

Rock Paper Shotgun was quite frank about acknowledging that their "We're going to talk about feminism in gaming whenever we want" policy was going to cost them viewers. They evidently were prepared to lose said viewers. I don't know if you remember the comments on those articles before they were locked down, but some of those viewers were probably happy losses. As a person who once visited their site more regularly, I wish they'd given as much attention to keeping quality content on the site as they have to their wearisome punditry, but if wishes were horses...

I've never seen this claimed outside of jokes and shills. The hastag is still rolling along and has been for months now. It doesn't seem like anyone has "won" to me

How, exactly, do you determine a "shill"? God, I was in a thread just the other day where someone was stating that Gamer Gate had "already met all its victory conditions". It would be one of the multitude on Off-Topic. He also made some dire utterings about things becoming more violent, or something along those lines. Was that a joke? Was he a shill? How would you even know?

Totalbiscuit, Eric Kain, Boogie2988, Christina Hoff Sommers, Alexander Macris, Intel, Kraft, Mercedez Benz etc. all believe in an evil liberal conspiracy?

Few things...

1) A lot of advertisers just like to avoid controversy, period.
2) I don't know Total Biscuit personally, I have no idea what his beliefs are or aren't.
3) Christa Hoff Sommers is a member of a right wing political think tank (The American Enterprise Institute...and "right wing think tank" is their language, not mine). She rambled about "Hippy liberal art majors" among other naked pejoratives in her video on the subject (while affecting the most condescending sneer I've ever heard, I cannot imagine you would approve). I don't know her either, but I think there is sufficient evidence available to suggest we can be relatively assured of her political affiliation and views on the subject.
4) I don't know who these other people are.
5) No Milo Yannopolous? No Adam Baldwin? They're part of the discussion too, and have been quite frank about their opinions on the subject.
6) As I've said many times before, Gamer Gate is diffuse and there is no singular collective belief. Radical right-wing politics is most certainly a voice in the discussion, however. One of my favorite quotes from this forum on the subject was "You brought your politics into it, so we brought ours". Tit for tat, eye for an eye. Summarizes the tone of the entire debate nicely. However I DIGRESS I know you don't want to discuss Gamer Gate. I just think it's disingenuous to pretend it isn't a huge part of why this thread exists, and isn't informing the discussion.

That's certainly valid, however my point was not that it was not definitive proof that there has been no issue with the readership of the sites in question. I would trust companies like Intel to be more unbiased about who they support moreso than I'd trust easily gamed metrics.

Unbiased how? Intel has a single motivation, which is profit. We can't know what Intel's reasoning was or wasn't without a statement from them. Did we get one?

Your tone suggested more than astonishment, and it took several posts for you to fully list the context of your statements, and another few to admit that not everyone might be posting from the same perspective. I don't really see how you don't perceive your own actions as deciding to "wade in swinging".

I've freely admitted I was being combative. Again, not sure what the point is of piling on. If someone concedes a point do you traditionally continue to raise it?

I think after ~50 days of madness a break is a perfectly acceptable thing. I'll be around should you wish to continue any discussion on this issue.

That's fine, I'll continue talking to you, in this thread, provided we can keep the tone relatively conversational and accusation-lite.