Over the weekend, I had a good friend come and visit. While we browsed through my game library, I extolled the virtues of The Inquisitor. He looked at me with frank horror, because the game was objectively bad in his eyes. I sort of saw his point, if we argue that games are not just an art, but a craft too, then the foundations that The Inquisitor is built on are bad. However, that doesn’t change the way that game made me feel and how much it entertained me. We almost descended into CinemaSins level of critique, but avoided that by playing one of the worst FMV games I’ve ever encountered.
So, as a companion to another piece I am writing (out later), I actually dug up an old article I wrote in 2011(!). Some of the references are going to be out of date, and there are going to be a few typos, but bear with me.
[Cue flashback to 2011]
Only a few months ago, a friend politely listened to me rant about games as a medium and what they can do. A few days ago he broached the subject of the ‘No Russian’ scene from Modern Warfare 2. It was deeply affecting for him. This is something that I was really happy about, because it meant that he was seeing past it being a shooter. As much as I like to deride the COD series at least I can thank it for making someone think for once while playing a game (someone who normally wouldn’t). It is just unfortunate that the game that did it is called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I mean, look at that name.
The rest of the seeds were sown for this piece when I was reading the Observer (an English Sunday Broadsheet) and struck upon the film section of the paper. They have had the same film critic for as long as I can remember called Philip French. (author’s note: you can tell this article is old because French died in 2015, RIP to a real one)
Now I have never seen eye-to-eye with French’s selections for film of the week (he once chose Message in the Bottle with Kevin Costner), however I can read his page and respect his reasoning for why. He, more often than not, will dedicate a large amount of space to a film of merit that may not be a commercial success. The blockbusters see barely an inch and the meagre column inches dedicated appear to be more like a token concession to the fact that the film is going to generate several tens of millions at the cinema not because French finds any merit in them.
Now, I have a feeling that I wouldn’t want to hear Philip French’s thoughts on video games so I’m not saying he should switch careers and get cracking at Red Dead Redemption instead of True Grit, or start limbering up for the Streetfighter Evo Championships. What we do need is more people like him sitting down, in comfortable, mainstream positions and writing cogent articles about games.
Certainly we are starting to see Rock Paper Shotgun rising up in the PC field and ignoring the argument on whether games are art or not and just talking about ‘wot’ they think. This in turn is making us think. Unfortunately, this just isn’t enough.
With the games industry being bigger now then any other entertainment industry, with ever widening arcs of influence – not just with supporting fiction in book and comic book form but also with things like the soundtrack causing spikes in sales for the original artists – it would be assumed that we would have more mainstream critics and critiques with a mature out look on the subject matter.
Edge magazine, for all its excellent features and articles. still largely dedicates its main reviews to the game equivalents of The A-Team or Avatar. In its PAL release, Ico barely managed half a page in the publication. This is typical of an industry that barely seems to understand itself outside of explosions. A game can’t seem/seen to be deep and successful without a large amount of gameplay, or options being centered around destruction. I’ve touched on the subject in the article wrote on Metacritic and I see this obsession on scores being emblematic of the problem. Call of Duty is the Lady Gaga, or Kanye West of video games. If it evokes emotion amongst some that is fine. It is just there are just better games out there.
It also doesn’t help that the game industry seems to make it hard for most journalists to remain as journalists and, instead, is interested in eating itself. Of the game journalists I respect (Chris Remo, Kieron Gillen, Anthony Burch, N’Gai Croal), none of them remain anywhere near as active in that realm as they once did. This is mostly to do with the fact that they have either taken jobs in other fields or are now working in the employ of a developer or publisher.
The industry seems to be growing without growing up. We don’t have real ‘Prestige’ games. By that I mean we don’t have big mainstream games being made that aren’t expected to make money but will have an impact on our hearts and minds. We don’t have enough reviewers who are allowed to make bad calls on good/bad games without being eviscerated in their own forums by vocal minorities that only know how to abuse the anonymity gifted to them via the Internet. This written excrement in turn makes editors and publications less keen to experiment or be outspoken and really this needs to stop if we are going to see games grow up.
At the same time you see it in the trenches, gamers are encouraged to like the same thing, if you don’t like a game that scored well then there is something snobbish, elitist, wrong about you. You are being a troll, or a try hard. This is not seen with the same abundance in other art mediums,if you go on Metacritic you can’t even find the Drone metal band Fulci yet that doesn’t mean that they suck just that they fall outside of the mainstream tastes and that is okay, yet SEGA forbid that a game get a 60% rating to be forever cast down to the pits of gaming Hell next to E.T. on the Atari.
This constant self fulfilling cycle needs to stop and we need to be able to agree that it is okay to argue over whether Assassin’s Creed or Final Fantasy XIII is better, but come to conclusion that there might not be a true answer only reasoned arguments for why you, the reviewer or audience, don’t like it.
I know this isn’t something that is going to change over night, but it is something we should be working towards and if I am going to be growing up then I swear I going to try and take a few of you with me. I am not going to stop teasing people for getting all excited over Killzone 3 or creaming themselves over screenshots of the next Rockstar game, but I am going to agree that you are entitled to your opinion as long as you will grant me the same.
[End of original post]
Looking back on this piece, I do think that Kotaku, Polygon, the Remap (ex vice magazine people) and Aftermath have taken great strides into addressing this issue of gaming feeling like a monoculture. Even with more diverse and interesting voices in games, we still have Metacritc with a vice-like grip on popular opinion. We also have bizarre campaigns for games like Stellar Blade and weird-ass moments from apparent devs on Space Marine II.
I always think this piece was meant to be hopeful, a decree for what might be. I don’t think it is impossible either.
If I had the energy and the time I would probably write a little more in depth about it, but I feel like this 2011 piece remains pertinent.
Final addendum, the post had a number of links to where I found the images all those years ago. Sad to see that most of them are now dead.
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