Skepticism is a Virtue
When critiquing games I try to be easy on them but without allowing them to walk all over me. I don't like being judgmental, in fact making a comprehensive judgment is my least favorite part of reviewing. It's much more fun for everyone involved if the game gets a fair chance to justify itself, and we assume that all of its disagreeable design choices are for good reasons. Labeling a game as either "good" or "bad" is difficult because there are some games that simply don't seem interested in being fun but if they achieve their intended goal then I don't believe I can say they are failures.
There is a danger however in being too accepting. Just because I'm easy on games doesn't mean I accept each one with open arms. I accept each one, but cautiously. I assume it's design is well-intentioned, but am constantly on the lookout for ways that it screws up its own formula. For me the good and the bad cannot outweigh each other because I don't believe in comprehensive scores. Each detail is noted on its own rather than weighed into a whole. I don't penalize for errors, but I don't forget them.
I'm very skeptical of every new release, and lean towards the negative pole of judgment when I play one. I admit I'm a hard customer to please. I just don't see any reason to get caught up in hype and expect any game to be anything more than acceptable. Looking forward to a new game is fine, but accepting each one with open arms is like accepting every person you meet with open arms. You risk being disappointed or even hurt.
When compared to other media games must especially be accepted cautiously. Games are expensive and dropping sixty bucks isn't something a wise person doesn't think about. But even if games were half of their current price they take a time investment as well. Before I commit ten to twenty hours I want to be sure those will be well spent. Perhaps these are why most of my gaming purchases lately are “retro.” They've already withstood the test of time (and are usually cheap).
Unless someone has disposable income, disposable time, and a high tolerance for bad quality then I don't understand how he or she can openly and blindly accept every game out there. Skepticism is a virtue in the gaming world.
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3 comments
When I was a kid I was much more skeptical about games. I would only have enough cash to buy a game once or twice every year, and could maybe get a parent to give me one as a gift for a birthday or Christmas, but my siblings and I could convince our parents to rent a game once or twice a month instead of movies. So I would only buy a game if I had previously rented it and after returning it I still wanted to play it more.
This would've still made fiscal sense if I was paying for the rentals as well since a rental cost $3, and 19 out of 20 games were easily not worth more than a rental. Meanwhile I still got to play things that weren't worth $60 but still had some fun to be had in them.
I've begun to think recently that I need to have a policy like this again.
I just saw this on the Edge article you linked:
"People will buy sh1t if its cheap enough. So the title of this article Valve [asks]: Are Games to Expensive? could quite easily be Valve [asks]: Are Games (Mostly) Crap?"
I think most games are interchangeable. If the goal is simply to kill time then there are plenty of ways to do it. It's hard to justify spending any amount of money on a product that's being constantly replicated, sometimes for free. This ties into what I said about rentals above. If instead of buying a game I can rent twenty other games (I think it's typically more like twelve games nowadays. I haven't payed for a game rental recently) then that one game has to be pretty special to justify that expense. You could also look at it as buying entertainment hours. If the twenty games you rented have, on average, one hour of entertainment, then that offsets the value of purchasing one game with twenty hours of entertainment.
I'm aware that this is a model based on consumption and treats games as simply a way to kill time with no other redeeming feature. I think the majority of commercially produced games warrant such an approach.
I'm not sure what inspires me to try new video games anymore. The fact is, I already own enough. I'm not hungrily on the lookout for my next fix. I don't need more and I mostly don't want more.
Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure how new games continue to get my attention. I mostly avoid anything that looks too similar to something that I already have, even if it's something I really enjoy; experience has taught me that there are diminishing returns to buying too many similar games, even if those subsequent games improve on the original (which they too often don't).
I can be very forgiving toward a game if it does one thing well and that happens to be something I like. For example, the game Battle of the Bands for the Wii is bland at best and terrible at worst by any scale you'd care to measure it. But! It DOES have 30 songs recorded in five distinct musical styles, and it's fun to listen to the differences in the music when you switch styles. I rented it, enjoyed it, and then bought it when it went on clearance for $15.
If I turned off gaming websites and never looked back, I'm sure I'd never buy another video game again. Maybe I should try that.