Mutual Co-Operation: Some Thoughts on Criticism
By gamer_152 4 Comments
This is the kind of thing that some readers are going to find a bit basic, but I think is worth talking about: I see at lot of people, especially recently, discussing media critics and media creators as though they’re in some kind of adversarial competition with each other. Some common forms of this:
- When critics express a negative opinion about a piece of media and that piece of media then goes on to be popular or highly profitable, it’s often framed as the creators or the media triumphing over the criticism or critics. It may also be framed as the critics being somehow “proven wrong”.
- When critics express that an element of a piece of media might be problematic and the creator doesn’t change their media in response or even doubles down on that element, they’re seen by some as fighting back against an oppressive force.
- When a critic makes a statement about a piece of media someone disagrees with, that person will sometimes defend that piece of media in a way that treats the criticism as an outside threat to it.
In these situations it’s implicitly suggested that the goal of the critic/s was to somehow damage the success of the piece of media or prevent media getting into the hands of an audience that might be enthusiastic for it. However, despite people making these statements a lot, few ever seem to make an argument for a predator-prey relationship between these groups as a real part of the creative landscape. There’s rarely even a supposed logic on which this idea of the destructive critic is built and evidence presented for it is often only from fringe sociopolitical groups vastly stretching the truth.
Critics do affect audience habits, but critics also know that writing negatively about media isn’t going to make it vanish in a puff of smoke. In addition, the people in criticism are largely there because they have a passion for and love of the medium they’re critiquing. For these and other reasons, just trying to delete media from the world is almost never what they’re trying to do. In fact, if everything is working properly, creators and critics can form a co-operative and positive relationship.
There is frequent middle-ground that many creators and critics are trying to push media towards: Both creators and critics often want to get worthwhile media into peoples' hands. This of course does not apply to every creator and every critic of them: The goals of critics and the goals of creators change from person to person, and there’s often more than one thing that people in these roles are trying to achieve. Additionally, critics and creators disagree all the time about what makes worthwhile media. Still, that doesn’t mean there cannot be and is not a large area of overlap where creators and critics benefit from a mutual exchange of media and feedback on that media.
Despite this portrait of the artists and the critics staging some epic cultural battle, a lot of the artists I know and see around me are people who are very eager for feedback, especially feedback from particularly informed individuals. If you want to work your way “up” a creative field that kind of criticism becomes invaluable. It’s why indie game devs are keen on getting games into peoples’ hands and why game studios bring in QA teams. You can also see plenty of people and companies out there who see criticism as an important form of publicity for their product, even when that criticism may highlight considerable flaws in what they’ve made. Heck, just look at the relationship Giant Bomb has with game developers.
No matter the critic’s goals, constructive feedback can and is used as a vital tool in sculpting art or entertainment people want to engage with. Likewise, even if the creator feels subjectively different about their own work than the critic does, they can still see the criticism as representing outside opinions in a valuable way. What’s more, even if they don’t agree with the criticism as a whole, that doesn’t mean there can’t be elements in what the critics are saying which will help creators think constructively about what they make as they go forward.
This is of course scratching the surface of critic-artist relationships, and a lot of controversies over critical opinions also have a lot to do with people feeling that criticism of things they like is a personal attack on them, people being confused about the difference between disliking something and criticising it, and many more issues. The critics aren’t always right and the critics won’t always agree with us, but that doesn’t mean that artists need “defending” from criticism or that critics are in competition with artists. Seeing conflict as unavoidable and people you disagree with as the enemy is an easy but dangerous way out. One of the best things we can do for any medium is see instances of and opportunities for co-operation. Thanks for reading.
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