About two years ago, I decided to start taking notes and assigning scores to nearly every game I played. I’d been abroad a few years and fallen way behind on all the next-gen games that reviewers raved about. I suspected my own evaluations might be different, but I wasn’t sure just how big the disparity would be.
The first game to shock me was the original LittleBig Planet. Of 85 reviews, only 5 dipped below 90. The lowest was a 75, and the metascore was a staggering 95. But the game I played was a 3 out of 10. I loved how it looked, loved its charming DIY spirit, loved how it encouraged player creativity, even found many of the player-creator intro videos quite moving. But Sackboy’s running and jumping were so appalling that it killed all my motivation to play and negated the game’s many virtues. There was no explaining it away with talk of physics engines or how it was really a different kind of platformer. Its controls were simply game-ruining for me.
I continued to play highly reviewed games that not only underwhelmed but often stunned me with their failures. There were more 3’s (Skyward Sword, Halo 4, New Super Mario Bros 2) and 4’s (Skyrim, Dear Esther, Tomb Raider) but not so many 5’s (Arkham City, Bastion), since my feelings didn’t often fall in the middle. Even 6’s that I mostly enjoyed (Red Dead Redemption, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Journey) were nothing to get that excited about. Only 7’s (Gone Home, The Last of Us, Wii Sports Resort) and 8’s (The Walking Dead, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, Far Cry 2) really started to get interesting, and there were a handful of amazing 9’s (The Binding of Isaac, Kentucky Route Zero, Spelunky). While I did play two 2’s (the other was Limbo), I also played two 10’s (Minecraft and Demon’s Souls).
Of this sampling, you might agree with some of the scores, but how could anyone agree with all of them? That’s precisely the point – no one could, or should. And without an explanation, why should anyone care about numbers alone anyway? If I were to write a review, it would be my task to articulate why I thought the game deserved that number. And of course readers could decide how convincing they found it.
But some of these scores no doubt look ridiculous to anyone familiar with most reviews. The very outlandishness of my numbers points to how ingrained our pitiful review scale remains. It speaks to how easily we submit to the tyranny of the perceived majority. It’s the same kind of thinking that leads to the many ridiculous sacrosanct positions held by the gaming community. To say you consider Ocarina of Time not a great Zelda or find Half-Life 2 overrated or prefer Metroid to Super Metroid, as I do, demands an explanation. It invites skepticism of not only your opinions but of your very motives. What’s your deal? You’re just trolling for clicks. And why should I listen to you anyway? You didn’t design the game. You don’t represent the average gamer. You’re just some vocal minority.
It’s exactly a reviewer’s job to speak for the minority. A minority of one. How could a reviewer speak for anyone else? They aren’t elected to stand in for some demographic, and the review community is not a representative democracy. Every time I see a reviewer try to speak for the average player, the fabled everygamer, I see a dodge. An unwillingness to put himself out there and state his values, an attempt to hide in the crowd and submit to the majority. I see not a reviewer sensitive to his audience but a reviewer cowed.
Even for those who have the sense to speak for themselves, there is a more pervasive problem. This is the call, posed a thousand different ways, for objectivity. Isn’t BioShock Infinite objectively a good game? Doesn’t it have good graphics and sound, play well enough, provide interesting characters and themes? I mean, let’s be reasonable here. Let’s be fair. Irrational put a lot of time and money into this after all. Most of your criticisms are just based in your personal biases. They’re just your interpretations. At least you have to admit it’s a lot better than most games out there.
Here’s what I’ll admit: many boys have a really hard time with subjectivity. To grapple with your own subjectivity is to grapple with the subjectivities of others. It’s to see the world not as legible, stable, conquerable but as resistant, shifting, and fundamentally unknowable. It diminishes your certainty and authority. It leaves you vulnerable. This is a human problem, being a person among persons, but one that many boys have trouble admitting even the basic tenets of. And so they call for an objectivity that has no foundation except received opinion, that seeks to diminish individual experience, and that turns out to not even exist.
Objectivity is very convenient for the straight white middle class male gamer. Videogame culture encourages him to see his own subjectivity as the standard, as objective. He’ll invoke science, economics, statistics, and all manner of folk wisdom to defend his little kingdom. He’ll decry any challenge as ‘politics’ or ‘bad business’ or ‘whining’ or ‘here we go again’. He never considers how often objectivity is a cover for a dominant subjectivity, for a subjectivity that stays in power by not being recognized as such. He fears what will happen if the established order breaks down and the Vox take control.
This cult of objectivity has it exactly backwards. They want it to be one way. But it’s the other way. A good review is openly, flagrantly, unabashedly subjective. It goes all in with the reviewer’s biases. It claims them for what they really are – not tastes, not mere opinions, but values. It is a full-throated expression of one person’s experience of a game. This is the authority it claims – the player’s. And how could it be any other way? How can a reviewer get outside him or herself?
Some might admit that objectivity doesn’t exist but that it’s still an ideal to shoot for. It is, after all, a worthy goal to try and get outside yourself and see things from other perspectives. But chasing objectivity to achieve this is, again, entirely upside-down. You do not connect to the world outside, to the world of others, by suppressing or negating yourself. You do so by fully being yourself and recognizing just who that person is. A good reviewer knows that none of our values are settled, that the game community is actually in thrilling flux, despite the placid surface of its reviews. The only way to change how we talk about games is to encourage a plurality of voices, revel in their diversity, and be honest about our own subjectivity among them.
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