@pr1mus said:
Game reviews should probably be entirely subjective but they still have elements like graphics, sound quality, bugginess, etc. that are not and tons of reviewers out there still put a lot of emphasis on those. If you read a review of The Last of Us that does just that even if the reviewer thought the gameplay was trash if the score is impacted enough by the technical merits of the game it will still score pretty well anyway.
Movies are 100% subjective because all they have is a story and acting. Unless reviewers started writing 3 paragraphs about how great or poor the special effects are in each review but you're never going to see this because they know better. SFX, cinematography, sound editing and the likes are at most mentioned in passing in almost every reviews.
And then there's all the other more sinister aspects that gaming media like to ignore and jump on people who dare mentioning them. Like the fact that almost every gaming publications and sites are kept alive by ads from the very industry they cover and are also stuck with a very toxic community at large that gets outraged by any score outside the norm to a level that even the most angry movie review readers are not approaching. Most movie reviews are from newspapers or magazines that don't focus exclusively on movies.
And lighting, and editing, and staging, and score, and cinematography....
Actually, having given this a moment's thought, I'm being totally fatuous, because you do acknowledge some of this in your post anyway. So I'll revise what I'm saying to: You're either not being granular enough and being reductive, or your being too granular by even saying that film reviews are undertaken by splitting a film into it's component parts and grading each one according to some set of criteria, subjective or otherwise.
But the individual sections of a film can largely be looked at in an objective way, I think. Certainly bad editing, staging, lighting and all those technical bits would be immediately obvious if you ever saw a film that was incompetent in those areas (they don't get seen by many people, surprisingly). Story is a bit more complicated, because obviously you can't objectively criticise a story for being the story it is; but historically there are structural standards that we like to hold stories to and against.
Of course there is still leeway and subjectivity in all of these things, and rule-bending and lowered standards can all be applied (subjectively) by a reviewer, but - and this is where the thing about being too granular comes in - it is normally measured up against how it all works in service of the total sense experience of the film. I think film reviewers (certainly the more nuanced reviews I've read/heard in my life) tend to start from a position of "did this piece work as a whole" and then work backwards to try and describe what it was that worked (ie the editing really enhances the tension of the film) or why it didn't work (the story was too heavily weighted towards the final action sequences, so I felt no emotional connection). I realise that I am still describing a subjective method here, and I would never deny that I was. I just wanted to suggest that the process might be a bit more complex than you were suggesting. That's not even to get into questions of intertextuality in films, and how a critic with a long history, who knows a lot of about films, can often get to the heart of whether and how a film works just by putting together the influences and references and getting a more complete picture of what the film wants to do (IE the lit crit part of the process).
I think this is part of why film critics seem "harsher," because being able to look at a film both as a whole and in the details allows for a lot more variation in their response to it: "I liked what the film was trying to do, but it's cinematography was too flashy for the subject matter" is a type of response you just don't see that often in games journalism, because the only real equivalent is gameplay and graphics, and graphics are measured more on their verisimilitude than their service to the plot or whatever, and gameplay is often treated as "separate but equal" to story (not necessarily incorrectly). Put simply, the stuff that can be technically bad in a game stands on its own as bad, rather than as a competent but failed attempt to do something.
But yeah, even excluding that, there is a base line of technical skill which doesn't often get criticised because you don't often see films that fail to reach that line?
Log in to comment