Those who’d like to see games properly understood and weighed seriously by a massmarket audience believe strongly in what games can be. They laud experimental, emotionally potent works and decry the faintest whiff of commercialism, genre constraint or lowest common denominator-courting risk aversion.
Those sorts of people – OK, let’s just go with ‘we’ – have long resented the assertion that we ‘take games too seriously’, or are ‘over-analytical’. Let the unwashed masses mindlessly consume, it’s we who’ll pay the special attention that the medium deserves, and through our insights and our learnings we’ll… like, probably advance the medium somehow! Yes!
Through the Internet, we can effortlessly build a network of critics who share ideas and challenge each other to be more thoughtful. This community has doubtlessly elevated the conversation that can be had around videogames and the business that creates them, and has helped us define and raise our expectations of play.
But we’ve also ended up creating a subculture of writers who primarily write for one another. It’s too easy to become insular and disconnected from what drives this industry: the average gamer doesn’t care who we are, or about what we have to say about ‘emergent gameplay’ or ‘ludonarrative dissonance’. It’s not that we become irrelevant as a result – the gaming audience should absolutely be conceived as a spectrum of taste and passions, rather than broad market segments determined by economics and rigid genre preferences. But if we aim, through our criticism, to help the language of play evolve, then preaching to the already converted becomes counterproductive.
The same self-reflexive insularity exists on the development side, too. In some respects this is simply a consequence of creation: no artist or craftsman has much ability to create outside of their own experience. If designers merely cultivate an interest in the videogames they have played and studied in the past, they won’t make anything markedly different. If developers have internalised the language of design, then their work will largely be restricted to appeal to those who already speak that language.
The fact that designers and reviewers so persistently disagree is often evidence of this. It’s a common perception in the industry that game reviewers are useless mouthpieces who ‘just don’t get’ design, but that disdain only enforces how disconnected developers can be from how the games they create will be received by the consumer.
Take the prolific yet ultimately ambivalent critical response to Rockstar and Team Bondi’s LA Noire earlier this year. The game appears ‘broken’ on both the design and narrative sides: it offers an open world with minimal interactivity, and conversation mechanics where the player often can’t tell what the game wants. What kind of hero cop steals cars? Why does the game let players bungle interrogations, often spectacularly, and yet demand believability for Cole Phelps’ continual promotions?
But LA Noire confused everyone because it rejected established practices. It isn’t actually an open-world game, but it suffered for the ways in which people intimately familiar with the genre tried to compare it to one. Critics focused on all the things LA Noire doesn’t allow the player to do, and searched out all the spots where immersion breaks. But while it’s true not every element of the game ‘works’, critics forgot that the average gamer, the one that enjoys crime shows or historical fiction – the gamer that the developers most wanted to snag – doesn’t think the way they do.
Friends of mine who regard videogames with polite detachment (to put it charitably) enjoy watching me play LA Noire when they’ve enjoyed none of the others. They watch, quietly engaged, with none of the usual questions like ‘who’s this guy again?’ or ‘why does he have superpowers?’ or ‘what are you supposed to be doing?’ I never have to wince as I hear myself giving absurd explanations about enemy hordes, fictional clans with stupid names, or complex faction discussions that I know they don’t understand.
And the things critics say break immersion – that Cole can be a bad driver, or an aggressive interrogator, that he walks funny – it’s not that my non-gamer friends don’t notice. They laugh. It’s just that they’re far more willing to accept dissonance, to refuse to be interrupted by it, than critics give credit for. They’re not looking for it. I thought my friends wanted to dislike games, but all the while they’ve been looking for a reason to enjoy them, and it’s my critical peers and I that have been focusing on all the things that supposedly ‘don’t work’.
Games that are familiar and admirable to designers and critics frequently remain a foreign language to everyday players – the folks we all hope will someday understand our culture and buy our products. As long as that condition persists, so will the sense of alienation non-gamers and even casual fans feel.
Two weeks ago, we published Clint Hocking's call for game journalists to stop re-writing press releases and write the news that matters.
Illustration: Martin Davies
Comments
9I could care less that non-gamers or casual gamers don't 'get it'.
The only reason I want them anywhere near this culture is to lap up the poor eye candy based excuses for video games which will hopefully fund development of products that have a serious learning curve and offer more of a challenge than the very poor LA Noire. 'Visit Location/ask questions in horrible interrgation scene/repeat/repeat/repeat/uninstall'...
The critical response to LA Noire wasn't ambivalent, they all loved it. It was the people who bought it that had a more mixed reaction.
The title of this is "Writing for the everyday player", but the example that Leigh uses is someone "politely detached" from videogames. I just don't think her categorisation of that type of person as the average gamer is correct.
And besides, do we really want to aim for the average gamer? AFAIK, the average gamer buys Call of Duty: Bombastic Jingosim every year and little else. If anything,
Sure, magazine could aim at converting non-gamers, but not at the expense of considering their ignorance of the genre as right (I don't use the word "ignorance" in any deprecatory way).
P.
So as games critics we may be getting "ahead of ourselves" because the masses are too commercialized to care about their games on a critical level? I don't buy it.
While I agree that the majority of the gamer market doesn't give a good goddamn about more critical elements like narrative potency, immersion, or narrative/ludonarrative harmony, I don't for a second think that we should take a less critical approach when writing about games for their sake.
On the contrary, I think we have more of an obligation to approach games from a more critical perspective, lest we get stuck in an endless cycle of derivative "genre games" being rehahsed year after year. Oh, wait...
So, "yes it's shit, but some people who don't play games don't care about that, so stop pointing out that it's shit" is the message I've got from Leigh here.
Not being funny or anything, but the person in your example is highly unlikely to be reading any form of games criticism. Let alone something like Edge. Games writers are writing for people who like to play and read about games.
I'm not so sure you can call the critical response to LA Noire really any more ambivalent than any other big release. It's Metacritic score stands at 89 on both PS3 and 360, with a much lower user score. The lowest review scores from more traditional major gaming media were Edge and Eurogamer, both of whom scored it at 8, and had things like this to say about it:
"If you're willing to take the rough with the smooth and submit to the story, L.A. Noire will pay you back in spades".
To be perfectly honest Leigh, I don't really have a clue what you're talking about, and from the words you've set down, it doesn't appear that you had much of an idea where this was going either.
The audiences of 'game players', 'games writers', and 'games readers' are so vastly diverse that summing them up in such a basic and binary way is ridiculous, at best.
That someone would want to write about any topic in an intellectual way has nothing at all to do with any segment of the user base of said field. The writing is there for those interested in reading about it.
Those who may have "lost touch with the average person’s view of a good game" are surely out there but I don't think that topic was touched on at all in this article.
Sounds like there was a good idea here that escaped. I've come to expect more from Edge's articles (and Leigh) than this piece.
A further point to this. The situation described here is exactly the same as for film critics. Things like Transformers and The Expendables are routinely panned by the critics for almost every aspect. And yet people collectively fling millions of pounds at them.
Really, Leigh is taking umbrage at criticism in general, rather than just with video games.
For me the point is that there are two different ways of breaking new ground with any media - on one hand criticism helps to break things down to their consituent parts, analyse how they work, and then think how they could be rebuilt differently using that knowledge. The danger is that it's insular - stuck in a world of technical terms and rules that can have a negative impact on imagination when it comes to creating fictions (I guess that's the point in the article).
On the other hand new ideas come from those who aren't familiar with how things are supposed to work, or the kinds of fictions and mechanics that are acceptable. I think LA Noire fits into this pretty well - what is so enticing about it is the setting, because it has a certain 'realness' and is relatively unusual even for a veteran game player. It possibly takes someone thinking beyond the usual boundaries to come up with this. But then, frankly, the game is terrible - in trying something different it seems unaware that there are certain rules that make games function properly - a 'critic' would understand this.
I'm not quite sure if it's what the article is suggesting, but I would say there is demand for more of a dialogue between the 'inside' (industry and players) and 'outside' (by which I don't mean CoD players, but those who don't really play games because they don't understand why they so often follow such a limited range of ideas). It would be good to hear some ideas from people who aren't as involved and entrenched in genre conventions, and bring those into the development process to both learn from and challenge it. It would be good for games to feel more welcoming, thematically, not for mass market expansionist reasons, but to broaden their creative horizons. I think it's the whole industry's responsibility, for everyone's benefit, to do so.
Leigh - did the people who enjoyed watching you play LA Noire also actually play it, though? Has their enjoyment of it more to do with its familiarity to consumers of film and TV? It's thematically accessible - actors from Mad Men and plots half-lifted from LA Confidential - but would they have actually enjoyed grappling with its unpredictable interrogations or slightly pedestrian investigations much more than I did (which is to say: moderately)?