Spectator-mode Notepad
There’s a lot of controversy about videogames recently. We’ve all seen the issues, games being rated “10/10 100% game of the year” by professional reviewers and getting much lower reviews from the actual players. I want to focus on two instances of this.
I do want to preface this by saying that I don’t trust the videogame review industry. The scores they give are generally higher and far more generous than the game-playing population. We’re no longer in an era of constructive criticism and honest press. More than ever, journalism attends its business needs first, and their responsibility to deliver accurate, unbiased information second. There are no two places where this is more visible than US Politics (Which I am not touching with a 50 foot pole) and Game Journalism.
It feels like a cyclic industry. Game Developers choose to whom they send their review copies, giving the people (or the product of the people) being reviewed instant power over the reviewers. Imagine going into your next job interview with leverage over the employer and how much easier that would make your life. Game Journalists then make a choice. Review honestly for the public, or pander to Puppet-Master GameDevs who hold their strings in one hand and scissors in the other. Pan a game? Don’t get the next big release from that studio. Instantly you lose traffic as readers looking for information on that release go elsewhere. Game Journalism, in my opinion, takes the easy route. They hop onboard the hype-train that accompanies all large game releases, and spew information and opinions that rarely reflect the actual product.
So now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about my click-baity title. No; I don’t mean that VG Journalists are punching gamers in the face. I mean they’re attacking legitimate arguments using virtue signalling and logical fallacies. Most specifically, appeals to emotion, reduction to absurdity, irrelevant conclusion and ad hominem attacks, whereby VG Journalists attack players instead of their arguments.
Now let’s take a look at the first of our examples. Pokemon Sword & Shield.
This game received massive pre-release backlash from players due to information where hundreds of classic pokemon were cut from the game, despite high-res 3D models existing for them. This caused uproar as players started creating ticklists of their favourites and taking to Twitter to angrily proclaim their undying love for underrated Eevee evolutions.
This was quickly jumped upon by VG Journalists as an attack point. You can find hundreds of posts refuting this point. But this was not actually the main source of the complaints. The real complaints ranged from poor storyline, the map feeling small (with one route literally just turning a corner), cities feeling empty, game music being jarring and, in several places, completely missing , poor quality animations, N64 era graphics from a system capable of bringing us BotW, etc.
In short, gamers had plentiful and valid complaints. To them, the game was an unfinished, rushed release, presumably pushed through to meet Christmas pre-sale deadlines. These complaints were, for the most part, ignored by the VG Journalism industry. Any valid arguments were ignored. Instead, they clung to the irrelevant conclusion fallacy of “You’re not getting all your pokemon, so you’re just sulking.” In part, a valid point. But failing to address the actual argument. And, to put it quite bluntly, an attack on gamers.
To this day, Pokemon Sword has a Metacritic critic score of 80, and a user score of 4.6.
More recently, however, VG Journalists have taken the next step. As such, I want to talk to you about where you knew this post was going to end up.
The Last of Us, Part II.
Like Pokemon, the story involves leaks. But most of the discord started with a picture. This picture:
Now, I am not here to discuss the content of this picture. That’s another post for another day (or in current political climate, perhaps never). What I will say is that this picture received vigorous mocking online.
Post release, VG Journalists were quick to jump into attack mode against their own readership, blaming bigotry and homophobia for poor reviews. The most stark example, and the one that prompted me to write this annoyingly long post, is here (citing for sources, but please don’t click it and give them ad revenue): https://www.vg247.com/2020/06/22/the-last-of-us-part-2-incel-impressions/
The review does a poor job of labelling anyone who disagrees with the direction of TLOU2 as a basement-dwelling, woman-hating, bigotted and homophobic incel. Which has been a standard tactic for some time now.
But let’s reverse time a little. If we look back to the original leaks, the picture came along with massive storyline leaks. Storyline leaks that, from what I understood, were the source of the outrage.
When the game finally released, and all of these spoilers were found to be true, gamers were exactly as annoyed as they said they would be with such a storyline. And VG Journalism began their attacks, again completely missing the actual points. Points such as poor story, poor character development, destroying previous character development, being forced into playing a character you see as the villain, having no control over the outcome of the game, the game having been sold as one thing and delivering another, etc.
But no one is talking about these points. VG Journalists are jumping on the “men are bigots who hate women” narrative and ignoring the actual discussion. Again. Furthermore, they are eager to jump on the idea of bots and review bombing. Another interesting tactic. Making accusations that vilify your opponent and which have the accusers have no means of proving.
So while you might already be tired of hearing about TLOU2, this (annoyingly long, but almost finished) post is not quite about that. It’s about this:
<PICTURE OF 10/10 REVIEWS>
Can we trust this?
Video Game Journalism is no longer the haven it was, back in the days of physical media. Think about it logically and you’ll see that, like most physical printed media, their sales have tanked due to the internet. No longer are they selling a magazine for $10 a pop with 50 articles, giving them a $0.20 / article per reader value. Instead, they’re getting something closer to $0.01 or less. They’ve become a volume business, abandoning quality in favour of churning out quantity. Anything to get your clicks. Anything to drag in that revenue, to stay afloat.
In future, when you see a game filled with “10/10 95% Game of the Century” flags, pre-release, cast a critical eye over it. Check with the user reviews. Find out what the VG reviewers are glossing over. Remember, you vote with your wallet, but also with your clicks. Consider boycotting the reviewing sites in the picture above.
In my humble opinion, they’re not journalists. They’re marketers.