Reply to Folklorists

"In his own way, Wager is more interested in the life of the game than the life of the author, so his preferences show up as a somewhat dry systemic analysis of, in this case, competitive fighting games. In contrast, Holmes’ preference for chaos comes across as more laidback and accommodating."

Y'know, this set of sentences really demonstrates a failure to understand, a failure to bridge the gap. I got this from one of the commenters on my article. He posted on his twitter comparing my review of cloudbuilt to eurogamer's, claiming it was "dry."

I feel like I'm talking to one of those people wearing that t-shirt that says, "Magic is just stuff Science hasn't made boring yet." https://www.threadless.com/product/1268/Magic_is_just_stuff_science_hasnt_made_boring_yet

This type of view reminds me of this speech by Richard Feynman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSZNsIFID28

I see a very similar attitude with the mechanical view of game design. We have these massively complex systems of interactions and possibility space, like chess, mario, mirror's edge, and street fighter 2, and instead of respecting that as an artistic and beautiful thing in its own right, people call that DRY or DULL.

It's like as realtime rendering moved towards greater visual fidelity and therefore storytelling capability everyone forgot they were games, at least everyone in the journalism sector, hell a lot of the people producing them forgot too.

And frankly, I find the way the mechanics interlock and create near infinite permutations of scenarios in these games to be interesting as hell. You probably played Pokemon as a kid. Do you know how the missingno glitch works? The old man that shows you how to catch pokemon actually stores your name temporarily in the list of pokemon to be caught so that his name can be old man during the tutorial on catching pokemon. This would normally be cleared upon entering a tile with a wild pokemon list, however the shore at the edge of cinnebar island is both enabled for wild pokemon encounters and has no associated list. Because shit, isn't that the coolest damn thing? Have you ever wondered how a priori and a posteri collision detection systems work? Do you know about the current use of delta time for 3d games to allow for variable framerates relative to the fixed framerates of older 2d (and some 3d) games? Did you notice how Sonic, Mario, Megaman, king of fighters, and Smash bros all have similar mechanics with pressing the jump button harder to jump higher and how each of them accomplishes this in a different way, which suits the types of games they are and the way the player needs to control the character relative to the levels and other character abilities? Isn't that cool? Isn't that worth covering or talking about so that both people can identify why the games they like feel the way they do so they can talk about how it should feel relative to a given game, or so developers can see and understand the different methods and approaches to better understand what method they should use in their own game?

I regularly have this saying, I want to know how the universe works. I majored in animation in college, I've been an artist for a long time and regularly my pursuit in art has been to find out how it all works. What is the method that enables me to learn the data I need to know to produce desired outcomes? What data do I need to study in order to correctly draw a human figure in proportion? This stuff is important to being able to consistently draw the things I want to depict in a way that people will interpret consistently. Like being able to draw someone's face and have people recognize that face as the person I attempted to depict. My view has always been that the quality of art is determined by the technique used to produce it, and from there you can make art about any message or meaning you want to.

And frankly, I'm pissed off by the attitude that this sort of information is stuffy, dry, or boring coming from people who rob the art of video games of its soul. Because for all the impassioned essays about why whatever current media darling indie hit is deep and changes the way we look at games and establishes new meaningless relationships between ourselves and others, they're still not looking at games, at the artistic systems of rules that create the fun in basketball, hockey, soccer, texas hold'em, monopoly, castlevania, quake, bayonetta, and smash bros.

My problem isn't just that game reviewers aren't experts, my problem is that nobody is looking at how the systems of rules that comprise games are actually put together in any coherent manner. The analytical method isn't a reductionist one, based on reducing games to their core components. Instead games critics are regularly obsessed by the symbols and semiotics that are of facile importance in comparison to how games work, leading to dumb statements when one tries to address any interactive aspect of the game like Holmes saying that longer landing lag is a symptom of being a control freak instead of being capable enough of critical thought to realize how it impacts the entire game. Because of the obsession with the feedback games give or their narrative resonance, there is a regular failing of understanding when it comes to multiplayer games which lack those things by and large (the exact same failing that happens with singleplayer games, just in those cases the prominence of the narrative content allows them to talk about something definite and overshadows the vagueness of the rest of the review).

The article responding to mine calls into question whether anyone is an expert at all, and I can't draw a fine criteria for what constitutes expert, that's difficult in any medium, however I can definitely say that journalists regularly make mistakes like holmes did. They regularly fail in these critical thinking exercises, the entire show Extra Credits is a fine demonstration of that, where they have progressively and readily made mistakes whenever they attempt to talk about something other than a game's narrative (for example, look at David Sirlin having to correct them about the Perfect Imbalance episode, and the immediate massive mistake they make by claiming chess is a balanced game). You don't need to be an expert to make correct deductions based on the information you have available. However the regular trend of people in the games criticism sphere making either vague surface level observations and deriving incorrect conclusions is overwhelming.

And the funny thing is, in comparison to semiotics or meaning or significance, which may well be very subjective things, the rules of the game and the effect they have on how people play the game are very absolute, objective, and observable phenomena. They're something we can quantify and learn from, yet they go ignored except by the basically dead and unknown formalist movement.

The rules that comprise games aren't arbitrary, they aren't subjective, and they aren't dry or dull. The rules for games we have aren't what they are by chance, yet games journalists would have us ignore these rules as just being there to fill in the overarching theme of the game rather than being something positive and enjoyable on their own merits.

It's like instead of recognizing games as their own form of art, like the difference between a movie, a painting, a book, and music, critics are coming at them with this old style of understanding from literary theory and reiterating the same tired post-modernist art understandings we've called bullshit in art history classes a hundred times. Yes, I read your other article on ye olde interactivity paradigm before you bring it up, it was.

And of course if anyone raises their voice to cry foul, we get the league of games journalists all rushing to defend each other. What did that article criticizing my piece say? "So we should not be surprised when reviews and other criticism don’t reflect what we think. We should demand that they challenge the way we think!"

Yeah, I'm trying to challenge what you all think right now. I want you to see the beauty of games and be able to explain that beauty to others so we can all have a more rich games criticism space, but I am met with nothing but rejection and ass-covering.


If you want to have a skype or steam chat, my name is Evilagram on both. A direct conversation would get this sorted out faster than long protracted essays and articles.

And my last name is spelled Wagar. No E.