On Writing Criticism

I recently came across a blog post via Good Games Writing, which took a humorous approach to writing an 'opinion free' review. It was of the recent SSX game, inspired by a lot of complaints about the subjectivity of reviews. The point of course being that reviewing anything is always going to have a large dose of personal opinion.

I'd been thinking about the same thing recently and also whether sometimes reviewers need to be reminded of this fact - myself included. Certainly when I was writing up my thoughts on Prometheus, I felt like I was presenting my problems with the story as almost unquestionable facts. But my focus on its flaws was almost certainly down to my initial feelings on the film as a whole and plenty of other people have either not noticed the same flaws or did not find them jarring enough to spoil their enjoyment of it.

In fact comparing it to Alien you can point out some similar flaws in both films, specifically simplistic characters who make lots of mistakes. But because I enjoy Alien overall, my first thought would not be to bring up these criticisms in a review and it probably took some time to recognise them. To be able to see issues like that I think takes both experience and knowledge but sometimes just time to reflect on it too. That's something I would imagine a lot of professional critics don't have the luxury of and I'm quite happy to write reviews with no set deadline, so that I have more time to think through what I've experienced.

There have also been some Film Crit Hulk articles on this subject too, a slightly older one was Tangible details and the nature of criticism. The crux of this was how we can all end up out of our depth in certain topics and make judgements by what stands out to us most. The first example in this article was something I've probably railed against in the past, the 'strut' sequence from Spiderman 3. It suggests that there was nothing wrong with this scene overall but it stands out in most people's minds as the worst thing about the film over more fundamental problems. The conclusion here is also that it takes an in depth knowledge of a medium to truly understand why something doesn't work sometimes. Obviously I have an interest in films and know a little about the process of making them but I'm by no means an expert. In that respect I try to stay humble and accept that there will always be someone who knows more than myself and more for me to learn.

I often feel that I don't really have one single area with a huge amount of knowledge, I've always been a bit of a 'Jack of all trades, master of none' in terms of having a lot of interests that don't really go past a surface level knowledge. It's not something that I do intentionally though, I think it always comes from a genuine interest and a desire to understand how things work. Even things like understanding combo systems in fighting games that are way beyond my dexterity to perform, I just enjoy having that knowledge of how it all fits together.

In terms of one specific area that I have the most detailed understanding of I suppose it would have to be video games in general. Having trained to write them and gone on to work on them, I'd like to think I can use this knowledge to give a balanced view of games and perhaps suggest more in depth reasoning for why they turn out a certain way. Even so, that doesn't always translate into the most important part of a games review. What makes a game fun is such a difficult and personal concept to nail down, both from the point of view of those creating games and those criticising them.

A more recent Hulk article, What makes a movie good?, almost feels like the antithesis of the in-depth knowledge approach. Similar to the idea of writing an opinion free review, it suggests that it's pointless to critique a film via an X, Y and Z checklist, where a film lacking in Y can never be considered a classic. Here I felt the take away idea was that everyone ends up with a different view of movies, that may well be influenced by the circumstances in which you watch them and the people you are with.

With games largely being a more lonely pursuit there is often less of an influence from others but there are certainly some games that are remembered fondly because of who you played them with. From the split screen co-op of Halo played with university friends, right up to playing the Lego games with my wife, these experiences tend to elevate our opinion of individual games to another level again. And obviously there are purely multiplayer games that are highly dependent on finding a good group of people to play with, as I've been hearing about Day Z most recently.

If I had one point to end this on, it would be that we should probably be more honest when writing reviews and where possible not be so quick to judge. Try to separate our personal opinions from more technical issues but not just remove personal feeling completely. Be more open to having our opinions changed and admit that we may have been hasty in our initial judgement. I think I would find it refreshing to see more reviewers admit that they were drawn in by the hype or that they found more depth to a product later. Just looking back at the range of emotions I went through after finishing Mass Effect 3, writing a review of it based on my immediate thoughts would have created a very different picture than what I think now. The controversy over its ending in particular seems to have led to a lot of gaming sites really digging their heels in and branding fans as 'entitled whiners' when there have actually been a lot of well made points about its issues.

To me this is yet another reason to not give scores in a review, that official number that is the final opinion of an outlet as a whole makes it very difficult to overturn. In a sense the internet should really free us from the issue of a printed media writer's opinion being set in stone but there is still a sense that you should never back down from your review if people question it later. I get especially concerned about this when I hear about developers being rewarded based on average metacritic scores, which have no way of being updated to reflect changing opinions. Just today I've seen an article on The problem with Metacritic, which features opinions from both sides and I disagree just as much with the idea that a reviewer should feel pressured about writing a negative review that might drag the average score down. Sadly even those who don't give scores aren't immune from contributing to this problem as metacritic will assign your review a score based on what they think the content of your review suggests. It seems like this issue is probably here to stay and we can only hope that developers can gradually aim to negotiate better ways of being rewarded for their work.