I Stand Corrected - partly

Just yesterday I blogged that Patrick Dugan had provided a very insightful critique/analysis of the game Ayiti: The Cost of Life, and I complained that it was "a shame more games are not reviewed or critiqued with such insight".

Next thing you know, Jurie, over at Intelligent-Artifice points to Ian Bogost's brilliant critique of Bully, and the game community's failure provide critical analysis of the game.

Excerpt:

No matter how absurdist the public response to Bully might seem to those deeply immersed in video game culture, the game community’s own responses are framed almost entirely within the language and issues of that public debate. Nowhere do game reviewers, players, journalists, or developers discuss the game’s meaning on its own terms—neither in praise nor riposte. We can understand this state of affairs through the lens of “seriousness.” On the one hand, the public detractors of Bully do take the game seriously, as a threat and a danger but not as a cultural artifact. The video game community, on the other hand, does not take the game seriously at all. It is allowing the legislators and attorneys and media watchdogs define the terms of the debate.

Now, I'm far from being the first to lament the sorry state of game criticism, but this pretty much nails it on the head. In my opinion, there are three main reasons the industry needs to develop and nurture a stronger community around game criticism and analysis.

Reason One: Protection

The first is that such critical analysis ultimately protects us from censorship. It is much harder for a small vocal group of center-leaning democrats to steal away the much needed 2% of the vote by preying on conservative fears about a misunderstood medium when they need to argue their case in face of a huge body of work from professional critics who in fact analyze all of the things these censors claim games do not afford the public. The cry that games are violent and have no redeeming qualities starts to look mighty far-fetched in face of fifty or a hundred thousand pages of critical analysis of those very qualities.

Without that critical analysis, the defence of, 'no there is something meaningful behind all the explicit violence' admittedly looks equally far-fetched. The argument becomes subjective and the Last Defense imparted by First Amendment protection becomes the only defence. It's a pretty strong defence, but anyone who knows fuck-all about games should know that this is not a good strategy. As much or more than anyone, we should know better.

Aside on First Amendment protection - while the US Constitution and First Amendment protection technically only has relevance to Americans, there is a functional dependence on US rulings relating to this issue that impacts the entire North American and European game industry (and to a lesser extent the Asian industry). If the sale of games is restricted in the US, it hits the bottom line of the entire industry very hard. Publishers who hope to sell 50% of their titles to a US market will make different decisions about the kinds of games they make if that market is heavily restricted. So while the rest of us technically can't do anything to impact US court decisions, we can contribute to the critical discussion that could ultimately create the insurmoutable barrier between a few desperate but vocal politicians and their crackpot lawyers, and the US Supreme Court.

Reason Two: Ownership

As Bogost points out, our responses to attacks on a game like Bully - indeed, even our simple reviews of it, are increasingly 'framed in the language and issues of the public debate'. Shouldn't it be the other way around? After all, we're the 'experts' here. We're getting sucked into arguments about what games ultimately mean by people who are functionally illiterate in the medium. It is exactly the same as if people who were illiterate (as in couldn't read) were trying to have certain books censored, and we were arguing with them on their own terms - again, claiming First Amendment protection and trying to assure them they are wrong. We shouldn't even have to listen to such people - never mind fight them on their own terms. If the body of critical and analytical material were of the depth and breadth it should be, then our illiterate challengers would be easily revealed as such. Additionally, in the cases where legitimate challengers brought forth legitimate concerns, the debate of such issues would be less subjective, less hysterical, and more compellingly argued with the assistance of critics who indeed know what they are talking about.

Now I'm not claiming we should take ownership of game criticism and analysis so that we can't be criticised. On the contrary - taking ownership of criticism and analysis greatly increases the depth and complexity of criticism, and forces us as game developers to make better games that have something to say. As Bogost points out, Bully in many ways fails to really provide a strongly compelling look at the difficult life of a teenage boy with weak social skills (I'm paraphrasing him - I haven't played it yet). Imagine if we were criticising the implementation of that design, rather than the existence of it? By taking ownership of the dialogue of critical analysis we light a fire under our own asses to make games that do provide important, meaningful, and entertaining perspectives on important things. Diffusing the capability of a bunch of wingnuts to argue with us over what we should be allowed to do is only a side benefit.

Reason Three: Feedback

As I mention above, critical analysis of our games improves our ability to make games. Of the 70 or so online reviews of Chaos Theory linked off of Game Rankings, I have read every single one of them. Additionally, I have read a dozen or more print reviews. Sadly, only about three or four of them even offered a single sentence of meaningful critical anaylsis. Admittedly, these are reviews not critical analysis, and they are intended as such. For the most part, the quality of reviews in the game industry is not too bad; but reviewing and providing critical analysis are two different things.

The point remains, that having worked as the creative lead on one of the most visible titles on the market, I was simply unable to find a range of critical analysis that helped me learn about how successfully the meaning I designed into the game resonated with its audience. It was a year later before I read one single meaningful piece of analysis on the game that was presented publicly, and boy was I happy to see it - and that was only a couple paragraphs about one tiny little element of the game. It's true that I occasionally find a student thesis in some dark corner of the internet, or I am sent an essay, or other peice of critical analysis that looks at certain aspects of my work, but this is excruciatingly rare.

On the other hand, I have had scores of meaningful conversations with friends and other developers about my games. I have learned a lot from them. But there is a painfully obvious bias in critical discussion undertaken with ones friends and colleagues. I would pay a thousand dollars cash to overhear two developers who played the shit out of my game tear it apart over beers in a bar. I am reasonably confident that I would make that thousand back ten times over with what I would learn from such an event.

So - there you go. We need more and better critical analysis of games - of individual games and of games as a medium. Sadly, even though I would love to take the time to write up my thoughts on any of a dozen games I've played this year, I just don't have the time. In fact, I don't even have the ability. There is an entire field there, and virutally no one is working in it. I try my best to help develop a design vocabulary which is useful for designers, and will hopefully - by extension - be useful to critics. It takes me literally hundreds of hours of my limited free time to come up with, research, write and present a tiny portion of this material in a formal way that is ready for other designers or critics to learn from, challenge and maybe even apply. It's all linked over on the right - take it - it's free.

I know there are other people working on this problem, and in fact - thankfully - the number of people working on this problem is growing. I suppose it is a problem that is being solved, but in my mind, the sooner we - as developers - start getting inundated with this stuff the better.

While Bogost's critical analysis of Bully is excellent and insightful - it is only partly that. It is also a critical analysis of the lame state of critical analysis of games. It's too bad he has to waste half his words chastizing us. InterestingLY though - it is the very fact that he has wasted those words, and that I have wasted this entire post on this topic that makes the point most compelling. We are this close to having an explosion in the field of game critical analysis. When Bogost doesn't have to spend half his time lamenting, and I don't have to spend five times as many words reiterating - when there does exist a small but noticable and steady stream of this kind of media analysis, all these wasted words will disappear and be replaced with more criticism and analysis. Bogost and myself and dozens of others will shift from complaining about not having the analysis to actually providing it. It's a tipping point. Once we reach it the slow linear growth of this kind of material that we see now will shift into a period of exponential growth, and we'll have arrived.

The sooner the better.

Comments

[Patrick]

I think a key to that is meta-criticism, but in a constructive way rather than the chastisement you mention here. There are a lot of different theoretical lenses on game design: nested play loops, unit analysis, constraint analysis, grammatical analysis, "edge of chaos" type systems theory, MDA (or my twist of it which includes player metrics - MDMA) and on and on. I'd like to post on a few approaches to game criticism using at least one of these, I suspect I'll tackle constrain analysis since thats what I used for CoL and The McGame back in a March interview. I'm pretty busy getting ready for a publisher submission(!) speaking of a tipping point, but I'm pretty damned passionate about this.

[Tim Edwards]

I think the problem is that there exists little space in consumer magazines and websites for the kind of deep-thinking critical analysis of mechanics and themes that you really need. Mags and sites gain eyeballs by offering one single piece of information: is this game worth buying or not.

They hold onto those eyeballs by being entertaining. Unfortunately, I only know of a few writers that can properly explain mechanics or deeper meanings while maintaining an average reader's attention. Certainly though, I'd kill to read deeper analysis by great writers written for an industry facing site/magazine - I don't think much of the videogame industry trade-press.

Tim,
PC Gamer UK

[Ian Bogost]

Just found this thread today. Thanks for the excellent comments. It *is* really too bad that I had to spend half the article just framing the context for the critique itself. But when I read some of the responses to this article and others (sorry, can't post links here cos the HTML gets stripped), it becomes clear that without the framing, many readers wouldn't have the faintest idea what to do with the piece. A strange catch-22. And even with it, many still reject the very idea.

I think Tim's probably right that the consumer magazines are hard-pressed to offer a forum for this sort of critique. *Regular* critique, that is, which is really what's important. There are a handful of critically sophisticated game journalists out there, but the publications they write for have not yet committed to a regular game column of this sort. In the long run I believe we need a major publication to commit to critical reviews of games in order to move the needle.

FWIW, the strong relationship between critical discourse on games and the progress of the medium in general has significantly changed the direction of my academic work. My first book (_Unit Operations_) was quite academic in tone, although I think it will help alter perceptions about the pursuit of game criticism within the university (note: different from development, which has already been embraced). I tried very hard to make my new book (_Persuasive Games_) speak much more directly to developers and the general public. The press and I have been working on tweaking the presentation of it to help even more (for example, it's not yet reflected on the webpage but the title has been changed to _Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames_). The problem is, an MIT Press book still has a hard time getting in the hands of ordinary folks. I've been taking this challenge seriously in some of my new projects -- after all, what good is the shroud of the Ivory Tower unless we use it to produce work that can't be done outside that protective cover.

On the subject of the critique of the implementation of design, this topic is poised to become a hot one. I do give credit to Gamasutra and Game Developer Magazine for starting to put more of this type of critique directly in the eyeball path of game developers. In part, further progress requires a critique both at the level of meaning and experience *and* at the level of technology (e.g., the role RenderWare plays in the apparent design decisions of a game like Bully). There just aren't a lot of popular (or even academic) critics who can accomplish it. That's changing (more on this in the next couple weeks over on my blog), but its changing slowly.

Mostly, it's rewarding to read this kind of response even to a short article of this type. Thanks for taking the time to write it up here.

[Jared Newman]

Ah, how this argument rings of Chuck Klosterman's call for gaming's Lester Bangs. That said, it may be helpful to provide a definition of who this call to action is aimed at.

You say "we," which I take to mean game developers, or the gaming community at large. If Feedback is what you're after, this internal critique will most benefit developers. The obstacle here would be getting more people to notice (ie you had to be pointed to Dugan and Bogost's critiques)

For Protection, you need the media, preferably the mainstream variety. Outsiders (be it politicians, judges or your mom) are not reading 1up and GameSetWatch, they're reading Time, the New York Times and The New Yorker. Features on Will Wright are a first step, and the NYT does have some regular video game reporters. I think over time these publications will separate themselves from sites like Gamespot, which seem pigeonholed into straight consumer reports.

Not sure what to say about your Ownership point. Who's to say who has ownership of criticism -- the media, developers, gamers or complete outsiders? All sides have valid motives for debate.

The big hurdle is to define Criticism. Klosterman wrote about social criticism, the kind of big-picture analysis that grabs anyone with even a marginal interest in games. Unfortunately, most games don't deserve this. Bully and Ayiti are exceptions.

On the developer level, every game is rich with potential for critique, but only within that sphere. The general public does not care about nested play loops and unit analysis.

It's fine to call for more criticism in general, but the source and nature of that criticism should vary greatly depending on who it's directed at.

[Clint]

Jared:

By 'we' I mean the game community in the broadest sense. As in developers - be they on the business, creative or even distribution end - as well as players. By 'we' I mean people who are literate in the medium. Opposed to those whom I suspect are illiterate in the medium, and who currently seem to be controlling the nature of game criticism and the debate around gaming in general.

As long as 'they' are the ones doing the criticism, the questions we wrestle with are questions of whether or not we should be making Game X at all, as opposed to questions relating to the comparative merits of Game X in artistic, social, cultural and medium-specific contexts.

In response to your question about feedback - I agree that it most DIRECTLY helps developers - but I think it helps MOST the players. If developers come to better understand their medium, then the quality of games improves tremendously. The ones who gain the most from that are players.

Of course we need a wide range of different types of criticism directed at different audiences. But before we can 'specialize' into different branches of criticism, we need to have more criticism.

[L.B. Jeffries]

Michael Abbott over at Brainy Gamer is doing some great work in this regard:

http://www.brainygamer.com/

I also try to do my best at Popmatters. It will take a group effort to really get a more mature critical approach to video games going and the more ideas bouncing around about it the better.

[Rafael]

Hey Clint,

as a matter of fact I work on my doctoral thesis on the use of language in computer games and I can assure you, that the academic world (at least the one I represent) is very eager to solve this problem your write about here, especially when it comes to a collaboration with designers and critics (again my personal view of it) which is so easy now with the internet. We all can only benefit from many points of view.

Last week Matthew from tap-repeatedly (http://tap-repeatedly.com) recommended me your page. And this only because I stumbled upon one of his articles, wrote him an email and he being such a nice person was willingful to help me with a bunch of recommendations.

I am sure that that's the key to solve this: we should keep on talking, writing mails, writing articles and add our views and criticism to each others work.

Best regards from Germany
Rafael

[flash game index]

I think the problem is that there exists little space in consumer magazines and websites for the kind of deep-thinking critical analysis of mechanics and themes that you really need. Mags and sites gain eyeballs by offering one single piece of information: is this game worth buying or not.

They hold onto those eyeballs by being entertaining. Unfortunately, I only know of a few writers that can properly explain mechanics or deeper meanings while maintaining an average readers attention. Certainly though, Id kill to read deeper analysis by great writers written for an industry facing site/magazine - I dont think much of the videogame industry trade-press.

Tim,
PC Gamer UK
+1