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Haven't played the game myself (and probably won't until it comes out on PC, since I don't own a PS4) but Death Stranding made me remember something that's always served me well, in fandom and otherwise:

Don't get hung-up on what reviewers say.

Some of the very first reviews I saw for the game were trashing it backwards and forwards (with one reviewer going so far as to imply that game-developers should never be given the creative freedom that Hideo Kojima currently enjoys). And yet, every person in my circle of friends and acquaintances who has gotten to play the game so far, has been more or less raving about different aspects that appealed to them.

There's a very good reason I keep insisting so firmly on the notion of the fundamental subjectivity of art and why I have no patience for certain Big Geek Media types and their obsession with labeling art 'objectively X / Y' ('objectively good' for what they enjoy and what appeals to them, 'objectively bad' for what they don't enjoy and doesn't appeal to them). Meanwhile, I'm sitting there, quietly scoffing and going "there's absolutely nothing objective about you labeling this as 'good' because the tone and the aesthetics happened to be on-point for you." When I say that something is 'good', I judge it so from the point of view of my own subjective perception and personal tastes, rather than any sort of universal litmus test that would never actually be 'universal'. Even when I'm unhappy with something, I also acknowledge that my own individual expectations are in play (for example, I don't expect others to be as critical of She-Ra's storytelling as I am, if 'building believably military operations and a believable military hierarchy' isn't a priority in their own suspension of disbelief).

Which brings me back to reviews and reviewers. My rule of thumb has always been to use reviews as a loose guideline at best and, particularly where video-game reviews are concerned, to focus on those highlighting actual technical issues with a game. I say this because I would have missed out on many things that I dearly loved upon watching or playing, if I had let reviewers' opinions about tone or story or characters influence my own decisions.

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Honestly I have nothing to add to this, other than I wish people would be more honest about what their metrics are when commenting on anything, and in general make use of the langauge that lets us determine what lenses are being used to look at a thing with.

Like, take the complaints about the gameplay of Death Stranding and what the point of it may or may not be. If we could have a conversation what it means to have a thing that is repetitive in real life also be repetitive in a game, that would actually be kind of cool and we could maybe explore the paratext a simple behaviour in a different context is, but instead trying to understand criticisms like that always just becomes trying to understand what the hell the reviewer is comparing the thing to.

(I also just got hit with this by someone I follow on Tumblr saying that they can't stand Joseph Anderson's criticisms and feel like he only got popular for having a nice voice and good scripts because wow, yeah, a lot of his criticisms are super "yeah, so?" and clearly are just about sheer mechanical preference. I like his videos because they show me sides of games I Never Fucking Think About but I also don't agree with him on almost anything :'DD)

I've reached a point where I'd go "thank you!" if people would just start adding "I think" or "in my opinion" before subjective statements (if for no other reason than saving me from grinding my molars into dust XD). Ideally, they'd also talk in-depth about the lens through which they look at something, but that's being far too optimistic.

The Death Stranding situation reminds me, in some ways, of what we talked about re: FF XIII and the backlash that game endured, while using highly linear and restrictive gameplay to try and induce a sense of claustrophobia and constant fleeing from doom in the player. Similar to what the characters themselves would be feeling, once branded enemies of the state and reduced to having no single safe harbor left on Cocoon. But very few discussions actually centered around that concept, whereas most of it could be boiled down to "Not My Final Fantasy!" (which, granted, though repetitive, at least it made it very clear where the other person was coming from).

(Hah, haven't seen his videos before, but the name is familiar, for some reason. Knowing me, it's probably a mental association with Johan Andersen of YGO GX 😂).

Joseph Anderson does have a hardline statement of "subjectivity is implied" attached to his videos -- he actually made a whole video about how subjectivity is implied in his videos -- but in the current timeline we live in, whenever people open with "so this is all just my take on this", it immediately makes me want to listen to them more.

I've railed about how critique has become super commercialised and everyone thinks reviews are just meant to tell you if you should spend money on a thing instead of being their own art form, and while there are many essayists turning the tide, their works aren't really getting the recognition I'd like unless they cross over with "hate entertainment" like takedown videos. It's really telling that "X is Garbage and Here's Why" is the thing people started aping considering the maker of the original "X is Garbage" video also had another video in the format of "X is Genius, and here's why" that is just as well-produced.

I've seen this in play even during my time as a journo, where 'attack-pieces' were widely preferred (and were even twisted into such by editors, regardless of what they'd actually been in the beginning). The bluntly-stated rationale in the newsroom (aside for having to appease the interest of whatever oligarch-wannabe was paying our salaries and going after his political rivals) was that these sorts of pieces always provided us with our largest increases in viewer-numbers, something that was actually true. That was a depressing realization right there, that a sure-fire way to keep people glued to the tube is to drip-feed them a diet of outrage and "X is horrid and this is why you should be up in arms about this", because anything else would entail losing them to the competition. I wasn't much involved in the spin (one of the reasons why I preferred the international desk) but even we had to go into the muck, from time to time.

I suspect the same thing is in play as far as "X is Garbage" reviews are concerned. 'Hate-entertainment' is a very good way of putting it and entertainers themselves quickly figure out that it generates a substantial amount of clicks and view, both from outrage and from validation.

Edited 2019-11-15 21:45 (UTC)

If you haven't seen Innuendo Studios' "How to Radicalise a Normie", I recommend watching it, like... just in general, but it brings up how hateful spaces use outrage as a way to both stress their viewers out and soothe them, which is what I think the urge to seek out hate entertainment even when it's not good for us comes from -- how anger feels energising and constructive in a way fear and anxiety never can. I feel like that's also why binge press and hate entertainment are so popular, you can keep people in a loop where they feel good for having their anxiety validated while keeping them frothing.

I was talking about it with a friend and how I really cannot stand "getting angry" as entertainment and will drop anything the moment it pisses me off without explaining itself, because for me the whole range of outraged emotions is so unpleasant I will do anything to not feel them. Because anger and heightened emotional arousal narrow the spectrum of emotions we can comprehend in ourselves, it feels galvanising and makes us feel powerful, but if you give it even a moment's thought, you realise that the fear, pain or sorrow that causes it hasn't gone anywhere, and whatever you were going to do wasn't gonna make you feel better except maybe in a cathartic outburst-y kind of way. It's like emotional junk food, if you're deep in apathy, yeah maybe anger is better but really, we should all be aiming a little higher >_>

I second this. I've really no interest in Death Stranding at all, despite quite liking Kojima's prior work, but there's so much raising of voices and tearing of sackcloth regarding this game and protests that this is what they're used to that I wonder what exactly is the goal with a lot of these review sites - other than singing the praises of games that they subjectively enjoy for free despite the harm that the mechanics of said games do to the industry.

I'm asking myself the same question. With games themselves being such an immensely subjective medium (one person's immensely satisfying mechanics can easily be someone else's "I'm going to rip my hair out!" moment) I've always looked at game-reviews with a lot of skepticism, outside of clear-cut "is the game stable / is the game buggy and what bugs are there / is the game a good PC port?" questions. It doesn't help that many sites have been so utterly inconsistent in awarding scores that they're now become utterly meaningless as any sort of metric (what does a 9 out of 10 even mean, when barely anything scores below 8 on a site?)

It's so easy to get weighed down in other people's ideas of what games should be, especially considering the loudest and most obnoxious voices often dictate the direction. Recently, I've been playing the new Pokemon game, and it's far from the best game ever, but it's such a relief to me after a year or so of "live service" titles, like, "oh, they still make games like this? wow."

I've gone back to a few old favorites -- mostly Morrowind and Planescape Torment. I look back very fondly on Morrowind in particular and recall that this was effectively the last Elder Scrolls game before they started to nickel-and-dime their userbase with small addons in Oblivion and then went into high-gear with Skyrim's Creation Club. By contrast, in Morrowind, only expansion-sized additions cost money and the team added a wealth of small creations (from enchanted arrows to allowing the PC to play an instrument in taverns and earn money that way) at no additional cost.

I was so convinced Creation Club could be a good thing the first time they announced it, and with each bit of info they released, the more my hopes sunk. I brought a few pieces for Fallout 4, but it was such a disappointment. I really want to re-play FF IX and XII on the Switch but they're absurdly priced right now - hopefully Baldur's Gate will be affordably though.

Ugh. This turned into a mini-Switch rant, sorry.

I had the same initial impression of the Creation Club. My hope was that the combination of skilled modders + Bethesda oversight + pay would result in if not expansion-sized mods then at least the sort of mods that the community can't reliably produce at a consistent rate (such as professionally-voiced companion characters, well-written quest mods, new gameplay systems, etc).

What we got instead was half-baked at best, downright insulting at worst. Even 'Survival Mode' one of the most feature-rich mods on the CC, is a poor man's copy of Frostall + Campfire (both free mods) in terms of what it offers and how it actually integrates with the game and other mods (can you tell that I've got a bone to pick with the CC? :p)

As for the Switch, I don't have the pleasure of owning it (like all Nintendo products, it's blisteringly expensive here and will drop in price very slowly) so I can't comment on the prices of the games. I can recommend FF IX and XII on PC, though, if you have one that can run them. Particularly XII, whose 'Zodiac Age' version launched on Steam around two years ago.

The Switch is still super expensive here, if that helps - I'm literally just using my brother's until I can afford to pick one up. sigh I adore XII so much, I'm sure I have a playable copy of it somewhere in my flat if I just made an effort, I'm just doing that horrible mid-21st century of being too lazy to go and find it.

I was so hoping CC would be quests and more possibilities for storytelling. When it was announced I was like, oh, that's awesome, that means they're committed to continuously updating this game, I can just keep playing forever, but, ah, well, that never happened...

Counter-point: computer games can be objectively bad when they fail to work properly. If the game crashes, bugs out and is impossible to play, or otherwise just doesn't work, that's bad.

Haha, yeah, I should've been clearer on that point, reviews pointing out concrete technical issues with a game (frequent crashes, game-breaking bugs or just very annoying bugs, visual glitches, incompatibilities with certain software and hardware combos) are definitely necessary and worthwhile. Case in point, Red Dead Redemption 2 and its stuttery debut on PC this month.

This is also pretty much me @ movie reviews. I like a fair number of movies that critics absolutely hate and dislike a fair number that they like.

A helpful(?) approach I've found is that if I come across a review I agree with, I keep an eye out for that particular reviewer. We possibly have similar tastes and I'd put more stock on their opinions that other critics/reviewers out there.

Yeah, that's good advice. Someone can still might end up disagreeing with the reviewer, but a baseline understanding that their tastes match up to a good degree usually means that the reviewer be liable to recommend films the person will actually find enjoyable / worthwhile.

Hah, absolutely hear you at the "love a number of films critics absolutely hate" part. That was my first inkling at the inherent subjectivity of art, when even at a young age I had my own opinion about what I liked and what I didn't and something being very highly-reviewed wasn't at all a guarantee that I would enjoy it or even personally see all that much merit in it.

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