Games Aren't Numbers

Maybe I’m not as savvy as Leigh Alexander is, but it took me a moment before I understood what she was talking about in her analysis titled “Why Alan Wake Is Too Well-Made To Work” which explains why the game is ironically too correct to be good. I have no idea what “well-made” means in this context, and I’m probably not helped by the fact I haven’t played Alan Wake yet. I have played a whole lot of games though, and I doubt that one new release is going to open my mind to what a “correct” game is. This sounds like the kind of thinking deployed by places like Metacritic, except that Alan Wake only has an 83 out of 100 average score there; that sounds like at least 17 percent of the game is incorrect.

I hoped that the article clarifies itself somewhere, so I continued reading.

Leigh Alexander never does explicitly define what she’s talking about, but for all the ignorant people like me it’s relatively easy to pick up on the gist of it anyway. Correctness seems to be related to a game’s accessibility and lack of frustration. Alan Wake is both of these things, and is therefore well-made. That’s just my interpretation of her interpretation of Alan Wake, so you’ll probably want to read her article yourself.

I began writing this by trying to criticize her ridiculously vague and reductionist language, but I ended up agreeing with her point. Correctness, as defined by most mainstream videogame media, is in fact not correct at all. If Alan Wake fails at manipulating the player’s emotions then that’s because such manipulation is a superficial goal to begin with. The fact that this is considered the proper way to make a triple-A game shows how worthless so many opinions in this industry are.

Maybe I’ll update this with my own thoughts on Alan Wake once I get a chance to play it myself. Its Xbox exclusivity has barred me from it, at least for now.