ALEXANDER OF CALEDON

Game Reviews

discovergames:

Recently I’ve heard a little bit of talk (you know who you are if you happen to read this) about game reviews, and how they should be all opinion, and no objective information. I think we can all agree that reviews should never be marketing speak, with just a list of features (“Contains fully-voiced cutscenes!”) But the opinion I’m hearing now is that there should be little to zero objective information, and I’m having a little bit of trouble with that idea.

In my opinion, one of the things a review should do is to give the reader a good “sense” of the game. Absent any other information, reading a good review should give me a pretty good idea of what the game will be like. That’s difficult to do without talking about certain features, gameplay mechanics, etc. If there’s an upgrade system that breaks immersion, or a weapon that ruins the balance, shouldn’t I be allowed to talk about those things? And how am I supposed to explain the effect they have on the game if I can’t describe them first?

For example, if I talk about how the platforming “feels” in a game, you may get one sense of it if I tell you it’s first person, another for third person, and still another for 2D sidescroller. The same opinion viewed through different lenses of information can yield different results. Without the concrete objective information, the opinion or criticism has very little meaning or impact. When I read reviews that don’t give me even this most basic information (genre, 2D vs. 3D, etc.) it feels incomplete, and I walk away without getting what I need out of it. 

Then again, these are just my current thoughts on the matter, and I’m happy to take pushback on this. What do you guys think? What is an acceptable ratio of objective information to opinion in game reviews? What is your ideal ratio? I’m interested to see what people think.

I don’t often read reviews before I get new games - I usually just rely on word-of-mouth from folk who I know I share the same interests with, or who I trust know me well enough to recommend games to me. When I do look out reviews, it’s from reviewers or sites that I feel I have a lot in common with regards to taste, so that if they say they enjoyed a game, I know I probably will as well.

That, I think, is the most important thing about reviews - not how they’re written, but who they’re written by and how close their tastes match your own. Having reviews that are just a list of specifications and features does little to describe the experience you tend to get from the game, and having reviews that are entirely personal and subjective means that you’ll only be getting that person’s unique take on it, and their take on it will be informed by their own life experiences - you could end up getting an entirely different experience from that same game. 

I’d also separate reviews from critique or critical analysis of a game; reviews being general overviews with the purpose of informing a reader how “good” the game is to play, whereas critique is more in-depth, typically focuses on specific aspects of the game and how those aspects relate to other fields.

“7 Thoughts on Women in Games”, by Porpentine

And trans people, and queers, and everyone else who feels this.

I.

When I think of visibility, renown, people liking my work–the first thing that comes to my mind is that I have less chance of being doubted when I talk about abuse and harassment.

Less chance of suffering in silence.

I resent seeing everything as part of a power dynamic.

I resent this fixation on survival.

It dominates my vision, makes my eye sick.

II.

Women are turned against other women.

I feel sick when I think about it. I second-guess every disagreement I have with other women. I wonder how to disagree with other women in a culture where we’re encouraged to bully and undermine each other.

I feel disgusted and ashamed.

III.

Communities should demonstrate safety from the outside. It doesn’t matter how safe they are if their exterior doesn’t prove itself to people with previous bad experiences.

For example:

It was natural for me to approach the circle of interactive fiction. I made games with words in them. But there was nothing for me. I was poor, not middle class. I was queer, not straight. I wrote experimental hypertext, not traditional parser. I was a woman, not a man, and there were many of them, and one of me.

It was intimidating.

Once I did participate, by submitting my Twine game howling dogs, I got harassing emails saying making howling dogs was a “crime”. Some public reviews were angry, condemning, moralistic, censuring. At the same time, people like Emily Short reached out to me, talked about my work in a different light. I found other reviews that left me teary-eyed, in a good way.

The reality was more complex, both negatively and positively, than my fears.

The point is that I almost didn’t participate at all.

We should think about how permeable we are to outsiders, not just physically but emotionally.

Communities aren’t “just friends”. Sure, they’re often groups of friends based around a common interest, but when a community of friends overlaps or encompasses technical resources, they must take responsibility. We all have contextual power, even if we are marginalized in other ways.

IV.

The future of commenting is no-dignification, wordless deleting.

Avoid the fallacy of fair and balanced. Providing equal status to both sides of the issue is harmful when the other side hates women. That isn’t a stance, that’s violence.

In fact, don’t dignify anything that

wastes

your

precious

time.

They’re just radios mindlessly regurgitating the propaganda of their culture. They haven’t examined their own opinion. Why should you?

V.

Women’s shit test for men (or any marginalized person’s shit test) exists for a reason. Don’t call it rudeness. Don’t call it arrogance. Call it intelligence.

When half the world is socialized to manipulate, despise, and step on you, one gets a little wary.

We’re sick of the false camaraderie that snaps and turns to rage, mockery, hurt feelings. Sick that all it takes to be betrayed is to assert the most basic tenets of our existence.

It feels fucking weird and queasy to try and smile along with someone you suspect has no stake in your reality and will toss you under the bus for any old reason. It feels terrible because you want to smile too. You want to get along. But you know better. You know they aren’t along for the long ride.

It would destroy us to encounter constant betrayal. We need a filter.

We weed out those who will hurt us. We preempt heartbreak.

The truth is many of us have great relationships and friendships with the proverbial straight white dude, and it’s because they earned a degree of trust instead of making a big deal about the fact that we’re acting on instincts finely honed by a lifetime of violence and harassment.

Don’t begrudge people their instincts.

VI.

Women in games.

We are a crucible.

It is not that we seek to fight, but that our existence as women making games, talking about games, and occupying the sphere of play in general, is a threat to power structures.

Women are told they mustdiefor making personal little games on their own time, for writing about their experiences, or simply for existing.

(Even our whispers, a small game or poem circulated among close friends, are deafening to these men.)

And when they are not told directly, they are made to feel like they want to die.

One of the greatest challenges of this time is not blatant misogyny (an easy target for outrage anyone can participate in) but the crypto-misogynist, whose fear is concealed behind language that sounds basically okay to everyone but the women it is intended to harm.

They’ve figured out they can’t call us bitches, so they resurface under a thin veneer of patronizing “civility”, neutralizing our energies with mindless, boring semantics.

They will find endless ways to intellectualize their discomfort.

They are terrified by our joy

They project that terror on our alien bodies

We become stewards of this terror, nurturing it off our own bloodstream, off the very air in our lungs

We become intimidated

Even doing basic work in the games industry, whether it be in a mainstream or indie capacity, becomes filled with chronic ambient terror

Those outside this terror dimension, by virtue of their privilege, do not see this terror

Why are the women agitated

Why is that woman so sad all the time

Why did that woman lose her job

Why did that woman disappear in a burst of ash

MUST HAVE BEEN LIGHTNING

This heightens our sense of unreality

The feeling that we are insane

That we are helpless to stop our punishment for being a woman that is our birthright and indeed our inevitable doom

Endless micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions pile up

Until our voices crawl back inside our bodies

And die

And rot

And poison us

VII.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Audre Lorde

When I read those words, I cried. I cried because I’d been afraid for so long. I cried for all the times I was too terrified to reach out to others.

I realized that I had been delaying my existence in a world where death exists.

The temptation, of course, is to horde the scraps of power we’re given, like a guard recruited from the prisoners standing watch over her fellow inmates, grateful to hold a gun in her hand, never even considering that she has agun.

Join your power with other women.

Fight for them.

Exercise your white-hot fierceness and free your fucking sisters from the silence, the doubt, the terror that they, that we, that I have fall into, time and time again.

I have never felt so alive as when another woman told me she would fight for me, that she would stand with me, that shebelievedme.

Bullets can’t read audience feedback forms.

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

Audre Lorde

The idea is to fight for our friends.

The idea is to fight for our not-friends.

We all project a bubble that extends x feet from our body in every direction and in that bubble we can have that better world any time we want.

There is no singularity, no utopia, just how you treat the people around you.

I don’t need assurances of survival.

I don’t need to know my actions will result in a perfect outcome.

It is enough to act, and in doing so, feel the sunlight on my limbs.

[Original Source Here]

I basically want this plastered everywhere, so here it is on Tumblr as well; Porpentine’s “7 Thoughts on Women in Games”, a massively inspiring manifesto and call-to-arms.

fandomsandfeminism:

epthenardiers:

gleerant:

Maybe I’m crazy…: defilerwyrm: fandomsandfeminism: If you have ever thought to yourself…

defilerwyrm:

fandomsandfeminism:

If you have ever thought to yourself “Oh my god, why does it even MATTER if there are gay people in this? Its a book/movie/TV show/etc. It isn’t a big deal!” Remember this:

You have probably NEVER, EVER, in your entire life, read a book WITHOUT any straight people in it. 

Think about that. Every story, every TV show, every movie, or book, or comic you have EVER read has had cishet people in it.  Every. Single. One. 

Even shows like Queer as Folk have more recurring straight characters than most shows have recurring LGBTQ+ characters. How sad is that? 

You don’t know the luxury you have in that. 

So before you treat us like we’re whiny and irrational, just remember that we only want a little of what you have ALWAYS had.

New life goal: write a book without any straight people in it.

ok but uh

lets remember that at least 90% of the population is, in fact, heterosexual and cisgender

every story has straight people in it??? wWowOW wWHAT A TRAVeSTY@!!!11! its not like practically every single social situation you will find yourself in irl will have straight people in it too except OH WAIT

idk i think being mad about most fictional characters being cishet is a little ridiculous because uh….most human beings…are cishet………..

Yeah, thanks for completely missing the point. 

The point was not “There’s too many damn cishets on TV.”

The point was “There isn’t enough LGBTQ+ representation in the media, and it’s really shitty for cishets to tell LGBTQ+ people that it doesn’t matter. Cishets have no idea what that kind of lack of media representation is like, so they really should not try and diminish our desire to see LGBTQ+ representation.”

This “90% of people are straight, therefore 90% of characters should be straight!” is a pretty shite argument anyway. 100% of people are human, and yet we still manage to find space for werewolves, centaurs and aliens. Writers as a whole don’t sit down and go, “Gee, the demographics of my story require a Taiwanese person at this point!”. And the entire summation of all fiction and media doesn’t necessarily magically balance itself out by ensuring that there will be the required 10% of non-cis, non-het folk. 

It often comes down to writers saying “but that’s not like real life!” as though there is a concrete, watertight set of criteria that clearly shows what is realistic and what isn’t. But there ain’t. Different folk will describe the same setting as “realistic” and “unrealistic” because different folk use different markers for these kind of things. “Realism” isn’t some gold standard to aim for, anyway - if all stories were realistic in the generally accepted meaning of the word, they’d be dull as fuck. If they were categorically, 100% realistic, they would be non-fiction information about our world.

And I don’t think “ensuring there’s better LGBTQ+ representation by having more better-written queer characters” really counts as “unrealistic” when we also have stories about werewolves, demons, dragons and ghosts.

fandomsandfeminism:

cicatrici-belle:

If feminism truly is a fight for “equality”, then why do feminists* hate Egalitarians so much?

Because “Egalitarianism” creates false equivalencies and ignores the underlying social scaffoldings that enforce inequalities. 

theconcealedweapon:

Everything Men’s Rights Activists label as “female privilege” is really patriarchy backfiring against men.

The gender-specific rule that men shouldn’t hit women is caused by the misogynistic belief that women are fragile.

The belief that men can’t be raped is caused by the belief that men always want sex and the belief that men must always be strong, which are the same gender norms that enable men to sexually harass women.

The belief that all men are rapists is caused by the misogynistic belief that a woman who is quick to trust a man is asking for it.

The belief that statutory rape is worse with an older man and a younger woman than with an older woman and a younger man is caused by the misogynistic belief that society must protect female virginity.

Custody favoring the mother is caused by the misogynistic belief that taking care of the kids is a woman’s job.

The fact that only men can be drafted is caused by the misogynistic belief that women are too weak for combat. Also, most feminists are against the draft.

The belief that the man must pay for the date is caused by the misogynistic belief that women are helpless and need men to do everything for them, and it’s often used as a way to guilt-trip her into having sex.

Feminists don’t support any of those. All of those are caused by patriarchy. Men’s Rights Activists can stop blaming feminists for the problems that patriarchy causes.