I visit gaming sites primarily to be enraged.
I'm constantly saying that this or that review has minute flaws, as though I had expected them to be produced by stern men under hermetic conditions. I examine the scores they produce like a jeweler, squinting, snorting at the base materials which remain in the finished product. Yet I keep going back, craving it, exhorting them to provide me with evidence of my superior intellect. I'm pawing at the teat, demanding that it produce. And I am rarely disappointed.
Really, what are we asking them to do? The reason I am infuriated by the imprecision of their shenanigans is because I have an indomitable faith in the medium. I know with supreme clarity that videogames are the inheritors of all media, I know this like I know with conviction which color is orange. When what we now call videogames expands beyond these stuttered steps to encompass the increasingly pervasive interactive technologies that permeate or lives, any sensible person will look back and recognize the pedigree.
However, it's not their job to act as shaman for a culture easing itself into even greater integration with technology. It's their job to associate a single integer with the most subjective type of experience ever devised by our species. It hardly seems possible. So when they fail at it, when they fail to represent the depth of these experiences, what are we saying exactly? That they are human beings, possessed of finite minds, saddled with the task of cramming the undefinable into the discrete universe? That hardly seems like something you can hold against a person.
They'd be off the hook, if what I were asking for was some heretofore unknown branch of journalism married to philosophy. I don't go into a McDonald's expecting prime rib, I know what's on the menu when I order mainstream culture. What I'd like is simply the odd bit of evidence that the entity reviewing a game is an actual person. Let's just call it out: objectivity in matters of personal enjoyment is a yeti, a wholly mythological concept. It is, in fact, perspective - the perspective they stripped out in the name of professionalism or objectivity - that I'm coming to them for. These guys aren't covering a bombing in Basra, they're telling me whether or not a game makes it fun to shoot alien mushrooms with a focused lason pulse. They can make definitive statements based on blatant personal bias and there's no shame in it. To the contrary, there is value, when disparate individuals share experiences. I would like less obfuscation of the signal - their own signal - and less posturing and mediating and diplomacy. I don't need any Maxim-esque man talk, I'm there to talk games when I visit these sites - they don't need to make gaming seem cool because it already is cool. It might be the coolest thing ever, while we've got the thermometer out.
I'd like them to act as though they knew that.
Tycho Brahe
fears no scorpion like a scorpion scorned
[Next: Chapter 5: Cahier du Jeux]
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