Worth Reading: 07/21/2014

Kim K's game helped me cope with the NBA free agency BS from a couple weeks ago. I didn't invest any money into it, so I have no regrets.

@joshwent: Very well said.

@joshwent: Fuckin' A dude. Great post.

@joshwent: Thanks for writing a nice post. When I read Totilo's piece, I couldn't see much wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with those kinds of questions. But the kind of media coverage you talk about, that's what makes me apprehensive whenever these topics come up. The comment sections reflect the way the articles write about these topics, and lot of the time, it's no good.

That was a great post. This is the true other side of the argument that is basically never addressed, or even acknowledged, by anyone working in game journalism.

I watched that entire Epona video, wondering if (in the end) it would make sense. It did not.

It's just a(great) pun.

I second that. This is the position of a lot of rational people that often is lumped together with people making death and rape threats. Not everyone who has a different opinion is a psychopath, despite what a lot of people (on this site included) want you to believe.

That Last Night game was pretty cool, but I'm not sure if it was because of some particular atmosphere or if it was just the music. In terms of cyperpunk it was fairly tame.

Anyone else get locked out of their computer for a few minutes when loading up Sun & Moon?

I think PK said it best in one of his, o christ, dare i quote a tweet ffffffuuu, "If you only play the games you're used to, how will you ever know what else you may fall in love with". That does not only apply to games but life itself, words to live by. Nice job PK.

So jealous of everyone jumping into D:OS, luckily i have Divinity 2 directors cut. Easily can see where the foundation was laid. The humor, voice acting and just plain personality is overflowing.

Except it serves absolutely no one. The reviewer just comes off as ignorant to the people who actually played and explored the game. The reader who wants a review to inform their decision gets misled. The developer doesn't get an actual critique of their game, they just get a surface level glance. It's a poor, dismissive approach, and anyone that actually cares about balanced game mechanics is left not getting served any information.

I'm not saying every reviewer has to be a competitive-level master at every game - that would be incredibly unreasonable. But I'd hope the reviewer would be better able to articulate and more willing to engage with a game on a deeper level to understand what makes it different. In the writer's example, popping Smash Bros. Melee for an hour and then playing Brawl should atleast elicit could some kind of a response like "This does feel different... It has a different weight to it, and my character just feels slower." Just shrugging "Yeah, it was okay I guess. I pressed the button and the dude swing the sword. It's.... visceral?" doesn't help me. It says nothing.

And brushing off people who want an analysis with some level of depth as "the crazies" is a gross attitude to have. These are people who should be more willing and able to look deeper into what's going in a game rather than shaking their head after 20 minutes of not understanding and walking away.

"The nature of the business" isn't good enough. That's not an okay excuse.

@joshwent: The problem is that pushing for diversity actually requires a little pushing. Just accepting "We didn't include any female characters because we only wanted these specific male characters" at face value and shrugging your shoulders isn't going help change anything. Now, of course the people working on the GTA and Assassin's Creed series aren't woman-hating misogynists, but the reality is that the vast majority of discriminatory systems aren't held up by nasty bigots spewing threats on the internet, but rather by nice, intelligent people who've simply internalised the values of of the culture around them. Unconscious systems of bias and tribalism are still significant parts of human psychology.

What this means is that the lack of diversity isn't anybody's "fault," it's a systemic issue within the industry. But you can't hold "the industry" accountable in any meaningful way; it's not a discrete organization that you can petition for change. You can only put pressure on individuals (and individual organizations) within the industry. Is it fair to hold Rockstar and Ubisoft specifically accountable for not having more diversity when, like I mentioned, it's not really their fault at all? Well no, not really. But it's ALSO unfair to just let the systemic issues persist and not pushing for any change at all.

In the long run, I'd much rather put some heat on companies today (Heat which they can easily take, GTA and Assassin's Creed aren't exactly struggling) in the hopes that the status quo can perhaps be pushed away from where it is right now.

@fifichiapet: Wow! You have summed up all my thoughts much better than I could. It's true, people seem to use "empathy" all the time now in place of "sympathy", as if the latter is a dirty word, but there is a difference between the two. Being empathic and being sympathetic are very distinct. You can't "empathize" with someone unless you have been through the same experience/felt the same feelings. If you haven't, you can still "sympathize" with them. At least that's how it was taught to me. This isn't a hard and fast rule, if you look up "empathy" in wikipedia there is a range of interpretations. In spiritual circles, an empath is someone who can literally pick up on and feel other people's emotions. So I always used it that way: if I've been through what another person has been through, I can empathize. If I haven't, but still have caring and compassion for them, I can sympathize.

From Wikipedia's article on sympathy: "Empathy refers to the understanding and sharing of a specific emotional state with another person. Sympathy does not require the sharing of the same emotional state. Instead, sympathy is a concern for the well-being of another."

Chris Wager's article is excellent. It makes sense that so much of the style of games criticism borrows from film and literature criticism, since games usually share many of the same elements as film and literature. I think Chris has a point, though. The level of criticism covering the areas of games that are unique to gaming (mechanics and interactivity) is woefully undeveloped. I don't necessarily think this is being done maliciously, it's simply a function of literature and film having been around much longer than video games. That being said, I think there are certain articles that are written specifically to provoke a response from readers. Whether these articles are written to promote clicks (as those provoked claim) or to promote discussion (as the author may claim), I have no idea because I can't see into the author's head. Either way, I think there is room for a lot of improvement in games criticism, and to me the challenge of wrapping our brains around the whole thing just serves as evidence that video games are the coolest thing ever.

The Last night looks super atmospheric and cool. I really hope that turns into a full product at some point.

Oooooohh. I've always wondered about the blood type thing but never enough to actually figure out the answer. I just chalked it up to 'because Japan'.

Kim Kardashian is so far removed from being interesting

I can't speak for the quality of Divinity: OS, but I'd liken it more to if you were a TV critic and instead of watching really good shows from recent years, you kept watching Ken Burns, or other documentaries that take up a lot of your time. Differently satisfying, I'm sure. But dude, just play Valkyria Chronicles and Demon's Souls and Persona 4.

Trying to figure out where to draw that line, when to conclude a game is not for you, is murky.

Once again I have to disagree with you, Patrick, because you seem to assume that we all live in a vacuum and nothing is comparable to anything else, when that is blatantly false. It's not the end of the world when you compare games, and doing so lets you know if a game is for you or not.

Otherwise, why would anyone say anything about games that aren't out yet besides the cold, objective, boring facts? Even when you play E3 demos, can you really say a game "looks fun" when you only played a small piece of it? Of course not, but you still do, because you're taking what you know about the developer and your previous experiences with similar games to form an opinion about it.

Yet here you are trying to say you don't do that, or shouldn't. It's confusing, man.

Then find better game reviewers? I dunno, I'm not trying to apologize for bad reviews, but I think that if you feel that the reviews you read don't cover games in an adequate manner, find some other ones that do. I'm also not sure where in my post I derided anyone for being crazy, I was merely attempting to point out that many times game superfans will be overly vocal about how the reviewer doesn't understand the game like they do and render their criticism as illegitimate. I think most reviewers that I read do a good job at taking the appropriate amount of time learning a game for review, but then again I don't really read any reviews outside of Giant Bomb, so if this is a huge problem with a lot of mainstream game sites I wouldn't really know.

I don't entirely agree with the "Tripping on the Air" article, but I do wish that game reviewers could speak more intelligently about game mechanics rather than spend most of a review talking about the story. It's why I don't find GB reviews that interesting; the dudes aren't really great GAME reviewers. They're fine I guess, and good writers, but not top notch in that specific discipline.

Good Stuff.

Regarding "the crazies" comment, that wasn't directed at you as much as it was an issue the author was having in the article about how those that disagree or call out reviewers get labeled. His post isn't without its own questionable statements, but he's not wrong about how reviewers will dismiss criticism towards them regarding their own analysis of a game. It's not a question about skill as much as it is about, well, effort. Effort in looking at a game with a pre-existing community and discussing what they may care about (even on a base level), effort in engaging with what the designers have put into a game, effort into articulating their feelings that aren't broad stroke statements, and even sometimes effort into noticing other options.

Giantbomb is in a unique position in that they rarely review anything, but there are plenty of Quick Looks where someone would be making a complaint again and again, and not noticing there is an option just on the side that would fix their problem.

That Burak Tezateser article is pretty interesting. He says "Whatever the reason, we couldn't make any sales. I blame market visibility" which is fair enough because reading what he says about it makes it sound pretty rough to get noticed, but then he goes on to talk about the relatively high price of the game, middling reviews and admitting the game wasn't tested enough before launch. It sounds like there were more than enough problems to go around with the whole process.

Gonna add my support to that Chris Wager article. No game reviewer is as good at Burnout Paradise as me*. No reviews of that game mention the many patches and bundles of free content it had received. I can make the cars in that game do anything I want them to do. When I go read reviews of Burnout Paradise, they just seem...wrong--even though the end scores are mostly agreeable. And that's not even a mechanically deep game! And I'm not even obsessively good at it! I can only imagine most games have this level of division between what a person who played the game for 300 hours could say about it and a reviewer who played the game for 10 hours could say about it. Game reviews are useless as more than a top-level thing. Luckily, that's all most people need (or frankly, want) for most games. It's just the nature of the beast.

I'm bad at SSB Melee, but I never understood how people couldn't tell that the controls in Brawl were much less responsive. They just are. It's not an opinion, the controls *are* less responsive. Right off the bat, you'd think reviewers would notice that. It's very odd to me that none did at the time, as that's a fundamental thing to overlook, but I guess none played Melee right before Brawl dropped. Maybe they should have? That's unrealistic, though...right? But maybe they should have noticed the unresponsive controls regardless of whether they played Melee or not? MAN I DUNNO!

One more thing: I hate when gaming press acts holier-than-thou over games. Like, great man. You're not a competitive Smash Bros. player. Wonderful. But you don't have to act like they're some kind of weirdo. If you're a professional video game person, and you never got obsessively deep into a single video game, maybe you're in the wrong profession.

*Jeff probably is, but you get my point.

This sounds pretty silly but this is PROBABLY the most amount of Smash content I've ever seen on GiantBomb at once, and will sadly probably the most amount of Smash content we'll see at GiantBomb :(

... unless....

Hey! Mr. Klepek! You're a fairly young, open-minded guy who likes stepping out of his comfort zone and learning more about gaming communities from a variety of angles, aren't ya? Why not explore the competitive Smash community? There's a fantastically well put-together documentary on them on youtube called "The Smash Brothers" to get you started. Even if you don't play Smash, watching the 7 individuals examined in this series express themselves both on the screen and in their personal lives is super-fascinating.

Amen, brutha.

I played the Kardashian game, just to see what the hub-bub is about.

It is awful. I can't see how anyone says it's fun. You just click a few times, then some items pop out, you click them and then it gives you your next assignment of stuff to click.

It's ridiculously boring. Rather than pay to play it, I think I'd pay to not have to play it. Come to think of it, maybe that's what all the DLC is about, paying so you don't have to play the crappy game.

The blood type video was a nice peak into something that I never gave a second thought about before. Bonus points for the super cute chick.

The Chris Wager article is a great read that everyone should look into, especially reviewers who take their craft seriously. I don't agree 100% with some of his broad statements that he probably said out of passion, but there are good ideas to plucked from his criticism.

And believe it or not, there is some good discussion in the comments section, specifically where one commenter takes the opposite stance. He/she gets into a debate with another, and although it does get sidetracked, there are relevant points brought up by both sides.

There is definitely the reality of video game reviewers from big sites having less and less time to invest in really getting to know a complex game's mechanics to truly say something worthwhile about them. They have deadlines to follow, and ultimately, they're in a business where getting the review out ASAP means more traffic and more money. This is certainly a problem that's unique to the gaming industry, as no other entertainment medium requires as much of a time commitment as video games to fully appreciate what they have to offer.

That, and there's still that kind of blurred line where journalism and marketing meet. Most other art critics get their opinions out in newspapers, journals, magazines and other more "reputable" traditional publications where the money doesn't come strictly from one source of advertising.

Please, no Johns.

That tabletop thing about racism is interesting, and my game has had similar things happen...

But man, I hate it when one player doesn't have a scenario revolve around them or roll as well as they had planned and then gets mad and refuses the play the rest of the night. He says he's "de-protagonized" which makes sense considering he's not the only person playing the game. When I DM'd, I wrote all my stuff for groups, not for protagonists.

A smart DM would have made circumstances such that his character has to wait outside. Then while everyone else is inside, some plot critical thing happens outside and that player has decisions to make. Warn his friends inside, take off alone? That way the differences between the characters actually cause different outcomes for them, but instead of you get to play/you don't get to play outcomes, they're just different outcomes. All outcomes in a tabletop game should be you get to play.

I read the Chris Wagar article and it's interesting but I feel it maybe doesn't understand what we actually go to 'mainstream' reviewers or writers or journalists or whatever the fuck for; it's not for expertise, it's for breadth of knowledge and experience. Jeff Gerstmann has played tons of video games from tons of different eras and can talk to you about 500 games from the last thirty years and give you a basic rundown of them. Seth Killian can tell you the absolute intricacies of about 10 games. Gerstmann's perspective is going to be more relevant for a much wider swath of people than Seth Killian's perspective. Especially when a new game comes out. Even when a new fighting game comes out, I'd rather hear the superficial but broad perspective of a Jeff Gerstmann than that of someone whose driving passion (a single genre) is not my driving passion.

Yeah, I definitely want to do more on Smash, but I'll probably wait until we're closer to the game's release.

@brodehouse: Thanks for the feedback on my tabletop article! I wanted to chime in about a few of your points.

It was really difficult to write that piece and not come across like a whining, spoiled player. I'm certainly not the "entitled roleplayer" that needs everything to revolve around them. In fact, I'm typically quite the opposite, as I'm a firm believer in using my own characters to set others up for big moments in scenes.

However, this one particular situation stood out to me not necessarily because of the GM's choices (which I was fine with), but the rest of the table. Maybe it was because everyone else was playing white middle-to-upper class PC's, so mine definitely stood out among the party. But it was one of those weird, odd moments where the group's out-of-character behavior had an eerie reflection to what was happening in-game. Again, not a slight against the other players like I pointed out in the article, it was just a surreal moment.

In retrospect, I wish I wouldn't have let it bother me so much at the time and continued on. I play with a few strong personalities at the table though that tend to dominate and dictate the direction of our games, and it just felt like my underprivelaged character was being forced to sit out and only be called upon when they needed him; again, it was a odd reflection of real-life segregation and discrimination that I felt was worth talking about.

@joshwent: Very well said sir.

You make a good point with this statement as well and I agree that discussing these issues is what will hopefully get people within companies like Rockstar and Ubisoft to think about them more and will hopefully influence their future design decisions. I would say there are definitely people at Ubisoft Montreal who are asking a lot of new questions and that's great.

The problem currently being faced is that many of the people in the games press shouting about this issue (not naming names but I'm sure everyone here knows of some) do need this to be someone's fault and treat their commentaries of it as such. I saw more than a few people who would call themselves journalists use a variant of "Ubisoft just hates women" during the Unity controversy. Whatever their motivations for doing so, their need not to discuss it but point fingers and say "You either see my unquestionable wisdom on this issue or you're as bad as the trolls." is doing more damage to an otherwise worthwhile cause than harm in my opinion.

These are important issues that need to be discussed but what we often see in the press is not discussion, it's just raw blaming and entrenched, binary opinions. I appreciate that it's an issue which is passionately held by many people and there's nothing wrong with that but the "You're either with us or the enemy." mentality so many commentaries on the issue are taking will only show positive change and make people who might otherwise be open to new ideas just "Well, forget you then." That's bad for everyone. As is the case with most discussions of this nature, the solution is neither black nor white but somewhere in the middle. A lot of people writing about this don't see it that way though.

@patrickklepek please play Persona 4, I'd LOVE to see your thoughts on the game(it's my personal favorite game)

Same here! I'm glad that was the one video I decided to watch at random, haha. (also helped that it was on the shorter side)

Chris Wager's article is pretty much the reason that even though I read Giant Bomb's reviews, I honestly don't really put much stock in what they have to say. Sometimes a game is just qualitatively bad due to having a very limited budget and trying to do far too much with it, but aside from that, reviews just don't tell me much, because I really don't trust that very many reviewers have anything beyond a surface-level understanding of the game.

I pretty wholeheartedly agree with Wager's notion that the vast majority of game reviewers basically don't have the time to get deep into the game mechanics of a particular game, unless it's about as simple as Mario Kart. I don't even know why major outlets review fighting games anymore, as the people who actually care about that genre know that your average reviewer of those games doesn't really know what he's talking about beyond "there are some new characters".

The reason why is due to the nature of the reviewer's audience. The people who 'actually care about that genre' have their own sources that they go to. They are not using metacritic reviews to figure out if they want to play Marvel or Mortal Kombat or Blazblue. They are already discussing things on that level, with the people who care about it on that level.

The Giant Bomb audience is somewhat diverse, but the interests of the staff have a great duel of influence in the specific games or genres the community is interested in, even the type of people who decide "this is the community for me". This is not a deep RPG site, or a deep fighting games site, or Dota, or strategy, or anything. It's somewhat eclectic, but still largely centered around AAA games and popular downloadables. Patrick likes horror and high-concept indie games, and some part of the site's community responds to that. Vinny's main interest is story driven games, Brad likes mechanically complex competitive games, Jeff likes action. Jeff has an appreciation for some fighting games, Vinny has an apprecation for RPGs, but neither of them are genre experts. What they have to say about a specific fighting game or RPG, however, has a lot of relevance to their audience, because their core audience is not fighting game competitors.