Julius

@peezmachine: I find your response very confusing. You tell me that games are not a monolithic entity, well, that is exactly what I'm saying. The problem is that games coverage biases towards to stories and characters of games, and they treat games and though they are all equally suitable for this type of analysis. That's not the case: Sport-like games such as Bayonetta or Spelunky are based on their mechanics, and the story is nothing more than a context for those mechanics, as much as the background or soundtrack.

Then you go knock down a strawman in "if you wake up next week and hear that here will be no more Call of Duty games..." and show that Sportist fans will still have their games, with the example being Call of Duty. The problem there is that I never said that these games are disappearing, I said that they are being critiqued and explored from a perspective that makes no sense for their content.

You also say that Gies's audience is his audience because they value what he writes and I disagree completely based on the limited quantity of major game criticism sites and the scope that they encompass with their reviews. People can be on Polygon for many different reasons, not just because they are a fan of Gies. He's analyzing parts of a game that the creators analyzed less than he himself did, and worse than that, he's trying to then make that game into an example of bad characterization. The whole thing loops back around when we have Storyist games then held up as shining examples of games when compared to Bayonetta, whose developers I could only imagine would respond with confusion as to why anyone took their game so seriously in that sense in the first place.

The point here is that stories aren't created equal. If we are critiquing a story that a writer worked on, considered, and fleshed out, then there may be value to that analysis. If we are critiquing the thin contextualization of the action in a game like Spelunky or Super Meat Boy in terms of its characters' motivations or the meta-narrative occurring, what are we really doing?

I explained the media preference for story-driven video games by citing Patrick and Arthur Gies's pieces, and gave a counterexample by citing Alex's review.

It's not "tribalist" to categorize concepts, it is a useful tool for people to express what they like or do not like and then build upon these opinions that they can more easily understand.

Feel free to post examples, I would love to discuss them. I disagree that it is "just wrong," though -- we have a community where many people watch and play games that have little to no narrative, revere Nintendo, Sega, Namco, Capcom, games that had little to no story, and yet the most common article to see on a game site other than straight-up news is commenting on the lack of progress in the characters and narrative in games. These weren't the things that made a lot of us fall in love with games, why do we have to accept that we need to go in the direction of Gone Home and company?

@soldierg654342 I agree, but it's not an excuse. Open-ended gameplay-based games were reviewed easily back when they were the norm, we shouldn't accept a degradation in the quality of games criticism.

Every "ism" word is ridiculous and overly general, but a lot of these higher-level discussions about social happenings and trends in entertainment require ways to abstract all of the intricate details. "Ism"s are an effective way of doing so.

I believe you missed a part of my post: "Gies should definitely not stop expressing his opinion -- it is his job as a critic to do so, in fact." It's absolutely fair to judge the game in that way, but from the perspective of Polygon, is analyzing a game on the parts that most of its audience ignores in that time of a game useful? I guess there's an evangelical aspect to it -- Gies may feel that he's educating the masses, but he is still writing a piece that people will base purchasing decisions off of. By not acknowledging the Sportist attributes in the score, he is losing the attention of a large portion of his audience.

@prestige

True, but when they are analyzed afterwards, the analysis often concerns the narrative and characters, which are again not the subjects the reviews even raved about.

Why is it that we can so rarely follow up reviewing a game well with putting out our thoughts about how the XXXYY combo is the reason the gameplay flows so well? Those tasks are left to the "weirdos" as I have heard them referred to as on Giant Bomb, the people who go look into speedrunning (just observing, it may be too hard for most people to do) or frame data or anything else like that. Once the review is over it seems like it's time to put the controller down and go have some opinions about the larger context -- there's still so much more to see, keep on playing and help us all remember why we love games so much.

@patrickklepek: @jeff: I agree that this seems to be a culture split, but it seems like it might be a culture split right down the middle of Giant Bomb, with Patrick (lots of commentary) and Dan (virtually no social commentary) representing the extremes. Is this something that is going to require Giant Bomb to take a side in terms of which type of commentary it provides? I find it more and more difficult to believe that both audiences can be served in the same venue.

If you can't see the difference in tone and severity in a conversation about consoles vs. a conversation about sexism, I don't know what to say. They don't operate on the same rules at all.

Your first sentence is true but it also doesn't address what I said. People go to absurd lengths for their console of choice, but no one outside of the community and others like it cares.

How can you not agree about the consequences to begin with? Jeff has never had to write an article like that in the entirety of the site's existence. And no, I don't think large amounts of people freak out about websites that just... don't have super-open comment systems, or have stricter rules. And with Samantha Allen not able to go on for as long as she did in the comments, she would just be someone on Twitter yelling, which is not exactly noteworthy.

The core users involved in these fights are not interested in being amiable to each other. See the phrases Allen and her detractors traded back and forth on her Twitter or on the site. These are not solvable discussions.

@djm389: The main thrust of the argument from myself and others like me is that we DON'T want to have this conversation. Why do you think we do?

@turambar: The comparison to a console discussion is pretty irrelevant. If two people get mad about consoles, no matter how horrible they are, no one outside of that thread cares. If it's about social issues, people get mad, then people on Twitter get mad, people on Reddit get mad, people get harassed, people get real-life threats against their person, etcetera. These are things that the world cares about, not just Giant Bomb's community, and for better or worse (likely worse), there are massive consequences to the image of a site who allows these conversations to happen out in its most public pages. "Censorship" is not necessarily the way to go, but relocation, recontextualization, setting a tone with the content, and other methods are going to help Giant Bomb not have to waste Jeff's time releasing articles telling everyone to stop being jerks.

I agree that from the conversation-starter's perspective it's a good idea. From the perspective of the site, this leads to (as we have seen) bad things that don't even involve a proper, organized conversation and eventually restrict all conversation. Therefore, it is in the site's interest. The conversation-starter's interests are not the matter at hand.

Again, I misread what @turambar had said, and have since edited my post.

Sorry, I misread your first post. Please see my edit.

@pyromagnestir: okay, well that's fortunate for you in this case, but I personally enjoy reading the audience reaction to content.