anyone who says ‘it’s not a game’ has nothing valuable to say, and here’s why
So, those of you who know me probably know I’ve worked on a lot of video games as a consultant, both indie an AAA, but predominantly AAA. You also may know that I’ve directed some games — including the critically acclaimed Adios and my current project, code named Waifu Death Squad (it’s such an easy name to search). What you may not know is that Adios, a game about a pig farmer who has decided he no longer wants to dispose of bodies for the mob, has been described by many as “not a game.”
That’s kinda weird, right? I mean. I make games, and I made that, and, as you can see above, I said “it’s a game about…” so clearly I think it’s a game. But some people don’t.
Many people try to describe games as “not a game” because they’re attempting to disqualify it from something. You’ll get incompetent critics saying something isn’t a game because it’s easier to say that than it is to reckon with what’s in front of them. You’ll get gamers saying something isn’t a game to justify leaving a negative review on something they didn’t like. But… it’s a useless statement to make.
So why do they think that’s something worth saying at all?
So You Want to Play A Game…
Usually, in a basic “game design 101” style course, a professor asks ‘what is a game?’ and the students pop in with their suggestions, and then the teacher goes ‘a game is a…’ and that’s the definition of games for the rest of the semester or their education or, heck, even their entire lives.
The student now believes that something is a game or is not a game, and if the student doesn’t think very much, the definition becomes calcified. While the intent might have been to set the scope of the professor’s lectures, to get all the students on the same page, a great number of people take a very strange and backwards idea away from this:
that the idea must follow the definition
Let’s think about words for a minute. What are they? What are they for?
Wait, let’s rephrase that: who are words for?
The obvious answer is humans. If aliens exist, they probably have words too, but, based on the information we have at present, they don’t, so instead of wasting our time on unproven and unlikely hypotheticals, we’ll say “words are by and for people.”
Okay, now we can get back to “what are they for?”
Words are used by people to communicate ideas.
Think about it; I am sitting here in my living room on my couch. I’ve got a Corsair lapboard sitting on my lap, attached to a Corsair K63 wireless keyboard and a Corsair Harpoon mouse. This is not an ad for Corsair or anything, I’m just trying to illustrate a point. I am typing out this essay on this keyboard, watching the words pop up on my screen as I do so.
You?
Truth be told, I don’t exactly know your conditions, because I don’t know who will be reading this. I’m talking to you (yes, you), but… I can’t truly know who it is on the other end of the line, you know? Not unless I’m sending it to you exactly, and even then, I might not know exactly your current method of engaging with this essay. Heck, this is being written in text right now, but as a video, it’s being read. You might be watching this on YouTube, you might be reading this in a book. Who knows what the future holds?
Throughout this, if you’ve got a visual imagination, you can probably imagine me sitting on a couch, in front of a television, at my lapboard. But do you really know what I look like? Do you know how many model rockets are sitting on the card table in front of me? Can you see the Titebond II bottle I’ve got? What size is it? 8 oz? 32 oz? (two rockets — Estes’ Patriot and Nike Apache, Titebond II is in a 32 oz bottle, it’s mostly full).
If you can visualize this, then you can see some of these things in your head if you’ve got familiarity with the words. The words are containers for ideas; a handy way for me to share a concept with you through text or voice without you actually seeing what I’m doing.
This is how we are able to communicate. If words meant nothing… well, think about a language you don’t know. To you, the letters are just symbols. They mean nothing.
Language is a mutually agreed-upon set of rules for humans to communicate ideas between themselves.
If you don’t know the rules, the language has no purpose. If you do, then you’ll be able to connect with other human beings. I say “Corsair K63 keyboard” and you can google that and get a sense of what it is. I say “a rocket, the Estes Nike Apache,” and you can imagine a model rocket on my desk, even if you don’t know exactly what Estes is (through context, it’s obviously a company), and even if you don’t know exactly what a Nike Apache is (it’s a sounding rocket that uses a Nike booster to launch an Apache rocket).
Language is, to some extent, fuzzy.
We don’t need to know exactly what something is; we ask for clarification when we don’t fully understand what’s being communicated to us (if I’m talking to an astrophysicist, while we’re both speaking in the language of English, they may also being speaking in the language of astrophysicists — we tend to call these sorts of secondary languages “jargon” — and I may not understand that one as well.
So I may have to ask them to explain the concepts in simpler terms, using ideas I do know instead of words I’ll need to spend time looking up. Obviously, if you have to stop every few seconds to find the definition of a word, it’s gonna mess up the conversational flow, making it more difficult to remember the conversation.
That’s actually the reason I try to avoid (or define) jargon in these pieces — my general rule is assuming that the person on the other end of this connection is an expert in another field. Maybe you’re a neurosurgeon or a rocket scientist, but I’m a game designer, and I know a lot more about that than you do. I know comparatively little about neurosurgery. But either way, we are both intelligent people, and as a result, I will communicate to you as if you are one, but one who doesn’t necessarily know the sub-language that is the jargon of game design speak.
So, in language, we have words. Words are the individual components of language that we, the communicators, put together in a specific way so you, the receivers, can understand… what?
The idea.
Remember when we said that letters and words for a language you don’t know are just symbols that mean nothing? That’s really important, because even though it may seem obvious at a surface level, a key realization I’m hoping you take away from this piece is the idea that the symbols of language are inert unless they are processed by a mind that understands them. It is only when a mind engages with the language that the language has meaning.
Language is by and for human minds to communicate ideas. It requires a being capable of both sending and receiving language in order to have any particular purpose.
Before we get to the words, we have ideas.
Heck, look at the animal kingdom; it’s very clear most animals have ideas, but what they don’t have is language — words, specifically — to help communicate those ideas to other animals.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve seen examples of elephants in India communicating “thank you” to people who wait for them to cross roads, and we know that crows will communicate “this person is a jerk and we should harass them” to other crows who haven’t even seen the person. We know animals can communicate, but an elephant cannot say “thank you,” and a Crow cannot provide a sketch artist with a detailed depiction of a suspect.
But… these ideas are generally not what we’d consider complex. A dog isn’t going to sit on a therapist’s couch and learn cognitive behavioral therapy, and a bear in the woods smelling the urine of another bear knows this means “this is someone else’s territory,” but that same bear cannot read a billboard and decide to purchase an automobile being advertised on it.
With words, human language gains a fluidity. We have versatile means of communication — through text we leave on signs or post on the internet, through audio, and so on — which allows us to communicate ideas not only directly, but through time. I can write this now knowing that people might hear it five, ten, even a hundred years from now.
Thanks to language, however you’re getting this message, when I type “five, ten, even a hundred years from now,” you understand what I mean. You can imagine, in your mind, a potential future, a hundred years from now, where people are on Pluto, getting my essays beamed directly into their head. Maybe in the future, if I’m remembered by anyone at all, I’m remembered as a guy with weird and quaint ideas. Maybe I’m remembered as a pioneer in art. Who knows? But just saying this can get the idea into your head, and then you can mull it over as much as you’d like.
The point is: ideas come first. We don’t have language that ideas then apply to, right? We don’t come up with a word and then try to find an idea to suit it (unless we go “wow, that’s a really awesome name for a story or character, I should find a way to use it,” but that’s naming, which is a bit different than defining, and outside the scope of what we’re discussing here).
A while ago, I was approached by several different tech people. They wanted me to put something in my games called the “blockchain,” though they didn’t really have many good ideas for it (the best one I heard was basically for gambling, but that’s antithetical to what I want to make games for, so I politely declined). I asked every single one of them the same basic question: “what can you do with the blockchain?”
The response was invariably the same: “that’s what we want you to figure out. We’ve got this amazing tool and we want you to figure out how to use it.”
Well, okay, why is it amazing? I mean, if it’s amazing, it must be amazing for something, right? Like… nothing is amazing in and of itself. It’s amazing because of something. Maybe it’s amazing because of the effort required to do it, for instance. When it comes to tools, the only way a tool can be amazing is if it’s amazing at the task it’s designed for.
But here I had like a dozen different people all telling me to try and make games with an “amazing” tool… that… they couldn’t even explain the task for, beyond “it’s a ledger.” Okay, I got more computationally superior, more secure method already, one that actually lets customer service agents, say, reverse transactions when a bad faith actor attempts to con a good faith user of my software.
Why would I want something that’s worse in every way? You keep saying “decentralized,” but you don’t tell me why that’s better than “centralized.” You keep floating ideas that don’t work, like “if you buy a skin in one game, you should be able to get it in another game,” not realizing it means twice as much labor with no financial incentive to the company making it.
But we’re not here to relitigate the problems with NFTs.
We’re here to point out that a bunch of guys in Silicon Valley started trying to sell a tool and then asking customers to find problems for the tools to solve.
That’s… not how inventions work. It never has been.
As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.” We create inventions to solve existing problems. So it puzzled me — I mean really puzzled me — why these guys kept saying their technology was amazing but didn’t actually have a fucking use case for it.
…and then, one day, it all clicked. I was reading an article that highlighted some guy — I want to say Sam Altman, who runs the very-much not-Open “OpenAI” company — who said something along the lines of “that’s how innovation works. You invent a solution, and then you come up with a problem for it.” It wasn’t about reaching consumers with a product they might actually want, it was about inventing something that sounds promising enough that a venture capitalist will be stupid enough to give you money for it.
But think about how stupid that comment is. You build things to solve existing problems. When I want to figure out how to cut the plastic on a model rocket, I go to a store like Amazon and search for a hobby knife. I don’t pick up a hobby knife and then start trying to find something to use it on. That mindset is woefully, wastefully inefficient — imagine every time you walk into a Wal-Mart, you look at everything presented to you, literally thousands of items, and find yourself needing to buy them all just so you can figure out what to do with them. See how backwards that is?
Necessity precedes implementation.
Solutions are responses to problems. A problem is never the response to a solution — the solution is a way to solve a problem; a solution requires a problem to exist before the solution can come into being.
The same is true of language. You do not invent a word and then try to apply it to something; you invent something, and then use a word as a thought linker.
Let’s say I’ve made a website called “Twitter.” When I want someone to put content on my website, I’ve got to come up with a catchy, intelligently-branded word to describe that action (that’s the problem) and the thing they have posted (a second problem). Maybe I call it a “tweet” (that’s my solution), which is both a noun (the object posted), and a verb (the act of posting the objects). A person can say “I am going to tweet a tweet” or “I have tweeted a tweet.”
No one goes “hm… ‘tweet’ as both a noun and verb. I like it. I’m building a business model around it.”
Now, in the case of Silicon Valley, I know exactly why they’d do this: Silicon Valley culture is obsessed with hitting it big, and it’s been this way pretty much since the release of the iPhone in 2007. Everyone who’s trying to get a bunch of venture capitalists to give them seed money to start a new business is just throwing anything at the wall and hoping to build something big enough that they can sell it off and do it again.
This is what we call a perverse incentive.
In an ideal world, there’s a lot of money available to people who are making products that will make money. The products that make the most money are products customers actually want.
If you invent a device that makes whale oil lamps 10% more efficient, that’s not super useful in a modern, electrically-based society where whaling has largely been outlawed. You won’t have any customers because nobody has any interest in your product.
So, in this ideal world, inventors come along, they find problems people have, and they innovate, creating new products that solve the problems people are having. Need to attach papers together temporarily? Cool, here’s a paperclip. Want to keep a soup hot on a wintry day? The inventor of the Thermos has your back.
Unfortunately, a perverse incentive is when, instead of coming up with solutions to existing problems, people start reacting to the problem in ways that… make things worse.
Take, for instance, the British government’s desire to kill snakes in India. “Hey, we’ll pay you for every dead snake you give us.” Sounds great, right? (if you hate snakes, I mean) Well, people just started breeding snakes.
The problem was “too many snakes.” The solution was “kill snakes for pay.” The perverse incentive was “if dead snakes make a profit, we’ll simply make as many snakes as possible to maximize our profit.”
So, in Silicon Valley?
A bunch of people started inventing products and trying to get venture capital types to fund them, and they got to a point where people will literally say the entire point of innovation is to create an object that’s ostensibly a solution, but damned if they’ve got a problem for it to be a solution for, which means it’s not really a solution at all. It’s just a useless thing. It’s anti-innovation attempting to exploit the rewards of a system intended to reward innovation.
It’s like a word that gets created but has no idea to refer to: entirely without purpose.
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What’s In A Game?
Okay, so, we’ve been circling around the drain of the idea for a while, but let’s get to the meat of it: a word is a reference to a thing. The thing must exist prior to the word. You don’t say “ow” out of nowhere, you say “ow” as a response to a pain stimulus. When you say “car,” you are saying that because you want the person hearing it to recognize you are communicating something about a car to that person.
Which brings us to games.
A very long time ago, we got what was arguably the first video game: “cathode-ray tube amusement device.”
That’s a bit of a mouthful, huh?
The basic idea was that you, the player, had to fire ‘projectiles’ across a screen towards plastic or paper objects physically attached to the screen itself. Basically, the “cathode-ray tube amusement device” presents a very simplistic game where the player is trying to fire anti-aircraft weaponry at enemy aircraft.
What is a game?
Ugh, the dreaded question.
I’ve heard a billion different definitions over the years. Over on google, we’ve got “a complete episode or period of play, ending in a definite result,” or “a form of play or sport, especially [but, you will note, not limited to] a competitive one according to rules decided by skill, strength, or luck.”
The best definition I have ever heard for a game?
Structured play.
One of the Merriam-Webster definitions of game is “activity engaged in for diversion or amusement.” It does not specify rules, you will note, and it considers this definition synonymous with play (recreation will also do). I don’t recall exactly where I heard the “structured play” definition, but I like it because we do know that “play” and “game” are at least somewhat different.
When children say “let’s play!” and go pick up action figures and toys and dolls and take them on wild adventures, there is little to no structure involved. It’s very free form. When they say “let’s play a game,” they impose some level of structure on it, up to and including rules. Sometimes there are winners and losers, directly competing with each other. Other times, there is no real competition — the players are working together to, say, solve a board game, or they’re playing a tabletop game like Fiasco, where the structure exists to facilitate an adventure, rather than a competition.
Structure, in other words, is a framework for things to happen in. When I boot up a 3D home designer program, while it may use some of the same technology as a game, the purpose is for me to design a home. When I boot up Minecraft, where the purpose is recreation, I am, in fact, playing a game.
The term “video game” did adequately describe games like “Spacewar!” and “Pong,” which were definitionally games being played through video (as opposed to electronic games with LEDs that light up)… all that changed in December 1979 with the invention of FS1 Flight Simulator.
When we think venerable old game series, we tend to think of The Legend of Zelda or Dragon Quest, both released in 1986. Microsoft Flight Simulator, on the other hand, is frequently forgotten, despite predating both of those games by seven years with its initial release as FS1 Flight Simulator.
When I was fifteen— and I know I was fifteen, because I watched the Athens Olympics that day, so it was just a few weeks until my sixteenth birthday — my friend Callum visited. He brought with him a copy of Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 2, and I idly said to him “Dad only lets me play video games like Microsoft Flight Simulator.” Dad, who was apparently listening in from the other room, shouted — not angrily, just loudly because he clearly didn’t feel like walking all the way over — “they’re not video games, they’re flight simulators!” I can still hear it exactly as he said it.
You see, my parents didn’t like video games at all. Other than a few educational titles, like the Oregon Trail, Maya Quest, and Geo Safari, we weren’t really allowed to play any video games. Flight Simulator, of course, was the exception.
My whole life, I longed to fly. I was born for it. Every time I am at the controls of a plane, I feel alive, at peace, and fulfilled in a way I have never felt anywhere else. It feels right to me. So, one Christmas, in 1997, my parents handed me a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 98, which had the tagline “as real as it gets,” and I was finally — finally — able to start learning how to fly.
I credit that experience with making me so good at flying that my instructors universally praised me for being a ‘naturally’ talented aviator. “No,” I’d reply, “this is just me with several thousand hours in Microsoft Flight Simulator.” I literally took all the flying lessons in every iteration of the series. I practiced thousands of takeoffs and landings. As with any skill, I developed my experience through practice, not any kind of natural talent.
It was December 31, 1999, and Dad took me and my older sister to the Wichita Central Library, a big old brutalist architecture-styled building in downtown Wichita, and one of my favorite places to go in the entire world. I’m still heartbroken they moved to a different building and it’s now closed to the public.
He wanted us to be able to check out the internet on the off chance the Y2K bug killed it all. I’d found in my Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 manual a mysterious entry that claimed I could get more planes for Flight Simulator at a website called “flightsim.com,” which still exists to this day. I loved World War II planes — my nickname, Doc, comes from the B-29 Superfortress I helped restore — so I downloaded a B-24 Liberator called “The Dragon and His Tail,” which had no preview art.
Dad had lent me a little yellow floppy disk — on which I could store a mere 1.44 mb of data — and I clutched it tightly as we drove home. It was after midnight by the time we got back, way past my bed time as an eleven year old kid, but Dad helped me install the plane. We booted up the game…
…and that’s how I found out why The Dragon and His Tail was such a famous airplane. Dad immediately sent me out of the room — less a room and more two walls that the previous owners had built out from a third — and deleted the plane.
But he let me try again, so long as I promised not to download planes with pictures of naked women on them again.
For the next seven years, every chance I could get, I’d go to the library, download new planes, bring them home, and fly them.
At no point in those seven years could I have ever called Microsoft Flight Simulator an actual game, right? I couldn’t. It’s not a game in that classic dictionary-definition sense, and yet it’s been included in video games for a very, very long time — longer than some of our most venerated game series, in fact.
So, okay. We now have a thing included in games that is not a game, so… is “video game” even the right word to be using?
Well… yes and no. Look, language isn’t always adequate 100% of the time. While “video game” made perfect sense when all you had was Spacewar, it doesn’t make quite so much sense when Flight Simulator gets invented a few years later, you know?
I mean, hey, “game theory” doesn’t actually refer to theories about games at all. Game Theory is about, as wiki puts it “mathematical models of strategic interactions.” It’s two prisoners being put in a room and pitted against each other. Not really a game in the recreational sense at all, y’know? People use game theory when running businesses. We don’t get to use that term to refer to any kind of theorizing about game design.
Rather than letting the definition of the word ‘game’ limit the possibility — saying “no, you can’t make Flight Simulator, it’s clearly not a game,” people went “yeah, this is like those other things — you use a computer to render a recreational activity on a screen that can be influenced through human behavior.”
Actually, the definition above is probably the best definition of a video game, which we frequently call “games” here, that you’re likely to find. A video game is software that is made to be engaged with recreationally. That means that yes, sometimes, you will be playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, which isn’t a competition, which isn’t a game, not definitionally.
But hey, I mean, is a virtual pet a video game? Most people would say yes. Is a pet raising game like Petz II for Windows 95 a game? You’re playing with the pet, but are there rules? Points? Competition? I literally cannot remember how Petz II plays. All I remember was you could squirt a cat with a water bottle if it misbehaved.
So! From this, we can come to one very, very important conclusion:
video games don’t have to be games. They are games and any kind of recreational activity we can do that aren’t games. “Video games,” which I’ll mostly refer to as “games” here, are any kind of digital recreation on a screen.
And that’s awesome. Seriously. It’s awesome. At one point, the word “games” was adequate. Eventually, as more things were developed, particularly simulations like pet raising games and flight simulators, but also virtual representations of real-world hobbies, like building Lego sets or flying model rockets.
Rocksim and Openrocket are not games — they’re simulation tools designed to help you figure out how to launch real world rockets into the sky. Next Space Rebels is a game, though. So’s Kerbal Space Program.
See how all of this is pretty fuzzy? If we look at it from the angle of purely “what it is on its own,” it seems indefinite. But if we take a step back and look at it, we can look at how human beings use the thing. And what we see is that Rocksim’s there to help you solve math problems with real rockets — making sure you can actually launch a rocket in the real world into the sky — where something like Microsoft Flight Simulator exists like the holodeck, a way of letting you fly planes you likely won’t have access to in the real world.
Seriously, I just came across an airplane on Simviation for use in Microsoft Flight Simulator that was never built in the real world. Scrolled down the list a bit and found a plane that only exists in unflyable scrap heap form in a real-world museum somewhere. You’ll never get to fly either of those in reality, but you can see what they might be like in Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is extremely cool.
This is crucial to understanding criticism of any kind — if you want to talk about a thing and be even remotely productive about it, you’re going to need to look at what the thing is and what it’s for. Don’t be a Silicon Valley guy, inventing a solution and hoping a problem comes along for it to finally get applied to before realizing there’s no market for the solution because it never solved a problem.
What’s The Purpose Of A Critic?
Well, historically speaking, criticism started out as a form of promotion. The idea was that people would talk about a thing to get people paying attention to that thing. Criticism evolved into a form of evaluation — what is a thing, does it do what it’s trying to do?
At some point, “criticism” got used sarcastically. You know the term “everybody’s a critic?” It’s used when people are responding to something negatively, but… look at the statement. Look at what a critic’s job is — to talk about a thing. Someone saying “everybody’s a critic” is sarcastically referring to someone commenting on something. It’s not necessarily good or bad — being critical isn’t inherently negative — but because the sarcastic quip is deployed defensively, it gives a negative connotation to criticism.
So somewhere along the line, people got this twisted. They got the idea that being negative about a thing is being critical about it, rather than being critical about a thing is a process of evaluation that may include negative remarks, but doesn't require negativity inherently.
When I first went to film school, on day one of our first film appreciation lab, our teacher, an effervescent graduate teaching assistant Courtney, one of those rare teachers whose enthusiasm for the subject matter was infectious, asked us a question: “what is criticism and what is a review?”
After some debate, the answer became clear: a review is a buyer’s guide. It exists to do exactly one thing: to tell the viewer if the product is worth their time and money. Criticism is… all the rest. With criticism, your job is to look at the thing in front of you and go “what is this?” and then explain what it is, and whether it does what it sets out to do, and whether that may have been worth doing in the first place. It is, again, an evaluation.
To be an effective critic, you must look at the thing in front of you, approach it on its own terms, and discuss it. It’s not about tearing the work down or building it up; it is, at the core, about being honest about the thing in front of you and what it is attempting to do.
One of the common traits of an amateur critic is that they use the work for wish fulfillment — why make a game about this when you could have made it about that?
A couple years ago, I read a purported criticism of a video game that claimed, repeatedly, that it was ‘outdated’ in its design. The piece did little to actually make that claim, and worse, it didn’t say what a more modern design might look like. If you’re going to make a claim, you have to back it up; if you’re going to say something shouldn’t be one way, you need to express why it should be another way.
But even then, while the writer wrote a piece that, through its inability to argue what was outdated and what more modern mechanics might look like, “this game is bad because I’ve seen some of the mechanics elsewhere,” they did not attempt to disqualify the game from being discussed by simply stating that it wasn’t a game or anything.
(as an aside, I found the article really strange because the game was actually trying something very new that the series had never done before, and the ‘outdated’ mechanics, as I recall, were “it has puzzles and inventory management” which is extremely silly)
The author wanted the game to be different, but couldn’t explain what that hypothetical game might look like. Rather than looking at what was in front of them, they just called it outdated because some previous games had used those mechanics.
It was still a refusal to take the game on its own terms.
What does it mean to take a game on its own terms? Hell, what does it mean to take art on its own terms?
Terms of Engagement
So far, we’ve discussed language, and the idea that language describes what is, rather than exists prior to what is. Words are not entities that float around in the aether, attaching themselves to objects and concepts, giving them meaning. No, the object exists, then we use words to describe the objects as they are, and then we, the people, ascribe meaning to the object. Language is a tool for being able to communicate about things which exist.
Then, we got into the idea of “what is a game?” and concluded that there are lots of things called games that aren’t — particularly, but not limited to, simulators. The word “game” sufficed at one point, but it should not limit the thing, because, hey, the thing predates the term describing it. The term may eventually become insufficient, but that does not magically prevent the thing from existing.
And finally, we’ve started to get to the driving force of the piece: criticism is evaluating what is in front of you. Because of this, when you talk about a game, you must discuss what is, rather than what you are imagining. If you want to treat a game like it’s a prompt for coming up with ideas, then you need to express that early and often.
It’s something I do all the time, actually — I assume a story is going one way, and instead it goes another. I thought the game was going to do something extremely cool, and regardless of what it ended up doing was cool or not, it got me thinkin’ about something cool. If I’m wrong about what I thought it was going to do, but my idea is cool, then hey, it’s fair game. I can do cool stuff with it.
“So, Doc, are you saying that you need to just accept what the work is doing and say there’s nothing wrong with it?”
Nope! First, it’s important to note that what I don’t do is project that disappointment onto the game in any kind of serious critical work — for instance, there are various plot beats I personally don’t like in stories, and if I’m writing a critical piece where I talk about them, I might say ‘here are the issues I have with Chosen One stories.’ I’m also not the biggest fan of the color yellow. No real reason, just don’t love it. I shouldn’t spend my time saying “they use the color yellow, which I don’t like, too much.”
What I certainly shouldn’t do is be dishonest about the work like Pauline Kael was, fabricating evidence and taking credit for other people’s work. See my essay on the extremely funny history behind auteur theory for more on that scenario.
But…
Well, consider this.
Someone made that thing.
I’ve kinda alluded to this throughout the piece, but let me be completely open about this with you now: humans make things for each other.
A work of art does not simply come into being any more than a word does not simply exist independent of people until it finds an object to be connected with. There is no innate ‘car’ concept that is out there somewhere, that simply exists, waiting to be discovered. The car had to be created. People had to come up with a way to describe it, which they then started telling other people about.
It was always about humans. And sure, we could say “well, maybe there are aliens out there,” but given the purely hypothetical nature of such a discussion, all we’d be doing is making our communication here and now inefficient.
It’s a strange thing, but any time I write a work of criticism or talk about art in some capacity, like the twitter thread that inspired this discussion, people emerge from the woodwork and say the most unrelated shit imaginable. We’re talking about art, a thing made by and for humans, so do we really need to talk about hypothetical aliens? No. If we include everything in everything we say and do, we get off topic. Things need to remain somewhat tangentially related to the realm of the real and known.
Likewise, if I say “Neon Genesis Evangelion is really good and everyone should encounter it once,” and a lot of people reply “it’s not for beginners,” or “but it’s confusing,” then I would point out that in none of my discussion of the work did I say “Neon Genesis Evangelion is for beginners and not confusing in any way.” What I said was that it must be experienced. Who gives a shit if it’s confusing? (it’s not) Who cares if it’s not for beginners? (it was one of the first anime I ever watched).
These people, I’d argue, are here to do the same thing as the “it’s not a game” crowd. They’re here to try to come up with a reason not to talk about a thing. It’s a negativity by way of thought termination — the idea is to shut down discussion of something that the person making the claim does not want discussed.
If I say “you should watch Evangelion,” someone saying “but it’s confusing” is trying to say “no you shouldn’t,” but they know that suggesting people don’t engage in a work they don’t personally enjoy is ludicrous on the outset. It’s stupid, foolish, and pointless to suggest people don’t engage with a work just based on personal dislike, and because they don’t want to put in the effort of making actual, meaningful, insightful criticism, they just try to neg it and hope that’s enough, because they’d look stupid if they said what they were actually thinking, which is “I don’t like it and I don’t want you to even try to like it.”
If someone plays a game and says “but it’s not really a game,” what they’re really saying, on some level, is that it should not be engaged with. Because if it should be engaged with, then whether or not it’s a game is irrelevant to the discussion entirely. There is no point — zero! point! — to saying “it’s not a game.”
Try it.
“It’s not a game.”
Okay, cool, but it exists, right? It’s right there in front of you, isn’t it? Someone made that! Someone was trying to do something with that! What were they trying to do? What were they trying to say?
Consume the art on its own terms. Respect what it is trying to do. Let it lead!
When people played Adios, a really curious phenomenon happened. Many players walked in expecting a game with multiple endings; even now, I see some reviews or discussions of the game saying that it does have multiple endings. We’ve never advertised that ‘feature’ because, uh, well… it doesn’t. Seriously. No multiple endings.
But a lot of people saw the dialogue options and assumed there must be. They’d get to the end of the game, go back through, try to get things to changed, and be confused when it wasn’t.
The game never told them to do that. That’s something they brought to the game themselves. They insisted that the game work this one, specific way for them, and when it didn’t, they got upset. That’s their baggage, though, not ours. We never advertised it, we never built the game to do that. That was never — and I mean never — relevant to the game being played. Thematically, it wouldn’t even make sense!
When you encounter a work of art, you must be open to it. Let it lead you. Embrace it on its own terms, because it was made by people, and the people had something to share with you.
If you told a person in a store “hello, I’m here to buy a new computer,” and they walked you over to the television section and said “here are televisions,” and you got frustrated, and their manager came over and said “what seems to be the matter,” and they said “this person wants to buy a television,” and you said “no! I want to buy a computer,” and the manager went “ah, so you want a television,” you’d feel pretty frustrated, right?
If you left that encounter, and the manager tut-tutted as you left and said “what an asshole. I don’t understand customers like that. They tell you they want a television and you do everything you can to help them and they still leave frustrated,” you’d probably be understandably pissed with them, right?
Well, hey. Games are another form of communication. They’re unique because we can interact with them — to some extent, impose our will on them (“I’m going to make a castle in Minecraft!” or “I’m going to try to play this game nonviolently!”) — but that doesn’t mean we have free reign.
One of the worst, most “your editor should have killed this before it went live” pieces of criticism I ever read was from someone who tried to playa game about killing monsters as a pacifist. They seemed to believe the game had failed them, in some way, by failing to facilitate this playstyle.
Look, fella, one of the most important choices you can ever make about a game happens at the point of sale. You looked at a game that said “this is what I’m about,” and you said “I’ll buy it and see if I can’t do something different with it.” I don’t buy a gallon of milk and get mad it’s a dairy product, so why in the hell would you tell everyone in the world what a stupid fucking consumer you are by getting mad the milk’s got fucking milk in it?
A game should not — and cannot — support all playstyles. Yes, that was fun marketing copy, but it’s also impossible to do! On Waifu Death Squad, the game I’m making right now, we have around twenty-six characters. You, in all likelihood, will encounter more people than that just buying groceries. I want to add a twenty-seventh to the game; we spent a lot of today’s work discussing that character, and he’s crucial, but we all agreed he’ll have to just be a generic sprite for the time being.
That’s just a character. Now imagine if we had to do that to mechanics. Maybe you think you oughtta do stealth. This game is… not a stealth game. I don’t even know how that would work in our respective genre.
Some people just want silly things, and yes, as it turns out, expecting every single choice to have world-changing impact is one of those very stupid, stupid things to want.
And… you know what?
A funny thing happened.
Adios has 94% positive ratings on Steam, our primary storefront (by a massive margin lol). That means that 94% of all the people who bought the game liked it.
So, what, am I just complaining about 6% of the people who reviewed it? Nah. Nah, I’m illustrating a point: a huge chunk of those reviews, from the people who loved the experience, point out the choice and consequence system. They actually liked what we had to offer. Why?
Because Adios gives you choices of things you can think but never say. Instead of using the dialogue system as a method of gamification, it’s a means of inhabiting the character.
Adios is very intentionally a first person game. It’s a first person game because it’s a game about being somebody. As I recall, one of the guys from Machine Games, who made Wolfenstein: The New Order, was being interviewed and asked “why is this first person?” Never mind that the series has been first person for thirty-some years, because the guy’s response was really, really cool: “because we experience life in first person.”
Wolfenstein is not about watching its protagonist, BJ, doing things, it’s about you, BJ Blazkowicz, and the things you do.
In Adios, you are Farmer, and you do what Farmer do. Surrender yourself to that — inhabit Farmer for a while, empathize with him, become him, let my very intentional choice to make this game first person actually hit you in some way. So, when you get to that moment when you’re on the phone, and you see the line in front of you, where you say “I can’t tell you this, because they’re listening,” and you click it, and farmer just mutters, and the line goes away…
Be open to it. If you take it on its own terms, that moment hits, according to the 94% of people who loved it. It’s routinely cited as one of the most effective moments in the game.
Work with me a bit here; if you try to impose your understanding of other games, or your desire from other games on Adios, you won’t get much out of it. If you are receptive, though? If you let the game do what the game is trying to do? I think everything will click for you; you’ll find yourself in a moment in time where you want to say something, you want to say it desperately, and you cannot, you must not, because it would be worse to say how much you love him than to let him go on hating you.
It is a deeply, uniquely painful moment that can only happen in a video game — so when people say, in their reviews “well, I don’t think it’s a game, because you can’t beat Hitman in an epic gun duel or change the outcome of the game in other ways,” you’re missing the point.
Maybe I should’ve made a game about a person trapped in a prison, just talking to his fellow prisoners as he awaits his execution. Maybe people would’ve understood then: there are more ways you can make choices than for those choices to be world-changing. Choices are as much a way of saying “this is who I am” as they are about changing anything. Is your day notably different if you pick chocolate ice cream or strawberry?
For most people, probably not. It was just a flavor. But it was something that said something — even if it was small, even if no one saw — about who you are as a person. A moment of expression is a special and crucial kind of affirmation.
A Case Study
The only negative ‘official’ review we got that ever bothered me was similar. The reviewer said the game wasn’t good because he could jump around during moments that were ostensibly serious.
Okay, so, here’s a learning moment: I’m the human being who made the game, so I have unique insight into this situation and can tell you exactly why you can jump. So why not ask me?
“Doc, why did you put jumping in your game?”
We gave players the ability to jump, and we bumped the walk speed, because I’ve made these kind of games before, and I know how first person is in games. I know we need jumping in first person games because sometimes you end up in a position in 3D space that isn’t where you want to be. In real life, you can fidget your way out of it. In a game, where you can essentially move forward, backward, and side to side, a jump is a nice little way to hop out of the problem.
Further — and this one’s even more important — when you are used to a specific kind of movement in a game, it can feel disruptive to lose access to part of that movement kit. We put jumping in the game so that when you, who’s used to first person games, presses that button without thinking because you’ve done it a billion times before in other games, you jump, and you don’t even think about it. If you couldn’t jump, you’d notice, and you might not like it.
This was an intentional, artistic choice that I made, as game director, to embed you in the moment. I didn’t want you to accidentally be taken out of it. I wanted you to be engrossed by the dialogue and the things happening, not suddenly going “oh. wait. this is a video game that feels bad to play.”
Someone suggested that we make the game more believable — Farmer’s in his late 50s or early 60s, so shouldn’t he be a bit slower? But I’d already made a walking sim before that, and I knew very acutely that we’d get tons of reviews saying the walking sucked if it was too slow. We kept it fast, and wouldn’t you know it, nobody complains about the movement. It feels completely natural.
Okay, but the guy still had a problem, right?
Yeah, but it was his problem, not ours.
He chose to act out of character in the moment. If he’d chosen to act in character — to work with the game — he would have enjoyed it a great deal. Instead, he rejected the game.
Reviews Matter
When I say “video game,” you may think of Flight Simulator. You may think of Petz. You may think of a virtual representation of rocket building or solving puzzles. These are the things you think of when you hear ‘video game.’ And yes, that might even include the walking sim, a genre of video game with minimal interaction where players walk around a virtual environment and do very little.
It doesn’t matter whether or not a game is a game. What matters is that the thing exists. It exists, it is right there in front of you, and it is trying to do something. There are forty-seven thousand reviews of Flight Simulator on Steam. That puts it at one of the best-reviewed games on Steam, the largest platform in core gaming history, ever. No one’s out there going “ehnnh, it’s not a game.” It’s been around long enough to be accepted as something worth keeping around, even if, definitionally, it isn’t a game.
When someone says “it isn’t a game,” or “it isn’t art,” they’re really saying “I am looking for a way to disqualify this thing from being in the discussion.” It’s a nothing-argument, an attempt at taking a thing out of discussion rather than discussing it on its own merits.
When I released Adios, I released Adios. It is a thing that exists. It is in front of you. For those of you who liked it enough to review it, your worlds mean the world to me. Please keep leaving reviews; remember, the purpose of a review is to let people know if they might like it. That’s it.
For those of you who leave negative reviews — I’d ask you to consider whether or not you’re being helpful. One person left a negative review on Adios because he loved the game… but he didn’t think it was a game by definition. He loved the thing put in front of him, but he thought it deserved to be disqualified from, what, being offered on the storefront? It still exists, dude, and was apparently worth your time… so why? Why tell other people not to buy it? If you liked it, maybe they would too?
I’ve seen other people leave negative reviews because “I liked it, but no game should have a perfect score.” Bro, your job isn’t to grade the game, giving it a 6/10 or whatever, and it’s as cruel and stupid as a teacher who marks a student down despite there being no fault with the work because “no exam can be perfect.” You’re harming the developers by scaring people away by trying to sabotage the score. All you are asked to do when leaving a review is say whether or not you liked it.
Be honest. If you liked it, say “yes, I liked it.” If you didn’t like it, say “no, I didn’t like it.” Personally, I only leave negative reviews if I believe a product is significantly flawed. Like, if the game doesn’t work at all, or says “we have cloud saving” but doesn’t (or has a weird cloud save system in game that doesn’t use Steam cloud). If I am ambivalent about a game, I don’t leave a negative review, because why would I want to hurt another dev’s bottom line? I’d rather see them make new games; scaring people away from the game is useless and shitty.
Over on Xbox, when Adios was given away with Xbox Games with Gold, an Xbox program that gives away games to subscribers for a set period of time, we got a lot of people leaving reviews saying “it’s not a game, and meanwhile, Xbox’s competitor PlayStation has bigger, realer games out there.” Someone else used the negative review to tell Microsoft they felt that Game Pass — a service Adios was not released on — sucked.
These people didn’t even play our game; they just left negative reviews in the hopes that Microsoft would notice (they won’t) the review bombing and somehow change Games With Gold to offer bigger, longer video games. They hurt me, the co-owner of a small six-person company, by marking my game down. Now, potential customers might not want to check out Adios.
These are not reviews of the game, but they impact our score. Every time someone goes to our store page now, all they’ll see is a super low score indicating our game isn’t that good by people who never even played it and just wanted to protest a Microsoft service we have no control over.
That sucks! I’m a human being who made a game for you with a bunch of other very wonderful human beings. We put everything we could into it. We didn’t have a lot of money, we didn’t have a lot of time, we had to deal with Covid and some of us lost people we loved. But we made something, and a whole lot of people chose to let it speak to them, and they got something out of it.
If you’re going to leave a review, would you consider adopting my own personal policy?
- If I even remotely liked something, I try to leave a review or spread positive word of mouth.
- If I was ambivalent on it, I say nothing.
- If it’s indie, and I had problems with it but don’t feel those problems warrant a negative review (maybe I just wanna talk about why it’s bad to start your story off by talking about too much lore — that’s not worth a negative review on its own), I might talk about those problems elsewhere, but I don’t name the game as a matter of not-wanting-to-fuck-over-the-developers.
- If it’s bad, like, it doesn’t run at all despite sincere attempts at troubleshooting it (I once found out a game wasn’t working because my physical motherboard had problems — that was NOT the developer’s fault), or it doesn’t include features that were advertised (ADVERTISED, not assumed by the audience)… then okay, maybe, just maybe, a bad review is warranted.
Also, I’m just gonna say it: most of those “i put 5000 hours into this game and now i’m giving it a negative review” are cases like “i used to main this character and had a lot of fun playing it, but the devs have radically altered the experience in a way I no longer enjoy.” I know people love to be like “if you got 5000 hours out of it, then you must leave a positive review,” but man, sometimes you enjoy a game and then Bungie deletes a bunch of DLC you literally paid for and that’s legitimately fucked up and worth a negative review, in my opinion. But hey, Bungie can probably take a negative review, as a Sony first party studio.
For developers, particularly indies without access to hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing budgets, every review means something. It can make or break a game. So… maybe… don’t leave a negative review if you’re mad you didn’t get Jurassic World Evolution 2 and got Adios instead?
This is About Enjoying More Things, Not Less
The painter Mark Rothko, famous for his massive paintings of apparently simple patterns of color, was accused of making large paintings solely to impress people. In response to these absurd accusations, Rothko fired back:
I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however … is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command!
Rothko understood that yes, absolutely, historically, a giant painting was a grand one — it did exist to impress. But his critics simply applied that existing understanding to his paintings in error; Rothko was designing for a specific, discrete effect. His work was here to hit you in a very specific way. Make the painting big and the audience drowns in it; you lose your control over it.
Upon accepting his Oscar for the film Parasite, director Bong Joon-Ho said “once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” and man, was he ever right. I still remember early on in film school, thinking I was pretty ahead of the curve when it came to watching films compared to my fellow students (and I was! but nowhere near as far along as I thought), and my teacher was like “you have to pick one movie from this list and watch it,” and they were all non-English films I hadn’t seen before. I’d hoped, maybe, to find some anime or some French film I knew about and hoped to watch, but no. I was much, much luckier than that, even if I didn’t know it at the time.
So, for whatever reason, I watched La Strada.
And by the end, I was in tears.
La Strada is now one of my favorite films. I sat there, not sure I’d like it, but determined to open myself up to what Fellini was doing with the film. As a result, I was able to enjoy it. I got something out of it that I couldn’t have otherwise.
When it comes to Evangelion, and people say things like “Shinji’s so whiny, and I hate that,” I’d like you to consider that someone made Shinji be whiny. What do you think the director, Hideaki Anno, wanted you to get out of that experience? Why is he hurting the way he’s hurting? What is tearing him apart? What was the point of showing that to you?
One of the first lessons I ever learned as a critic was that you cannot tell someone what you wish the work was, only what it is.
I’ve heard people say, often, that there’s no way to know what the artist intends, but that’s only people who don’t know art. They might try to invoke Barthes to disqualify the artist, but that’s not their real goal. Their real goal is to make up for inadequacy. If it can never be known what the artist was trying to convey, and if we’ve got some dumb old guy telling us that the artist’s intent doesn’t matter, then wow, no need to apply ourselves and try to think meaningful about the thing in front of us, huh.
It’s an idea motivated by fear, the fear of surrendering control, of allowing the artist to communicate something to us, of letting the art itself carry us away with the feelings imbued in it.
You do not have to be afraid.
Talk to any artist, anyone who knows the medium, and they’ll easily tell you what the artist was thinking. There is a joy here, a joy in the knowing, of speaking the language. You can learn that language yourself! You can be a part of this conversation! You don’t need to be an artist yourself.
There’s really only one thing you need to do.
Art is a person trying to communicate something beyond words. You are a human being. You know what they are trying to say, if you are willing to be open to them.
When someone whistles in a major key with an upbeat rhythm, you know it “sounds” happy, which means you know that the person whistling is probably happy, right? It’s like that.
These “death of the author” types are obsessed with the idea of imposing their will on a work, like a colonizing army entering a new biome and trying to grow plants that grow great at home and getting frustrated that the same plants don’t enjoy the new climate. You’ve got to work with the territory, not impose yourself on all you survey. Be receptive!
It doesn’t make sense that an artist would spend literal years of their life to make a Rorschach ink blot for you to do whatever you want with, right? They did not make a mirror. They expressed something to you, something far more powerful than words, something much more primal. There is some powerful emotional truth in what they are doing, something beyond a mere thesis statement or a blank canvas for you to make your own work on. Don’t ignore that.
It is an act of profound disrespect to attempt to wrest control of the art from the person who worked so hard to share some feeling with you, some intimacy, to reject it and go “i think this is about what I want it to be.”
You know when you say something, and someone else annoys you by saying “this is what you REALLY mean”? That’s annoying as shit, isn’t it? So why would you ever want to do that to an artist? Be open to the work. Your agency was the moment you decided to engage with the art. That was the choice you made — the next series of choices are up to the artist. It’s there for you to listen. If you didn’t want to listen, then you shouldn’t have chosen to engage in the first place.
That’s what you do when you close yourself off to the work and try to make it into something else. That artist did not put all that work and vulnerability into something for you to disrespect them like that. You can never truly enjoy or feel the work if you don’t let them be open with you by trying to control what the art does to you.
If you get over yourself and try to just, like, imagine a human being on the other side of the planet, reaching across the universe to connect with you, maybe you’ll find something new to enjoy, something that, in the years that follow, you can’t imagine your life without.
So don’t be afraid. Open the connection.
Before we continue this essay — because believe me, there’s a lot more to come — hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.
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