I’m going to conduct a minor shift on this blog, I think. Over the last year or so, I’ve been obsessively cataloguing everything I’ve been watching, playing and reading, offering up reviews regardless of whether or not I think I have anything to say on the matter. In the last few months, though, I’ve come to a few conclusions. Here they are, divided into paragraphs.
Negative criticism isn’t necessarily a deterrent. When you talk about media, regardless of the slant you give it, it nevertheless increases the coverage. There will be people who trust your judgement, sure, and maybe some of them will avoid that piece of media as a result; likewise, there will be people who dislike your judgement who watch or play something just to spite your opinions.
More importantly, there will be a lot of people who just don’t care what you think. And once you accept that, it really begs the question: why put something negative out there in the first place?
Criticism can be kind of a dirty word. This is particularly true in games journalism, though it bleeds into other spheres too - there’s a hyperbolic need to morally categorise all art these days, and while I'm not of the opinion that morality and socio-political issues are divorced from art, I’d also argue that there are formalist and poetic elements of art that can be equally as powerful, if not more so.
It’s for that reason that I still enjoy Bioshock Infinite, even after the plot decided that an ethnic minority-led violent uprising was just as reprehensible and deserving of mass murder as white oppression - even after it made its one identifiable black character a would-be child killer to justify a gameplay system that revolves around killing everyone in sight.
I enjoy it because the art direction is stunning, and the mechanics are interesting, and the world of Columbia at its best transports you to somewhere utterly surreal and fascinating. I enjoy it because of stuff like this. Bioshock Infinite is a beautiful experience with a rotten core - a game that doesn’t quite transcend its lazy storytelling, but still has elements to value beside the moral component. If it was expressly a political manifesto, I’d be skeptical at getting to grips with the wider artistic components, but it’s not, so I’m not.
Criticism nowadays can get preoccupied with this moral element to a point where all else is ignored, I think - it becomes less a question of directly engaging with problematic elements (and, lord, there’s a word that’s misused constantly - problematic) and more a question of shaming anyone who might enjoy something despite that.
The black British director of 12 Years A Slave, Steve McQueen, was recently asked his opinion on D. W. Griffith. This is, if you need context, the man who turned film into a pioneering industry and director of the racist propaganda movie The Birth of a Nation, where African-American men are portrayed by white men in blackface as sexually aggressive idiots and the Ku Klux Klan are a heroic force for good. His answer was justifiably nuanced - The Birth of a Nation easily fed into and bolstered the racism of the time, and that you could draw an unbroken line between the film and the subjugation of countless black people since the film’s production. All that said, McQueen was clear that he likely indirectly owed parts of his directorial career to Griffith, terrible racist as he was; the man made strides in cinema, and pioneered techniques that still persist to this day.
Good criticism acknowledges this murkiness. Sometimes, a moral component can be so abhorrent that it overtakes the literary aspirations or artistic significance of a work when you come to make a summary judgement; that’s not a controversial statement. Having said that, I’ve seen people characterise films like Blue Is The Warmest Color as a three-hour recruitment film for rape apologism (which it isn’t) and the newly-released Transistor as a game that could only be made worse if it literally included scenes of sexual harassment (which I can’t even begin to wrap my head around, given that it’s shaping up to be one my favorite games this year). When people do this, especially in the context of advocating that other people choose to avoid the media they’re describing, it cheapens criticism as a concept.
That’s why I’d like to transition this blog towards out-and-out recommendations, only posting when there’s something I’m impressed by; with an approach like this, I have an actual impetus to write beyond a sense of obligation. I don’t believe that positive reinforcement works in the same way as negative persuasion, in that I think a recommendation can carry further than a critique. I don’t want to see reviews as a sort of closure - once I finish something as painfully dull as The Blacklist, I want to just back away from it rather than feel the need to debrief. Likewise, if I encounter something exciting, I want to talk about it without it feeling routine. And it means I can say statements like “most video games criticism is insufferable shit” without claiming to be one of the privileged few. I don’t think you count as a critic if all you’re doing is saying how great things are.