A couple of Friday's ago, having spent the afternoon playing Mirror's Edge and talking to my game designer brother-in-law about the title's mixed critical response, I wrote a blog post. More accurately, I wrote a bit of a tirade about the quality of games journalism, and about how innovation can often be overlooked in the rush to cover elements such as graphics, sound, lastability and multiplayer support. I wrote it quickly and posted it without any re-writing. I thought it might get a bit of a reaction.
It did.
The story was picked up by most major game sites and, I'll put it bluntly, my arguments have not been popular. Lydia Sung of Neoseeker wanted to punch me in the face (I think we're okay now), Variety called me 'dead wrong', Newsweek's resident game pundit N'Gai Croal pitched my piece in with a couple of similar features and came to the conclusion that, "Reviewers aren't perfect, but attempting to police the discourse by insisting on the primacy of innovation over execution is not the answer".
That's okay - I really enjoyed all those responses. And the thing is, the piece was deliberately polemical. I knew I'd upset people by comparing movies to games, and I knew that by asking questions about the quality and point of game journalism I would come in for flak. Idiotically, I was surprised by the personal insults, by the sheer force of the vilification in various comments sections around the web. I was trying to get people to talk about innovation and criticism - I didn't quite realise how incendiary that could be.
What's become clear is that a lot of people are happy with the formal structure of videogame reviews. After all, on a fundamental economic level, games cost £50 each so if you're looking for buying advice, you don't want some smart arse to recommend a game because it references his favourite Jean Paul Satre novel, or does something interesting with high dynamic range lighting. You want to know if your money will be wasted or not.
And yes, Mirror's Edge is flawed and frustrating at times, and, yeah, it probably has the Metacritic rating it deserves. But questioning how we perceive games, how we react to them and how their qualities should be measured is really important; I think it contributes to the development of the medium. Sometimes it's good to try out a dialectical approach, to write a very one-sided hypothesis and see what comes back.
And sometimes what comes back is personal vitriol, occasionally based on little more than a cursory glance at the original piece. Sometimes it's brilliantly argued opposition. As long as it's more the latter than the former I did something right.
So the piece I wrote in less than ten minutes one Friday afternoon will probably haunt me for a few weeks, or at least days, until the cavalcade moves on. It was fun while it lasted.
