Everyone, Stop Writing Reviews Right Now. That Includes Me.

I'm not so sure that video games being accepted by the mainstream as "Art" is a good thing anymore. Remember when you could just say whether a game sucked or not without having to cite precedent or justify it in absolute terms that ignore marginal utility? [YouTube. Thanks to Old_at_Heart for the link.]

Eight years ago I failed a class at Hampshire College (which, BTW, gives no letter grades) because my final paper was on Metal Gear Solid. The class was called "Psychological Dynamics In Drama," and the professors made a big deal about how all you needed for drama/theater was actors. A physical theater, a script, an audience, etc., were all unnecessary extensions. Metal Gear Solid had actors in it, and the player was an actor in a way, so I wrote a paper titled "Projection And Reception Of Identity In Video Games." It explored, among other things, how I found myself switching from third to first-person adjectives without realizing it when talking about the game because sometimes Snake was doing stuff and sometimes I was doing stuff through the avatar of Snake.

I miss the good old days of video games being this marginal thing I did for fun because I wanted to. Part of it is like in that episode of The Simpsons when the guy with the "Do What You Feel" seminar came into town. As Lisa explained to Bart, much of Bart's self image was tied to disregarding social norms. When everyone disregards those norms, that becomes to new norm.

Commerce can screw things up because it brings people who don't care about something into the market. Once a critical mass of people start to care about something, it gains enough financial value to attract people who are interested in money regardless of where it comes from. This can bring a huge influx of capital, but it also dilutes the thing the core group loved. I've been through the same thing with baseball cards and comic books. Investors stockpiled them for their monetary value, which had been due to their rarity. When everyone bought X-Men #1 it was great for Marvel because it made it the top selling single issue of all time. It was not great for investors because that meant that there were more copies of that issue in circulation than any other comic, though it was marketed as a collector's item. Most of the books sales were of duplicate covers of the same issue, and because many comics were marketed as a collectible and an investment it was bad for the casual reader because it drove the price up. Did I really need a glow-in-the-dark, diamond-etched, holographic cover to just read the story?

The comic book bubble burst, as did the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble. I heard news reports years ago about how the housing market would tank in the next few years, and now I keep hearing reports that people are surprised. I feel for people who bought a home to live in, but I don't really have a lot of sympathy for stupid rich people who bought dozens of homes long despite warnings of a market collapse and now are freaking out because it collapsed and so are selling short, especially since their irresponsibility helped to fuck up the market for everyone who would be happy to just have one house to live in. Houses were touted as the "safe" investment in the wake of the dotcom crash because, "You can always live in them, and you can't live in a stock." How can anyone live in a dozen houses?

How do market bubbles and marginal utility tie into video games as Art? A study of art history in the 20th century alone shows the dangers of art becoming a spectator's commodity and burning through fads every few years. Those fads happen to be some people's lives.

What's the most stupid, most excessively overpriced and self-indulgent art you can think of? It's probably performance art and dada, which includes crap like picking something out of a dumpster and selling it for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The irony of this is that these art movements were created in response to World War I as a way to de-commodify art. "Art for Art's sake" was not supposed to be a way to get government grants to do art that had no commercial value. WWI was seen as a pointless war that was paid for by the blood of the poor for the indulgence of the rich. Formal art and art academies were seen as part of this culture of extravagant excess and conspicuous consumption. The point of performance art was that you couldn't sell it. It was intangible, so the only value was the artistic value people got from seeing the performance. Dada's goal was to make art so easy to make through things like "ready-mades" that no one would be able to sell them because everyone could make them. Eventually, enough people valued these new art experiences, if only for their novelty, to pay stupidly high prices for them. A new "elite" class was created by the assholes who paid for this shit and claimed that anyone who "didn't get" why a piece of paper that had a lipstick smear on it was worth paying $100,000 for was somehow stupid and unsophisticated.

In essence, the rich bought up the "Art for Art's sake" movement and by injecting money and hubris into it and falsely constructing an inaccessibility around it to create a new way to exclude people from art and feel very clever about themselves. The easiest way to exclude people is to make something very expensive. No one can call your bluff if you own the gallery and you only let other people from your clique in.

One might say, "Who cares why the rich like my work as long as it pays the bills?" The reason the artist should care is that speculative buying of something that can be infinitely produce, like art or Art, is a glut on the market. In that kind of environment, only novelties stand out. Those novelties have a very short half-life because they're only seen as valuable for their novelty, and that value is lost as soon as it becomes popular. Speculative buyers will move on to the next fad, and the artist will be left in the dust.

Video games have become popular enough to support an ever-increasing stable of professional critics, which are an industry in and of themselves. A professional reviewer's primary job is not to give a fair or accurate review of a game, it is to write something that will get read and talked about. Often it seems like critics have figured out whether they will give a good or a bad review of a game before they've played it based on which will make a better "clever" play on words.

As Gabe has pointed out on Penny-Arcade, there's nothing special or elite about a reviewer that gets paid that lets them know what you'll like better than you do. Reviews and counter-reviews are approaching the point of the debates about how many angels can dance on the point of a needle. [Wikipedia] (BTW, that argument never really took place. It was a satirical jab at the writings of Thomas Aquinas, who pondered and claimed to have the answers to questions like, "Can spiritual entities teleport, or do they have to move through physical space to get from point 'A' to point 'B?'" Yes, I paraphrased that.)

For the time being at least, I'm going to stop writing any reviews. There is a hyper-critical mindset that even an amateur reviewer enters when playing a game that I don't like. It dares a game to be entertaining rather than seeking enjoyment. It's like being a wine snob. I happen to like the wine that comes in a box. You have better wine? Good for you. In my house, I drink from the box. I don't care if it doesn't taste "hand crafted." It's relatively cheap and I like it. I guess I'll just be doomed to live out my life believing that I'm enjoying it instead of knowing the truth that I don't.

P.S.-- I really, really, REALLY hate reviews that conclude in numerical scores as if enjoyment is an exact science.

Posted by Graven on Tue Nov 20, 2007 @ 11:52 am EDT | 0 Comments