I feel like this is a take that someone needs to make, so I guess it'll be me:

Buffy ruined the MCU by being the best version of Spider-Man.

Both media franchises are about (or starts out being about) a depressed teenager who tries to balance having a normal, healthy teenage life with their superheroics. Their depression mostly stems from feeling like the weight of the world is on their shoulders, because their powers give them responsibility.

Also, both characters seem to have some meta knowledge about the tropes of the genre that they're in. I mean, that was kind of the X factor that made Spider-Man so popular in the 60s to begin with, now? He's just a nerdy highschooler, just like you comic book reader! He'll make the exact same quips about super villain names and evil monologues that you would do if you were in this situation, average superhero comics fan!

(This is also, imo, why Deadpool is the worst version of Spider-Man. They take the meta jokiness, flanderize that characterization to bits and ignore everything that makes Spider-Man a well rounded character)

I won't go into why I think Buffy is the best version of Spider-Man. I have to admit I'm biased. I grew up reading Spider-Man comics, and as a trans woman, Buffy filled a certain escapist fantasy in my teens that those comics filled when I was a kid. It's a very comforting show for me, for many reasons, so I might not be the most impartial person to talk about this.

I will, however, go into how I think Buffy ruined the MCU. The writing style is very distinctive. It's smart and quippy while dealing with heavy themes. It's no wonder that this is the most academically studied tv show of all time due to its psychological richness. Its also no wonder that it was so completely embraced by nerd fandom at the time, due to part of its lineage coming from that space. You can probably see where this is going.

Yeah, the big problem with Buffy is that it made Joss Whedon king of the nerds. Joss (imo) is a total piece of shit who treats his coworkers terribly, but he's also, unfortunately, a really good writer when he puts his mind to it. The Body is considered by many to be the best episode of a TV series of all time for a good reason. It's written and directed by Joss Whedon.

But yeah, he got so much praise for the witty, quippy writing style that I basically think it went to his head a bit. It works really well when your main character is a snarky teen or young adult, but Joss Whedon started writing all of his characters that way.

Then he got tapped to write and direct The Avengers. The problem is, when every single character in your superhero world is Spider-Man, no one is.

So yeah, never really been a fan of the MCU or their approach to stuff, but I have friends who are and that's okay. It's all down to personal taste eventually (even though I think the MCUs iron grip on the cinema landscape has been devastating for film as an art form, but that's neither here nor there).

Anyways, that's hopefully the last long, unfocused, geeky rant I ever go on, at least on tumblr, because it makes me feel really annoying when I do that. So yeah.

Back to posting pretty pictures of trees or whatever.

things do not feel Good right now <3

DARKLINA!!!! Ahhhh! Like I shipped them so bad form the beginning, I had no idea what happed after cause I have never read the books, but damn they have so much chemistry!!!!! And I was so sad that they were not going to be a trying!!! 😭🥺

I mean... like....

She's the Sun Summoner. He is the Shadow Summoner. Light/dark, Persephone/Hades, queen/king, hero/villain, You Are The Other Half of Me/There Is Nobody Like Us. There is angst and desire and trash and "we are on opposite sides now but still drawn to each other anyway." There is the whole "we want to protect the Grisha but have fundamentally different ideas how to do that." There is them both being pretty people (and obviously Ben Barnes) and him being an ancient immortal sorcerer who just goes around simping so hard on her at All times (and we approve). Like. What were we SUPPOSED TO DO?!??!

Also, there is definitely plenty of stuff that is not going to make me ship them any less yet to come (he can visit her at night alone in his chambers which are now hers, she sleeps in his bed, there are more kisses and almost kisses, psychic connection, she uses his power after he uses hers, etc) and I'm over here sitting atop my cranky Make More Villains Love Interests You Cowards hill and shouting at clouds. Like no, it absolutely does not work out in the books, but also, they said they were gonna change things, I'm still shipping them no matter literally what happens, and that's that.

Also... Mal is just...boring? I'm sorry, but he is. He is a perfectly nice match for Alina in real life (though he develops serious Wyatt s2 syndrome in book 2 -- if you don't know the reference this is not a good thing), and he is acceptably sweet in the show, but he is not really that interesting of a character. He grew up with Alina and they have a childhood crush on each other and he's a good tracker. Like that is... pretty much all we know about him (as I said in some tags earlier, he only exists as a corollary of her story and her needs, while Aleksander exists dynamically entirely separate from Alina). She starts and ends in pretty much the same place with him and loses her powers and goes back to live on a farm with him in obscurity? Nah son. Give me the epic romance and drama and FANTASY and darkness and other stuff that is much more complex and interesting. Give me Alina/Aleksander and make it messy and passionate and twisted and escapist. I don't need my fiction to be real life. That's the whole goddamn point.

Anyway, I have a whole other rant on how the "villains/antiheroes don't get to have love interests because it is a reflection of how love interests are treated in media as a reward for 'good people' and treating morally grey people as nonetheless human and capable of love is too scary and complicated for those in need of neatly packaged Moral Messages" thing almost always gets in the way of the really most interesting ships, heh, but yes. Anyway, Darklina Rights, there is always fic and I am planning to write more of it for them myself, I'm super used to ignoring canon that I simply do not vibe with, and that is just that.

Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot more total-Cullen-defense-posts than usual. What I mean by that is I’ve seen posts excusing racist/problematic/ otherwise inexcusable behaviors exhibited by the Cullen characters. This is very much not okay and I want to explain some things in this post.

First of all, just because you like an actor/find an actor to be attractive, this absolutely does not excuse any of the character’s behavior. The actor and the character are not the same. This is why it’s called acting. I’m sure there are plenty of genuinely great people who’ve played horrible characters. The two can absolutely be separated. For example, I think Peter as vampire is just sexy af. I even use the tag #imalwaysthirstyforcarlisle on my posts of him as Carlisle. But, I will also point out that Carlisle is in fact a colonizer and did in fact steal blood for experiments, among other microaggressions. Just because I think Peter is a very handsome man and like his portrayal of the character, that does not mean I like everything about the character, nor am I willing to defend the character overall. Why? Because the character’s actions are, point-blank, inexcusable and beyond problematic. Let’s create an environment in this fandom where we’re able to look at the media we’re consuming critically and be critical of the characters without trying to justify why “they’re not actually that bad” when they are actually that bad. 

Second, if someone points out something negative about your favorite character, it is not a personal attack on you. As @emmettisapowerbottom has said, “...In real life people you love and look up to are multifaceted. Good people do bad things and bad people do good things.” What this means is that no one is perfect. Everyone has moments where they mess up and moments where they do the right thing. Chances are, we’re all fans of content that is problematic in some way (and I mean this is the Twilight fandom so that’s already one thing right there) and people who are problematic in one way or another. Truthfully, we’re all problematic in our own ways too and we all need to continue to learn and grow and strive to do better every day. However, one of the problems within the Twilight series regarding this is that the characters have no real linear growth after doing something bad (linear growth doesn’t mean you never mess up again after messing up once, it means you’re continually trying to do better and you’re aware/trying to become more aware of your faults). Rather than have some sort of linear growth, or attempt to have linear growth, they continue to do what they’re doing and don’t learn or grow from it (or, in some cases, never even do so much as address it). The reason the characters were written this way is likely due to smeyer’s own racism/sexism/otherwise problematic views being projected onto her characters. Since smeyer hasn’t really acknowledged these problematic perspectives herself, they, in turn, are not acknowledged by her characters. Some great examples of this are: Jasper dropping the fact that he was a conf*derate casually in conversation and never addressing it again, the Cullens continually calling the Quileute characters (who get their namesake from a real indigenous nation) names like dog and mutt which are real life racist slurs, Carlisle colonizing the land next to the Quileutes and causing them to very painfully and at a very young age become shifters, only to later steal blood from an indigenous character for purposes of “experimentation” with no apology or remorse for either, Ed*ard fantasizing about wiping out all of the Quileute characters with no remorse only to continually think of ways he can take them out and later participating in using slurs against them. All of this was kind of just dropped into the story and never addressed. This is why it is so problematic. This is why the Cullen characters are so problematic. 

Third, we’re all here because we enjoy certain aspects of Twilight. Most of us do have Cullen characters we appreciate to some extent. Like I love Emmett and Rosalie, but guess what? They’re still problematic. Rosalie still uses slurs which is disgusting and should never be ignored or excused. I don’t remember Emmett ever doing/saying anything in particular, but he’s complicit at the very least, which is still pretty awful. We do need to discuss the problematic aspects of the series and characters so that people are aware they exist and don’t internalize the problematic aspects of the series as many of us did when we were younger and didn’t yet fully realize just how problematic it is. You can like whatever characters you like. That is fine. Just don’t refuse to acknowledge the problematic aspects of characters/the series because you like said characters and/or the series. You can do both. Both can coexist. You don’t need to defend the problematic aspects of your faves to still appreciate the parts that you like about them. Despite, or perhaps in spite of all of its problems, the series is unique in that beyond being a fun fantasy escapist series, it allows us to examine problems within our own world and educate ourselves. It allows us to consume media more critically and to think about what we’re reading.

I’d like to end this with a disclaimer: as always, my blog is a place of openness and education. I am not here to point the finger at anyone. I am still learning and growing and trying to educate myself too. If any of you have any questions or don’t understand why something in the series is wrong or problematic, I am more than happy to explain it in more detail. We all need to stay humble, keep learning, and be kind. 

scrawlers replied to your post: Current reasons I’m hype to get my own place:...

Is Jersey okay with cats? Or would you not take him with you? (Also please let nothing have happened to Jersey.)

Jersey’s okay! <3 Sorry for causing concern - I’m trying stay vague and cut back on sharing in-depth life details these days because of what I do for a living (and also because Healthy Social Media Boundaries. Those are nice). I think talking about my dog/living situation is probably chill, though? More details (and dog pics) behind the cut!

Don’t be tricked by the happy face. He was mid-tantrum because my dad was cooking something with beef and he was SO offended that, 1. He hadn’t been given any, and 2. I had the NERVE to try to play with him during a very dramatic barking session.

(Also, ignore the awful pic quality. After 4 years my phone’s starting to give out on me.)

Short answer: We’re all good here! :)

Long answer: Jersey just turned 14 1/2, and I’m staying with my parents for as long as he’s around. We all know it’s a temporary thing, but for the moment his quality of life is pretty decent for his age! His only real heath issue is that he’s had arthritis for ages, which was exacerbated last year after he tore his ACL. He was on restricted movement for 10 weeks post-op, which reduced the muscle tone in his hips pretty dramatically. He has the ability to build it back up, but he’s also stubborn af and refuses to walk more than 2-3 yards when we take him out (or the same distance at the park) unless he’s bribed with a high-value treat.

I do try to work with him, but at the end of the day? He’s a nosy old man who loves to sit in the front yard and watch our neighbors walk by. It’s a frustrating balance to walk between, “It’ll be easier for you to move in the future if you exercise a little bit now,” and “I don’t know how long you’re going to be around to enjoy moving around, so how about we just enjoy this specific moment and laze around in the yard together?” I’m not sure if I’ll ever know that I’m hitting that balance just right, but I hope we can get through the last weeks-or-months-or-years of his life with plenty of joy and minimal regrets.

In the meanwhile, we’re making tweaks to make his life easier (runners on the wood floors as he has a hard time pulling himself into a sitting/standing position without traction, dog bed downstairs because he struggles with the stairs these days). He’s also spoiled beyond belief, because he’s old and wonderful and how could you NOT?

Also? Getting a bike trailer’s helped! We have an actual dog bike trailer on the way right now, but I picked one up for kids on the cheap to be sure he would actually like it before I sunk Bougie Dog Gear money into it! I take him to a park he likes and he eventually gets pissed that he’s not getting to explore it himself. Sniffs around a bit, walks a while, and gets put back in the trailer when he’s done.He likes walking SO much more when it’s his choice! ;)

Moving out with him is out of the question because he’s my parents’ dog as much as he is mine, and he’s never lived anywhere but here. At his age, and knowing he’s anxious by default, it just wouldn’t be kind to move out with him. (Also, my parents love him to death and would never go for it in a million years!) We have a good set-up and division of responsibilities between the three of us, much more than I could manage on my own. (Also-also, he gets stressed and barky as heck when any of us are away for more than a few days. I’m sad to report that he’s an extrovert like me, and gets anxious if he spends too long with just one of us. :P)

I’m starting to look at apartments with the thought that if he’s still doing well several months out, I might at least get my own place and split some time between here and there. Without sharing too many details, there’s an apartment I’m looking at that’s still several months out from being ready, but I’d know my neighbors very well (always a perk) and it’s something I’m planning/budgeting for. And at the end of the day? I’m 28, and I don’t know how comfortable I am with putting living independently on hold for another few years if he’s ends up being some unicorn spaniel that lives to 16+. I know he’s well-cared for at home, and that he’s okay with spending evenings after work with just my parents.

A cat is very much on the “eventually someday” list for after I get an apartment, settle in, and spend a little time adjusting to keeping myself alive while living solo. It’s also fun to daydream about right now, because Future Apartment is a great escapist fantasy when I’m going stir crazy living and working in close quarters with my parents. For now? It’s all Jersey, all the time, for as long as he’s happy and comfortable and okay with that!

Talking back to the Geek Social Fallacies: they’re a non-intersectional analysis that doesn’t take into account how diverse our community is, and assumes we don’t have agency in our own social relationships.

Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil

From the website:  GSF1 is one of the most common fallacies, and one of the most deeply held. Many geeks have had horrible, humiliating, and formative experiences with ostracism, and the notion of being on the other side of the transaction is repugnant to them.

I think this is true some of the time, but not all. Here is the problem with how this is framed. The biggest problem with this (like with the rest of the analysis of the GSF) is that it’s a non-intersectional viewpoint of a diverse set of spaces that have unspoken traditional power dynamics. People outside of those dynamics - women, POC, and or LGBTQ people - talk about those dynamics *all the time.* Plenty of geek social issues aren’t individual, they’re structural.

There is a lot of geek exceptionalism here: it’s as if geek culture exists in a hermetically sealed bubble apart from the rest of society or its dynamics, pissing contests, or biases, and it’s as if problems that take place within geek space, are specific to geek space.

It’s also as if geeks don’t have agency or ever choose their friends and spaces with intention, and never reject or ostracize people. Plenty of us are geeks/nerds because we don’t hang out with just *anybody* and a lot of us really do think we are smarter and or more successful than a lot of other people in our own social class (which is part of the unspoken class anxiety in nerd/geek identity). A lot of us have defensive walls up in non-geeky spaces - but there are some of us who actively think we’re more interesting, higher class, better informed, or smarter than non-nerdy/non-geeky people.

Finally, the problem with assuming that the problem is “Ostracizers Are Evil”

assumes that geeks/nerds don’t prioritize some friendships within their group over other friendships, and ignores that structural and or unconscious biases may exist in geek/nerd space just like they do in other spaces. The person asked not to be an ostracizer is so often someone who’s expected to do emotional labor/be “the Giving Tree” or who has a more subordinate status in the group. The people we’re expected to tolerate aren’t merely some elephant in the room that everyone is working around, the group is often actively prioritizing that person over the people who don’t like that person. They’re not merely tolerating them. They put up with Jason the Creeper and Cat Piss Man because they like them and/or Jason and CPM go way back in the group! 

Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am

The origins of GSF2 are closely allied to the origins of GSF1. After being victimized by social exclusion, many geeks experience their "tribe" as a non-judgmental haven where they can take refuge from the cruel world outside.

Well... maybe this is true for some people, but the problem is, there are power dynamics *within* geek/nerd culture. This is another case where I feel like the author isn’t seeing the forest for the trees. Plenty of people don’t find geek/nerd culture to be a haven and don’t take acceptance for granted! Just because geek/nerd culture may be a haven *for some cis het men* from some kinds of gender essentialist tropes, doesn’t mean it’s a haven for other people.  

If you’re somebody who is always fighting for space in that world because it’s the only space you get to have *anywhere*, and you’re always running into the power dynamics of other groups, then it isn’t that easy to miss in geek/nerd culture. 

Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All

I’m not really arguing with this one as a common problem within geek space.  I do wish analysis of it would go further, because I feel there’s often an active codependent or enabling/co-addictive process. People really do get addicted to fantasy based stuff, and to video games, and to media. Even addiction specialists acknowledge this. But there are very few people doing analysis of addictive dynamics, anti-recovery, or enabling within geek/nerd space. One of the problems is that this is really pervasive in geek/nerd space and it’s almost impossible to get away from unless you completely quit geek/nerd space altogether, at least for a while. The thing is, many cases of “Friendship Before All” aren’t necessarily that the person has a broad feeling of this, as much as it reflects a specific codependent or co-addictive relationships within the group. (The fallacy I keep seeing here is again the assumption that geeks don’t have social agency, or specific social choices.) Some geeky spaces can even get into folie a deux dynamics or cult dynamics. 

The problem I had dealing with maladaptive daydreaming (which is often seen as addiction-adjacent) was that geek culture, especially tabletop gaming, was actively reinforcing it, and I actively needed to get away from that group for a while to get a handle on the maladaptive daydreaming that was taking over my life. The thing I needed to NOT do was be around people who obsessively daydreamed about their “ships,” or in any space that encouraged me to spend ten hours a day daydreaming about my RP characters. (I do RP again, but only because I’m in a space where it doesn’t take over my life.)

I had a couple of uncomfortably intense friendships that were as enmeshed as they were because they were based around us sharing the fantasy lives that neither of us could share with other people, let alone reveal to the world, and because we enabled each other’s bad escapist tendencies.

Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive

Every carrier of GSF4 has, at some point, said:"Wouldn't it be great to get all my groups of friends into one place for one big happy party?!"If you groaned at that last paragraph, you may be a recovering GSF4 carrier.GSF4 is the belief that any two of your friends ought to be friends with each other, and if they're not, something is Very Wrong.

I won’t say I’ve never seen this, but in a lot of cases, I don’t think it’s anything but the behavior of *young and socially inexperienced* people in general. It also assumes that we are talking a group of people who are all potential in-group and none of whom are ever one-down or on the business end of bias. It assumes that geeks never compartmentalize their friends, which is wrong - lots of us do, especially if we’re social climbers (which lots of geeks/nerds are and won’t admit it). (Let’s be honest, would YOU really introduce everyone you have ever gamed with, to the people at your staid/conservative job that you’re trying to get promoted at?)

GSF4 ignores the phenomenon of gatekeeping.  If you’re ever the person on the other end of gatekeeping of any kind, you certainly don’t experience every geek wanting to introduce you to all of their friends. It’s another case where I feel like the author’s viewpoint is just too narrow and that their generalizations are based upon a small set of people who are themselves always the gatekeepers.

Geek Social Fallacy #5: Friends Do Everything Together

GSF5, put simply, maintains that every friend in a circle should be included in every activity to the full extent possible. This is subtly different from GSF1; GSF1 requires that no one, friend or not, be excluded, while GSF5 requires that every friend be invited. This means that to a GSF5 carrier, not being invited to something is intrinsically a snub, and will be responded to as such.

This is another case that tries to oversimplify and lump multiple kinds of situations in geek/nerd space into one Grand Unified Field Theory: experience of *young* social spaces, experience of structural bias/gatekeeping, individual neediness (or projections coming from same) that also happens outside of geek spaces, and dynamics that happen with lots of subcultural spaces.

The biggest issue I have with the author’s analysis is about the structural bias, because GSF5 totally ignores 

ignores the existence of bias and structural stuff in geek/nerd spaces. And I don’t deny that GSF5 actually exists, but it has to be analyzed intersectionally. In adult spaces, I feel like I’ve seen people more often accused of some form of GSF5 to gaslight them about elitism, than I’ve seen actually being carriers of GSF5. 

I mean, what if you *are* being excluded and everyone around you is saying “don’t be silly, we don’t exclude people?” What if it *is* a snub and you’re told you’re imagining things? What if you’re actually not being invited to the thing?

There *is* an issue in geek space where individual cliques of friends intersect with larger groups, and friends-of-friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends. But plenty of geeks just associate with their specific cliques.

What makes a game a good game? I’ve been thinking about this, as well as what I have to offer to the greater conversations that are perpetually in motion Online. Taking a break from my usual outlet due to a huge feeling of apathy, I looked back towards my younger days just posting whatever it was on my mind on Tumblr and thought that was a time I was more satisfied. Not with a byline or great recognition but just kinda creating and putting it out there for nobody but myself to look over on a portfolio. So here are some thoughts on game criticism and media and the way they are used and could be used.

There is no such thing as an objective review. A great example of this is Objective Game Reviews that would post “Game reviews that are fact, not opinion.” An example from their “review” of RAGE:

One of the weapons in RAGE is the “wingstick,” a thrown blade weapon that can slice off the limbs of enemies and return to the player. Wingsticks can be steered through the air by moving the crosshair, and if they hit a hard surface or an armored enemy they can break. The player can craft wingsticks and alternative ammunition with parts looted from the world or purchased from vendors. Normal ammunition can be looted from enemies and refilled during a fight, whereas if alternative ammunition runs out the player must pause to craft more.

Another great example is Jim Sterling’s “review” of Final Fantasy XIII. Sterling did not like Final Fantasy XIII, giving it a Below Average, 4/10, for Destructoid on March 16, 2010. Of course reactions ranged from “whoa!” to “you didn’t even play the game.” In response, Sterling wrote up an objective review:

The videogame has graphics and sound. The graphics are seen with your eyes and the sound is heard by your ears. When you start the game the graphics and the sound will occur almost at the same time, letting you know that the game has started. There is also text which players can read.

Gamers who cry out against reviews that are not objective just disagree with what is being said, and don’t actually want an objective review that is just listing the things in the game as factual statements with no opinion on whether those things are good or bad. The same can be said of those who cry that a reviewer is “biased” towards a certain game/company/genre/etc. Most famously this is hurled towards Nintendo reviews for games that are perceived as bad but get good reviews “because Nintendo.” Sometimes it can be hard to not fall into this trap, as my reaction towards Skyward Sword getting hugely praised in 2011 was viewed as coming from people who couldn’t help but worship at the feet of Zelda and Nintendo.

The issue though, of universal praise for nearly every major title every year is something worth discussing. Both Nick Capozzoli, Vincent Kinian, and Tevis Thompson have talked about this before, the latter with a bit more hostility and other issues all his own, but the fact remains that there is a deep hole of variety when it comes to game reviews. This isn’t helped by the fact that more sites are beginning to realize the stupidity of assigning a score to a game, as if a number can accurately sum up a game’s worth and that elevating all games on the scale of numerical weight means games never meant to be compared to each other will be. See the meme of IGN’s review of Party Babyz Wii whose 7.5 was copy+pasted next to “better” games that got a lower review score for years.

Tevis links back the inability for game critics to come out and say Red Dead Redemption 2 sucks to the universally praised Bioshock Infinite of 2013, a game that mainstream media made multiple offerings to in the form of breathless praise, whereas others wrote out their criticisms on the periphery, best exemplified by the recent Critical Compilation on the game.

One critic he mentions is Videogamedunkey, a YouTuber who puts out short videos about whatever game is currently in the discourse. His slant is generally as an entertainment, comedian, wanting to make his viewers laugh, but also he talks about what he liked in the game and what he didn’t like. With Red Dead Redemption 2 Dunkey’s conclusion is the excess bears down on the game and he became as disillusioned as protagonist Arthur Morgan does with his mentor Dutch. It’s a fine video/review, though doesn’t nearly have the bite Tevis appears to want with regards to Red Dead Redemption 2, a bite I personally found in Jess Joho’s review of the game for Mashable which most aligned with my own feelings on the game and one he does list. Listing Dunkey also either shows Tevis’ ignorance or agreement with another Dunkey video: Game Critics, which provoked lots of conversations about people who review games for larger sites. Though, reading through Tevis’ piece, that video might be why he apparently looks up to Dunkey for good criticism. It is not like some of the issues Dunkey lists are wrong.

You’ve got your fanboys, your hobbyists, your escapists.  Your ‘objective’ reviewers, your consumer advisers, your spec hounds.  Your people pleasers, your twitter cheerleaders, your industry bootlickers.  Your never hate a game philosophers, your games are hard to make sympathizers, your but some people like it! tsk-tskers.  You’ve got old critics who’ve given up and young critics who’re getting there.  You’ve got so many internet professionals and professional apologists.  The tired, the self-censored, the players of the game.  None mutually exclusive.  All guardians of the status quo.

I think the real issue here is that the required work to put into really proving this sort of thing is massive. Reading and sorting the reviews based on site and author, taking into account Twitter posts that extend the conversation into an endless timeline unsearchable by keyword due to the often vague nature of criticizing criticism publicly. There have probably been hundreds of tweets in response to just Tevis’ blog as well as games criticism in general. It seems like the conversation about reviewers, their role, their work, their compensation, their method, is repeated ad nauseum monthly. Games media loves to talk about games media. I mean here I am, someone much lower than those I’ve mentioned, talking about it myself.

This sort of work loses the point, about what is it that makes a game good? Objective reviews are useless, subjective reviews are useful. What makes a subjective opinion worth reading? What makes the work their talking about worth something? These are the sorts of things that have many answers.

Some small things to get out of the way are some more useless things, specifically the belief that a 10/10 means a game is perfect, is a belief that is hard to get around despite how simple it is. A 10/10 just means it is the pinnacle of what games can achieve and others should be more like this one. What constitutes a 10/10 is, as everything is, up to personal taste. For myself, 10/10’s practically don’t exist since no piece of art is without flaw. We are all humans. Remember before when I said assigning numerical value is stupid? Well given the circumstances of Metacritic, assigning a numerical score might not actually be a dumb thing when it's used as a statement, a punctuation at the end of your text. If Tevis used numerical scores in his reviews and got onto Metacritic he would be able to wield them much more usefully as a way to vocalize dissent through metascore than as just a page of text most will pass by without reading.

Phrases such as “Isn’t for everyone” or “not a perfect [x].” are also useless in terms of criticism. Not every game is made for everyone or could even accomplish that if it were the intention. That phrase can be applied to any and every game and is therefore useless. As mentioned before, no piece of art is perfect, so simply stating that as some sort of qualifier that, “I like this but it’s far from perfect,” is such a pathetic qualifier that should never be used.

A review worth reading is one that brings a point, a perspective, an idea that you didn’t have before about a piece of art and put it in your head. It also has to have supporting evidence for its conclusions, the sort of Philosophy 102 cogent argumentative qualities that blew my mind as a college kid. Given that we have already had decades of consumer grade reviews: ones that break a game into categories and tie them together into a qualitative statement at the end, that we would be able to move on from that into something different. This includes the derogatorily described “blog” reviews, ones that are less about whether or not the graphics never stuttered and more about whether or not a personal connection was made to a specific aspect of a game, whether large or incidental. These are the kind of conversations that bring something new than whether or not the guns sounded satisfactory. This is the sort of conversation that differentiates critical YouTubers like Raycevick from Noah Caldwell-Gervais. Both put out videos on the recent Wolfenstein series and both took very different approaches to what they wanted to say about the game. Raycevick was more focused on the mechanics, the variation of the map, the way it linked together its setpieces. Noah was more interested in what the game had to say about America, Nazism, and the ways to resist and cope with a fallen country. The former might make for a good quick recap of what the games are and what they do in a input-output sense (think right-trigger, left-trigger of Call of Duty), but it's the latter that does the digging into what the game is beyond whether the shooting was good or the stealth sections not too frustrating.

When ascertaining whether or not a game is good there are some easy questions to ask. Did I make an emotional connection? Was that emotional connection cheap (say showing a dog dying) or earned? Does the game have something to say about a topic and do I agree with or disagree with its conclusion about said topic? Did I enjoy spending time within the game and why? Was this a worthwhile spending of my time?

Mechanic’s based criticism is also valid, but personally less interesting. Does it matter if Anthem has good shooting and flying if the things surrounding it are bland? This is where subjectivity again comes in. So far, out of all the shlooters released, I’ve found that you can have the most mechanically satisfying circle, but if that is surrounded by mediocrity it doesn’t matter, it’s a bad game. I don’t care whether or not the shooting felt good in a game, I want to know if the things surrounding those mechanics is worth investing time into. Red Dead Redemption 2 had a rote shooting gallery mechanic underlying most all of its missions, and that couldn’t be saved by the characters and world surrounding it which left me feeling like I had wasted my time come the credits. Of course many felt the opposite, and its the ways we craft the arguments and explanations for why we felt that way that make a good criticism. A review is likely not going to and not meant to convince you that a game you hate is good, but it should at least allow you to understand why the author felt that way about it.

Something that has cropped up recently when covering games is the conditions under which they are made. As we, hopefully, work our way towards a labor revolution not only in games but across all aspects of culture, we have become more aware of the way corporations exploit the lower class workforce. AAA development means overwork, let’s not even get started on the lie of the 40 hour workweek, underpaid, and stress that routinely leads to the end of careers. Rockstar management came out and boasted about their 100 hour work weeks in New York Magazine, which was then qualified as just the writing team, and then was further qualified by a Kotaku report (that has been the norm) about the conditions under which Red Dead Redemption 2 was created. The question became whether or not this would affect reception of the game. It didn’t.

I sometimes struggled to enjoy Red Dead Redemption 2’s most impressive elements because I knew how challenging—and damaging—some of them must have been to make. Yet just as often, I found myself appreciating those things even more, knowing that so many talented people had poured their lives into crafting something this incredible.

The game currently has a 97 on Metacritic, there was only one “mixed” scored review, and even those who didn’t give scores offered only a slight hand wringing at the way the game was created in their text. Kotaku’s section ends with a shrug, “yeah the people who made this were exploited but I’ll be damned if that exploited work isn’t impressive.” It’s useless to have in the text as it leads nowhere, and the question of, “was their labor worth it?” should always be answered with a resounding NO. We are attempting to unionize the industry in order to keep exploitation from happening. What a fucking useless gesture to contemplate whether or not someone spending weeks crunching was “worth it.” It’s the sort of thing Tevis called out in his post,

They couch any troublesome truths in acceptable gamerese, outline all possible caveats, neuter any rhetorical force, maybe dress it up for their academic buddies while they’re at it.  Suddenly everything is ‘messy’ or ‘complicated’ or ‘full of fascinating contradictions’.  Sure, they’re ‘frustrated’, even ‘disappointed’, but they’re still rooting for the game.  And always with due deference to their audience.  It’s not for me but it’s cool if you and it’s totally just a taste thing now don’t get me wrong now I know what you’re thinking now I’m not saying that, y’all.

Some of this comes from the fact that games media is largely made up of, and rooted in, enthusiasts: people who do it out of a love for the media itself. This may best be exemplified by a recent (now deleted) tweet from Brian Altano, video host/producer at IGN Entertainment:

I've been working in the video game industry since 2007 and I don't think I've ever heard more than three people legitimately call themselves "game journalists" without being sarcastic, ironic, or putting it in air quotes while laughing about it. That's... not an actual thing.

Brian has never been someone you go to for criticism or news, the things journalists do. He exists to make you laugh, to entertain you. Going to Brian to determine whether or not you should buy a game will end with “Yes!” or “Maybe try it out.” Brian exemplifies the type of critic Tevis decries in his opening paragraph. He isn’t a critic, but he does represent a larger audience than critics do. There isn’t a real large audience for the type of work done at Bullet Points Monthly, or else their Patreon would be much higher than it currently is. People go to websites like IGN and GameSpot to have their already convinced minds reinforced that what they like is Important. This is why there are multiple articles whenever a new trailer or piece of information comes out about the next Star Wars or Marvel movie or Game of Thrones. These things are big so we have to talk about them and reinforce their importance, further enriching the pockets of corps like Disney, whose billion dollar company is immoral with its continued existence.

The roots of game criticism comes from the game magazines and websites of the 1990’s. Work that existed to be read and shared not because they did a good job interrogating the things they proclaimed to love but because they were entertaining to read and reinforced your love, whether it be Nintendo, Sega, Sony, or Microsoft. The same sort of circular reinforcement continues in the larger sites today, which is why AAA games will never fall below a favorable average on numerical compilation sites, with exceptions of course. Not that this sort of status quo is unique to just games media. Noam Chomsky, in the book On Western Terrorism, mentions how the media in the West give no time to dissenting opinion,

If you want to say that China is a totalitarian state you can say it, you know. If you want to say something like the U.S. is the biggest terrorist state in the world, they are not going to stop you, but you do sound like you are from Neptune, because you are not given the next five minutes to explain it. So you have two choices, to either repeat propaganda, repeat standard doctrine, or sound like you are a lunatic.

I hope you’ll forgive me for likening the universal love of game critics to the propaganda machine of western news media, as it's comically different in terms of importance, but the similarity is there. People who don’t conform to the generally accepted opinion on a game are labeled contrarians just looking to make a buck off a different opinion. Those who are praising Breath of the Wild are just Nintendo hacks. Those who call into question aspects of God of War are just SJW cucks.

Michael Thomsen touches on this status quo as well in his review of Jason Schreier’s book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels for The New Inquiry,

In these times, the most important task of game journalism isn’t to serve a public interest but to ensure that fans can continue to identify some version of themselves in the games they have played, and ensure future releases will allow them access to even deeper levels of self-expression and understanding. In playing the next game, owning the newest console, having an opinion on the latest patch, we feel like we can become stabler versions of ourselves, all at the cost of clearing out space—both mental and financial—for open-ended consumption of a form without any purpose beyond this increasingly tautological pleasure. This process is necessarily dehumanizing. Games matter because you are here to play them, and you remain here to play them because they matter.

We can do better, as being human is to strive to be more than we are (yeah its a corny Star Trek clip but that episode fucks me up). I think it should be obvious that better games criticism is probably pretty low in terms of importance when you look at other things, but I do think it has influence on creating and leading conversations, the kind that lead towards stronger rights for laborers and are more critical of the output of corporations who seek only to deepen their own pockets.