 |
|
|
| |
Opinion: Reviewing Games With Values in Mind
by Richard Clark [PC, Console/PC, Columns, Exclusive]
|
|
| |
|
June 23, 2010
|
| |
[In this Gamasutra opinion piece, Christian pop culture writer Richard Clark examines how game reviews often miss the point, and how an excessive focus on fun can result in "a denial of social responsibility on the part of both player and developer."]
Among those who engage in the (admittedly tired) debate of whether or not video games should be considered a form of art, there are those who suggest that the sheer entertainment value of video games both precludes and requires that the medium be differentiated from any artistic endeavor.
In their view, games are meant to remain a form of amusement, and to attempt and achieve anything more ambitious results only in the detriment of a game's first principle: fun.
This commitment to fun at the expense of all else seems a simple actually has the potential to end up being a denial of social responsibility on the part of both player and developer. Known more famously as the “just a game,” defense, it treats video games as soulless and accidental combinations of textures, gameplay mechanics, and sound effects.
The “just a game” point of view isn't articulated outright nearly as much as it's opposition, precisely because those who maintain it don't see in-depth conversation about the “nature of the medium” to be all that important or helpful.
As a result, when reading various features and editorials, it can seem as if most game writers and journalists understand the emotional, moral and cultural relevance of story and experience driven games. And yet, when we look at the most foundational form of games writing in the industry, the game review, we see almost no reflection whatsoever of any such understanding.
Falling Short of Considering the Whole
Instead, what we find are masterly written descriptions of various game mechanics and their respective flaws. We find mentions of pacing, sound design, camera management, and level layout, while the content is mentioned only insofar as they help to draw out the game mechanics. If a consumer is interested in the tone or moral implications of a game, they are forced to take their best shot at reading between the lines.
Meanwhile, as gamers mature they often become more concerned with exactly those aspects of the game which are being ignored. Does the game contain nuanced characters or does it merely exploit common stereotypes? Does the game make the player reconsider our preconceptions about war or does it romanticize it? Are religious and spiritual issues dealt with fairly or are they glossed over in a way that distorts the issue overall.
Not all games call for these kinds of questions. Games like Tetris, Peggle, Torchlight, and Doodle Jump make a deliberate attempt to place gameplay first. The story and characters truly are intended to be containers for game play elements. Recently, however, more and more games have sought not only to provide a level of experience and story-telling with their games.
Whether it's Alan Wake's fear-inducing gameplay or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's roller coaster style single player, games often utilize characters and ideas to give their game more weight or significance, even if they aren't seeking to make any particular point or deliver any particular message.
It's a shame, then, that the average consumer must wait days, weeks or months to read analysis at some of the more thoughtful gaming blogs, few of which get prerelease copies of these games as the more mainstream review sites do. For instance, when Modern Warfare 2's formal reviews reached critical mass, it ended up with a Metascore of 94 with the lowest score being a 78. In general, game critics loved Modern Warfare 2. Because of these rave reviews, most of us bought the game. Weeks later, however, bloggers began to express various concerns about the ideas, the message, and the implicit political implications of such a game.
Learning From Ebert and Friends
While I realize that there is a distinct difference in medium here, it's nonetheless apt to compare film reviews to game reviews in this case. Recently, Kick-Ass received mixed reviews from film critics, and many of the judgments against it weren't merely because of technical deficiencies or even a lack of a solid script. The New Yorker asks, “...when filmmakers nudge a child into viewing savagery as slapstick, are we not allowing them to do what we condemn in the pornographer--that is, to coarsen and inflame?”
Many films are slammed by critics for lapses in judgment that sound remarkably similar to some of the most common video game tropes, such as the Orlando Sentinel's description of Kick-Ass as “an awkward blend of ultra-realistic violence, boundaries-bending satire and low comedy.” Does that remind you of a particular open-world video game made by well-known and well-respected developer, Rockstar?
I simply find it hard to believe that the journalists doing video game reviews lack the same moral compass that seems inherent in the film, book, or music critic. And yet, every game that manages to provide great gameplay, replay value, and a noteworthy experience is universally lauded by video game critics. My suspicion is not that these critics lack a moral compass, but that they have suppressed it for what they believe to be the good of the “objective review.”
Consumers are told that review score aggregation sites like Metacritic only provide a partial picture of a game's worth, and that in order to get a better idea of whether they should buy a game they should endeavor to find one game reviewer whom they tend to agree with, and read the entire text of that review. This is a good suggestion, but one which still doesn't address the fact that many gamers don't share the same desire to suppress their moral, cultural and religious assumptions for the sake of enjoying a game.
Acknowledging What's There
As I mentioned in last month's column, every game with a story, plot or realized characters also has an inherent worldview. There is no reason to believe that the people playing those games would merely leave their assumptions elsewhere when playing a video game. If the video game industry wants to have more thoughtful games, those writing about games need to encourage more thoughtful gaming. It’s not that reviewers should concern themselves with every possible stumbling block within a game, that they count cuss words or recount horrible violent acts. A simple solution is to simply acknowledge when and why a game felt inspiring, tasteless, disrespectful, immature, or wonderfully nuanced.
The landscape of people who play videogames regularly is broadening and become more and more diverse. There are those who appreciate Half Life 2's strong female presence in Alyx Vance, those who appreciate the way Bioshock 2 deals with fatherhood, and those who find God of War's violent and sexual content to be immature. It's likely that those opinions might just be true enough to be called “objective.” At the very least, those opinions should be reflected in the same space that purports to tell us whether we will like a game or not.
Are games art? That's a semantics argument that's just not all that interesting anymore. But do games mean anything? Ask your wife that question after she's watched you rip off someone's head or have sex with Aphrodite. Ask yourself after you lost your son in the mall in Heavy Rain. Those moments mean something, and even if the controls are tight and the graphics flawless, without that infused meaning, we would have very different opinions of them. Acknowledging these to other players not only makes them aware of pitfalls, but it increases our appreciation of truly great games as well.
[Richard Clark is the editor-in-chief of Christ and Pop Culture, where he often writes about video games. He and his wife live in Louisville, KY. He can be reached at deadyetliving at gmail dot com or followed on twitter (@christandpc).]
|
| |
|
|
We all react and play games differently; there's no escaping that. So, why not acknowledge this in a review? Surely to do otherwise would be dishonest? If anything, reviews by their nature must be subjective, for they are opinions – rationally, well-formed judgements (hopefully), yes, but opinions all the same.
And responsibility is the key idea here. I don't want to get into the Spider-Man mantra, but it does hold true. If game developers and the gaming community want games to be treated as a mature medium then they must take on the implied responsibility. Video games ARE an enormously impactful medium and that impact can be for good or ill. The gaming community as a whole must take on the responsibility this realization entails through thoughtful consideration of implications of the content of their creations and the broad and thorough examination of the results of these creative efforts. The community doesn't need to apologize for what games are, but they must understand and treat the medium with the same seriousness as other art forms.
I especially liked their take on CoD: MW2, instead of a review, they said:
We think the "No russian" level is absolutely disgusting, we don't review this game, it gets enough attention from the gamer press, it doesn't need our review. Instead of a formal review of the game, we discuss, why we think the "No russian" Level is hurting the games industry as a whole.
They filmed this discussion, which was 1 hour long and showed a 10 minute summary of it on their show, while they uploaded the whole discussion to their website.
I found this extremely bold and think, we need more approaches like this.
Pardon my rambling - I guess what I'm trying to say is that I agree with Clark, and that hopefully more of that kind of commentary will continue to appear and will move toward the mainstream in the future.
I do disagree that certain moral issues make the game "good" or "bad", but instead think that the games with morally questionable material force us to look at ourselves and how we react to those situations, or even how the reaction to that same situation changes over time. I feel like I am much more offended by certain things than I was when I was a teenager, and think that I would make different choices in some games that I played years ago. Additionally, when someone tells me that they've played MW2, the first thing I ask is "did you shoot in the No Russian level?" I find that much more interesting than the success of the cinematics in the entirety of the game. It's the ability to analyze moral ambiguity of a game's interactivity that make them an interesting form of art, and I think reviews can/should start to reflect that. While a lot of gamers want the simple checklist reviews, a lot also want to discuss their games in a more academic sense.
Ultimately, I believe that while games may take a stance on various issues via the storyline, it is up to the player to interpret the meaning. Are you going to use GTA as a training exercise for the shootout against the cops you've been planning for years, or do you just want to play some darts?
Player interpretation, I feel, is the best argument for games as "art".
I think it's exactly the opposite:
Trying to teach good moral values to players is not mature at all, it's what children's cartoons do.
It's treating the player like a child who needs to be told good from bad.
Sure, some gamers are children, but let's not confuse games with "educational games".
"Art", as I understand it, is not meant to be educational.
Also, all this discussion is based on the implicit assumption that the content of games will have an influence on actual behaviour of player in the real world.
Now if that was actually the case, I would have seen it happen with my own eyes at some point after decades of hanging out with gamers.
Instead, I consistently see people's behaviour being influenced by only one thing: other people's behaviour. The influence of games is nothing compared to that.
@Mark - Yeah, I agree totally, though I have reservations about declaring the type of review we're suggesting "subjective" and calling the other type "objective." I'm not sure it's that simple. It's possible that there is such thing as objective moral or aesthetic qualities. At least, that's something I'm open to. And then, the quality of graphics, sound design, etc. may actually be more subjective than we think. Anyways, other than that I agree completely.
@Shawn - Absolutely, so true and incredibly well said. It's clear that most video games are something completely different than Chess or Bocce Ball. Whether they call it art or not, the world ascribes meaning to it when they accuse it of influencing violent people. It's just a fact that video games contain meaning, and that meaning has the ability to help or harm, to varying degrees.
@Christian - That sounds great! Especially with games like that, reviews could be 8 words long: You know if you want to buy this. After that, spend some time talking about some of the more interesting and unpredictable aspects of the game.
@Aaron - That's a good point, and the day one review is something I think is necessary in this industry, so the solution isn't to ask reviewers to take more time. I would just say "do your best." I think also it means we get people to write these reviews who are capable of such thought, and those who aren't should practice as well. I know it's possible, as Edge and Eurogamer tend to do this kind of thing every now and then, of which I am extremely appreciative. Anyone else think Simon Parkin is an excellent model of this review style?
The sad truth is that a huge portion of the audience for video games is simply immature. Remember the furor around Resident Evil 5 and the issue of race? Virtually every site that attempted to discuss the issue was swarmed with comments from people who didn't want there to be a discussion. Not people who didn't want to discuss it themselves, but people who didn't want *anyone* discussing it, and who were going to go out of their way to derail any attempt to cause a mature discussion to emerge.
If Resident Evil 5 was a movie or an album or a book that never would have happenned. It's unfortunate, but the reason we only get discussions of "fun" in our industry is because any attempt to talk about anything else is immediately swarmed by angry young men who think their hobby is being "ruined" by anyone who has a different viewpoint.
To Arnaud's point, I don't see how offering a viewpoint on morality is indicative of something on the level of a children's story. Crime and Punishment, for example, has a fairly clear moral message, but to put it on the level of an after school special is absurd. You could easily say the same thing for novels by people like George Orwell. There must be room in the game industry for works in the vein of 1984, and they would hardly be childish.
And as far as the low-brow world views of games like Grand Theft Auto IV -- I'd say they're a peculiarity of our culture. Games, like comics, have found art, meaning and some would say beauty in what others consider trash. It has been that way since EC Comics. Honestly, I'd argue that Rockstar has developed, perhaps, the most well-formed world view in videogames -- nearly all of their games share the notion that your boss is an idiot and that when you eventually take his job you'll be just as big an idiot. It's a cynical, cautionary position, but not a shallow or empty one.
I have a couple of reactions. One is that it's a pleasure to see the idea of responsibility for the content of one's entertainment products taken seriously. Of course no one game is going to convert some individual into a Columbine-style killer -- but what about the combined effect of many games?
What about their impact when merged with all the other forms of entertainment (TV, movies, music) constantly bombarding us? What about their mass impact on someone who hasn't lived long enough to understand that just because a lot of people in games and movies and songs are all doing or advocating doing some thing, maybe it's not really OK to do in real life?
The point here is that game developers contribute to the culture through the products they make, and thus bear some responsibility for what those products communicate. That doesn't mean no developer should ever make any game with sharp edges. Game developers, as artists, ought to be free to uplift or coarsen. But along with that freedom should come the maturity to acknowledge a small measure of responsibility for what they say through the games they make.
The second reaction concerns the "it's just a game" dismissal of that sense of responsibility when reviewing games.
That reaction is understandable. It's the perspective of most gamers, and reviewers (many of whom probably share that perspective) are catering to their readers. But "most" is not "all," and there are "it's just a game" gamers who are capable of appreciating other aspects beyond rules-based mechanics even if those things aren't the gamer's primary interest.
If that failure to faithfully render the overall nature of a game is a real problem in games journalism, then there are two solutions. One is for game reviewers to consciously analyze every game from multiple playstyle perspectives. Provide details about the rules-based mechanics, certainly, but also tell us about the story and the characters whose lives help to express that story; tell us about the world of the game and whether it has depth and makes sense; tell us about the core sensations inspired by actively playing the game.
It's unlikely that option one will happen to any degree. Reviewers, like gamers, tend to focus on doing one thing well. Which leaves option two: let's have more people reviewing games from different playstyle perspectives.
Along with the Gamist-oriented sites, let's see more people discussing particular games from Narrativist and Simulationist and Experientialist perspectives. You, the game consumer, will then have to visit multiple sites and then develop your own holistic understanding of what each game is really like based on integrating all those disparate perspectives. But that's the price of being an informed consumer.
Yes, it's a game. But no, it's not "just" a game any more than it's just a setting or just a story or just pixels with no cultural force. And I think we'd have better conversations on the subject if more developers and reviewers and gamers tried to appreciate this point that rules-based fun isn't the only thing that matters. Games can be -- and are -- more than that.
I think video games parallel popular movie and tv productions in that critics and reviewers who provide deep, sophisticated, analytical reviews don't really matter in terms of how much money a show/film/game will make and thus they will never influence what types of future movies/tv shows/games are produced. The hipster types who both play games and who care about deep reviews and discussion represent a niche group who wont be catered to in the mainstream media.
Without any real power why should any game reviewer for a major money generating site care beyond creating a superficial review?
As with most TV and film, end users are essentially at the mercy of the Captains of Industry to create, develop and market intelligent, thoughtful or responsible products.
@Adam Bishop - You make a great point about the immaturity of audiences (i would say population in general). Transformers 1 & 2, A-Team, Phantom Menace, 24, and just endless crud upon crud full of stereotypes, glorified violence, simplistic world views is pretty much what sells. That's what we'll continue to get and reviews just don't matter.
If I told someone "I don't like Martin Scorsese movies." They'd flip out (I don't, just a polarizing example. ;-)).
I think the problem is that many fans confuse criticism with condemnation, something I'm guilty of, too. When I saw a blog post criticizing Red Dead Redemption's writing, I had a knee-jerk negative reaction. After I calmed down and read a bit more I came away feeling like they had some points, even though I didn't agree with all of them. It made me realize that I was cutting Red Dead slack because (overall) I found it so much more mature than GTA IV.
I think it's along the lines of family. I can tell you all of the flaws my family possess, but if *you* say something, we're going to have words.
1) What is the author/creator trying to accomplish? (Usually includes, who is the audience)
2) How well did he or she or they do it?
3) Was it worth doing? (which ought to include, Why it was or wasn’t)
If video game reviewers assume that the creators are always and only interested in entertainment, then they're not competent reviewers.
"Meanwhile, as gamers mature they often become more concerned with exactly those aspects of the game which are being ignored. "
Man are you right. As gaming continues to evolve, I find myself breaking away frrom just what the masses say and looking for deeper and more engaging games. For example, although everyone loved GTA4, I found it to be really slow in terms of pacing. The story was not compelling to me either. As much as Nico wanted a way out, he murdered just about everything in site along with his brother. I didn't like it. Another example of wanting maturity is Saints Row 2. There is a scene where your character goes to get his friend out of the court house in the early parts of the game. The judge is a 60 something old woman. If you don't shoot her, the AI will. I can't tell you how awful I felt for the lady getting shot and that pretty much kept me from playing any more of the game. So I agree that for myself, as I grow more mature, I need more depth in my games than just the usual "here's a weapon for you to use and use it as much as possible."
But back to my point of reviews. On the flip side of things,Alpha Protocol got really low scores because of some its bugs along with subpar graphics, but overall the concept and story and RPG elements were really unique and I love the game. So it is true that the parts of the reviews that should get some mention really don't.
My next issue with reviews is that I notice they tend to be more on the technical side as you mentioned before. Here's an example. Many reviews I read about Oblivion said that they had issues with the loading times for some areas. The fact that I read about 13 professional reviews and that was mentioned in each and every one, kind of detracted me from the game. However I eventually ran out of things to play and finally got it. I loved it and the loading times were not nearly as noticeable as reviews had mentioned. I find it funny that when a game is really smart and intelligent and well done, all of that gets put asiide if it is not running at 60fps or if there is some clipping here and there.
But I really enjoyed the article and I hope that some where out there, some of those journalists got a chance to review this!