On the need for game criticism
Greg Costikyan has been saying this for a decade or more, but this is well-written at least:
The truth is that, for the most part, we don't have anything like game criticism, and we need it — to inform gamers, to hold developers to task, and to inform our broader cultural understanding of games and their importance and impact on our culture.
We need our own Pauline Kaels and John Simons — and we need to ensure that when they appear, no one insists that they attach a damn numerical score to their writing, because that is wholly irrelevant to the undertaking of writing seriously about games.
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Parmeter Mar 14, 2008
Interesting thing that.
Jim Brinkman and I were talking about food criticism a few weeks back after having caught the same episode of IC:A where one of the guest judges, a large and opinionated man, was rather harsh in his critique of the chefs' dishes and also in his remarks about the abilities of the other judges to properly "taste" the food. Jim related a story from his own school days where in order to pass a class he had to create some "basic" dishes and have three of the professors pass him on how it tasted. The problem he encountered in this was that each of the teachers thought that his dishes were insufficient in some manner which was contradicted by the others. One thought a dish was too salty and needed to be sweeter. The second thought it too sweet and needed have more salt. The third thought it too bland and needed to be remade altogether.
The point to all of that is something I think critical thought has lacked for a while now. Critical Theory, in all of it forms, needs to teach that you first divorce yourself from the things you like and dislike before attempting to engage a work.
Now I'm not going to sit down and say that we need some completely objective and qualitative scale with which to judge things by, but instead need to create the mental space to give ourselves a chance to see objectively (if that is possible) the work or works in question. It certainly would have helped in Jim's case as he ended up having to take the three teachers to task for having such divergent opinions (mostly due to letting their personal opinions of if it was to their liking get in the way of telling him if he had correctly followed their recipe and that the dishes could be served at the student banquet or not). For games and gaming in general, this is likewise important but first and foremost we would have to get rid of the money issues. Start moving such criticism out of the specialty periodicals and into a more general publications.