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HAVE PITY FOR THE GAMES CRITICS by Mr Biffo

19/11/2015

28 Comments

 
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I know I talk a lot about story and writing in my game reviews, but writing stories is sort of how I make my living these days.

I've got something of a vested interest in it (by which I mean, I've got something interesting up my vest: it's a big hernia).

I always made up stories as a kid - whether it was on the fly with my Star Wars action figures, drawing cartoon strips, or telling the rest of the village that I'd seen a wolf - so it's odd that I took such a meandering route into writing scripts professionally. ​Particularly given that bad or lazy writing is something about which I get pointlessly incensed.

That said, you can always choose whether or not to listen to anything I say about the quality of writing in video games. Never take my word as gospel.

I mean, on the one hand I've been writing scripts professionally for 15 years, have a few BAFTA nom-noms and a couple of RTS Awards under my truss, so you might think I know something of which I speak... but at the same time I was the guy who wrote Pudsey The Dog The Movie, widely considered to be the greatest atrocity in the history of humankind. 

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In that piece about Rise of the Tomb Raider wot I done the other day, I gave a fair bit of kicking to the game's portrayal of Lara Croft, and how bland the character has become, how rote and predictable the story is.

​It particularly grates upon my jowls because I see the game being held up by others as an example of great writing and characterisation, when I fail to see it as anything of the sort. 


So, I thought it was time to come clean on how hard it was for me to write such frothing bile.

See, talking of BAFTA... some of you might recall, I was on the BAFTA judging panel for best video game story, earlier this year. The chairperson of that panel was Rhianna Pratchett, writer of the two Tomb Raider games... 

Mm-hm. Now do you see? I'm literally history's greatest monster.


GENEROUS AND WARM
The BAFTA panel was the only time I've met Rhianna, but she was immediately very likeable, generous and warm. 

I don't know her, she's not a friend, but I knew her enough from that one evening that I really struggled to write the Tomb Raider piece the way I did, to not pull the punches that I felt needed to be delivered. They were aimed at the game as a whole, not intended for any individual target.

Part of why I feel I can do that is because I know that any piece of professional scriptwriting can be hobbled by the interference of others. Yes, it's hard when your name is attached to work that you don't feel is representative of what you're capable, but I also find it easier to shrug off the criticism when I know I've not been wholly responsible for the end product. There are all sorts of pressures on any piece of commercial work, and a writer is often a surprisingly tiny cog in the machine.

Let's face it, I've been on the receiving end of more than my fair share of criticism. Fortunately, I've generally been pretty good at shrugging it off - even the tsunami of hysterical hatred which flooded my way in the wake of Pudsey - but I've seen how it can affect some people. 

PERSONAL THING
Writing can be such a personal thing that receiving criticism of something you've written can feel like being criticised for being you. I've seen people utterly floored by a bad review, thrown into a downward spiral of self-doubt and depression.

I've been there with the self-doubt - but with me it tends to come from inside me, if for some reason my creative engine isn't firing on all cylinders. When the words don't flow, I start to doubt myself and fear I'll never write again, and that I'm a terrible hack.

So it's the curse (or the blessing, if you're a shamelessly horrible person) of being a reviewer that you have the power to utterly crush another human being. And choosing to wield that power can be difficult when you know the person you risk crushing.

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HOLDING BACK
​A few times since starting Digitiser2000 I've thought about getting on the lists of games company PR people, but I've always held back.

​Establishing a relationship with a PR risks clouding a critic's ability to do their job the way it needs to be 
done.

Not having that burden, reviewing only stuff that I've bought out of our Digi2000 donor fund, means it's one less thing to worry about. 

Yeah, I might still end up ruining someone's day by casually dismissing something they've worked on for four years, but at least I don't have to look them in the eye afterwards.

Plus, I only go all-out when I feel properly passionate, and it's always because I want games to live up to their potential, or because I fear others are not being truthful in their critique and I want to readdress the balance.

It's never because I want to be controversial for the sake of it, or be seen as looking cool for booting a sacred cow between the udders.


CHANGED MY MIND THERE

I was just about to write that any reviewer who tells you it's easy slagging off a game is a liar... but that's not owning it. It might just be me who finds it hard, and plenty of other game reviewers are utter psychopaths who revel in upsetting people.

But one of the reasons PR people exist is to build relationships with journalists and editors to try and get positive coverage for their products. That's how the world works. And often it works well. I can't remember specific examples, but I certainly recall going softer on some games back in the day because the PR person had taken me out to lunch, and I liked them.

On the other hand, I remember one game in particular which we laid into following a lavish freebie trip. The company's PR rang up, utterly incensed, because she felt we owed her game a better review than we gave it.

That wasn't the only time it happened, but fortunately it happened rarely, because the Digitiser team were chronically anti-social oddballs, which meant that most PRs found it easier to just send us the games, and not bother inviting us to anything anyway.

As far as the industry goes, I hope things have moved on in the intervening years, but my dirty guts tell me otherwise.

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YEARS SINCE
Having spent years as a professional games journalist, and then a few years training to be a psychotherapist for pity's sake, I think I've become quite adept at spotting when a reviewer is trying not to upset someone they know.

A review, where the writer isn't being true to what they really believe, leaps out at me. And ​I've seen a lot of them over the last month or so (and a lot of truly great writing too, to be fair).


I often read talk of journos being pressured by an ad department not to be too hard on a certain game, for fear of upsetting potential advertisers, and I've no first-hand experience of that to tell you whether it happens or not. However, the bigger issue is one that we can't do a lot about: human nature. It has nothing to do with ethics, or corruption, or conspiracy, and everything to do with basic emotional responses that we all have.

It takes a particular kind of psychopath to do something easily, which they know might upset another person... and an extra special person to do that thing to someone they know, with whom they've shared a few pints.

THE BRITISH ARMY IS A SAUSAGE FACTORY
Here's a truth that never gets talked about enough.

I come from a big military family, see. My dad, my sister, various nephews and nieces, have all served in the armed forces. I've seen people I care about transformed in the space of a few months after enlisting, going from regular people to someone who would kill another human being just because somebody else told them to. 


I was alarmed to discover that one of the first things new recruits have to do is strangle a chicken, to help desensitise them to the idea of killing. More troublingly, casual racism, and rampant patriotism, appears endemic in the military, because it makes it easier to do something horrible in the name of your country, if you no longer see the enemy as human.

​I've heard people - who would never have previously used a racist term - come out the end of the British Army sausage factory practically foaming at the mouth about "rag-heads" and "sand monkeys", and being so brainwashed that they would label Nelson Mandela a "terrorist" on Facebook. But I've also seen how that diminishes over time, and they revert to the lovely person they used to be, once free of such conditioning.


Our planet would be a very different place if soldier training the world over saw them handing free promotional t-shirts to targets instead of firing guns at them, and taking enemy effigies to lunch, instead of stabbing them with bayonets.

Point is, the greater the divide between PR and writer the better, I feel. Ultimately, as a critic, there's a responsibility to be honest, and removing barriers to that honesty and congruence is the ideal. At the end of the day, a critic is simply voicing one person's opinions, and it has no worth if they're not being honest. 

And I don't mean honest in the sense of not taking back-handers, but honest to themselves; what a game makes them feel. What it stirs in them. Writing, whether it's a script or an opinion piece, is at its best when a person owns who they are, and shares it with the reader; when they write from within, rather than be influenced by external forces.

Being honest doesn't mean you have to strangle a chicken.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
I WAS A BAFTA GAMES JUDGE by Mr Biffo
BOTH SIDES OF THE FENCE by Mr Biffo
LARA CROFT: THE FRAIL PSYCHOPATH by Mr Biffo

28 Comments
DD
19/11/2015 01:00:06 pm

Very well written Dave. This is why I love Digi, and always have done.

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DD
19/11/2015 01:03:40 pm

Dave? Holy shit who is Dave?

I'm mean PAUL!

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charlie link
19/11/2015 02:58:54 pm

Yeah, nice one Dave.

Ben
19/11/2015 06:14:14 pm

I'm nice Ben!

Carl Harrison
19/11/2015 01:07:49 pm

As much as I enjoyed the Tomb Raider robot, I thought the supporting characters were terribly stereotyped. You had the big shaman type guy, the American/ Japanese girl wanting to get in touch with her Japanese roots, and the nerdy tech guy. I can't even remember their names it was so generic. The same applies to a lot of other games, Skyrim comes to mind. I only remember Lydia because you're given her as some form of wench housemaid. The best characters of recent memory seem to be from Naughty Dog, The Last of Us being a particular highlight. Each character was written so well with the dialogue being exceptionally believable. I think it all comes down to the majority of games being 'dumbed down' (hate to use that term but I can't think of another). I've recently Been playing through some of the old Infinity games again, Planescape, Balder's Gate etc, and the choices you can have in that in terms of conversation and character development are still leagues ahead of what we have in the modern era of pretty graphics and watered down objectives.

I guess that brings me to something I was talking about recently with some friends. As kids, we dreamed of the day that games would be accepted as an every day past-time but now that they are and there's big money behind them, I wish I could take it back.

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Carl Harrison
19/11/2015 01:08:27 pm

Meant to say reboot, not robot.

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Sin Vega link
20/11/2015 10:25:58 pm

Great, you've spoiled it now.

Ian link
19/11/2015 01:12:52 pm

We had that exact same dilemma on the website I occasionally wrote for (linked on this comment), although journalistic integrity didn't get us particularly far as we called it a day in the end due to what was deemed to be insufficient traffic. Reviewing new stuff (even on one format) is an expensive business, also the rise of the fanboy & metacritic scores is a factor. Our review of a shit Killzone sequel, for instance, drew the ire of the fanboys as how dare we gave it 7/10... On the other hand, our main writer slammed an indie game on another site and the devs actually took his feedback seriously.
A way around it is to get popular enough under your own steam and if the PRs come calling, take their review copies but don't pull your punches. The TrueAchievements approach seems to work with a little disclaimer: "a review copy of the is game was submitted for the purposes of this review" which tells it how it is. If its a bad game, say so.

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Richard wager
19/11/2015 06:13:31 pm

In England my name is John.

Do you see...

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gravy
19/11/2015 06:57:29 pm

Nice article dave tx xxx

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Ben
19/11/2015 06:58:45 pm

Thing is, (and this isnt aimed at you; I think you're one of, if not the best games writer around and, Pugsey withstanding, I love dem words you do, OK?!) you say it's hard for a critic to really lay into someone else's work, but surely professional criticism, by its very nature, appeals to a certain type of personality? I can't help but think that criticism is ego driven so it's kind of hard to sympathise with anyone who thinks their opinion is so valuable or important that it's actually worth publishing, let alone someone whose integrity can be undermined with a swanky pants lunch and pudding. Having said that, I am a total review slag who can't make up their mind without a bunch of other peoples' stupid opinions stuffed in my slobbering gob, but I dunno, maybe I'm a naive idiot head, but slagging something off seems a lot easier than actually making something.

I totally agree that critics and PR people should maintain a safe, professional distance though, but that often isnt the case in my experience; gamergate might have been/be a lot of old juvenile, hotheaded, moronic nonsense (and nothing to do with ethics in journalism probably) but there is some merit to the notion that there is an unhealthy relationship between publishers and the games media, but that should come as no surprise to anybody with so much as a cursory glance at metacritic.

BTW, I didn't know you actually PURCHASE all your review games. That is commendable and deeply reassuring. ..your integrity knows no bounds. Patreon-me-do!

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Mr Biffo
19/11/2015 07:42:52 pm

Ben - I think there can be some validity in generalisations about the sorts of people that are attracted to one profession over another, but I also think it's a mistake to apply that to everyone. I mean, everyone's different, everyone has a different story as to how they ended up where they ended up... I mean, I becomes a games reviewer completely by accident, because my old employer needed someone to help write the games pages.

And there are plenty of other games writers I've known for whom it's about a passion for games, and because they simply enjoy writing. Which is more or less how it is for me now. So... maybe it is about ego for some, but I'm sure it isn't for all. There's a good piece on today's Kotaku about journalism, incidentally...

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Hamptonoid
20/11/2015 07:23:55 am

That piece by kotaku really irked me. What did they expect to happen on the back of the leaks? They acted pretty selfishly, then whinged about it when the big bad game company got upset.

Steve McPayola
20/11/2015 09:33:07 am

@Hamptonoid:
The tone of it does read as kind of petty, but it does raise the question of what the role of videogame journalism is. Actual journalism should be about getting news to people, not regurgitating press releases and doing things on the timescales the companies say to. But then, I do wonder if Ubisoft's ban might be in part due to when Kotaku went after them for not having playable female characters in Unity. Their excuse was admittedly rubbish, but if AC does try to do one thing reasonably well, it's representativeness. AC:Liberation had some really interesting ideas in that respect, though sadly I never finished it because it followed the AC formula so heavily.

Hamptonoid
20/11/2015 11:02:03 pm

Hey Steve, yeah I get that, and I don't disagree. But for me, it's all about respect. Biffo's commentaries seemed to be carefully framed, and I would hope that Pratchett would respect his views. I didn't get that sense of respect from Kotaku, who appeared to behave selfishly regarding the leaks. How would they have felt if they had an article ready to go, then a competitor got wind of it and trumped them?
Anyway, it was a good article and I appreciated the insight - cheers Biffo.

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Steve McPayola
21/11/2015 12:29:37 am

I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I don't like the idea of companies telling journalists what they can and can't print, but on the other, I know that Kotaku don't actually have a right to access to them, and there is a certain element of "playing the game" that has to be factored in. Ultimately Kotaku had to know this was a risk when they did stuff like post leaked Fallout 4 script materials that were presumably subject to NDA, so they can't really complain too much on that front. They surely couldn't really have thought there would be no repercussions for that. Besides, in some ways this is better for them, as not being part of the Fallout PR hype machine means that they can actually be honest about it.

Overall, I'd feel more sympathetic to Kotaku if they were getting blacklisted for doing something with real merit like exposing something shifty, but as it stands, it seems like they just tried to have their cake and eat it too.

Chomboss Wankuss
19/11/2015 07:49:09 pm

Hmm good stuff Biffo and got me thinking.

Games reviewing is pretty primitive compared to critical writing in other media (present company obviously excepted). Other than Digi there isn't really to my knowledge a Wire magazine (music) or TLS (books) type highbrow games review type system.

If you look at music, critically panned boybands and DJs sell by the bucketload whilst critics darlings such as, off the top of my head, Neutral Milk Hotel or Ornette Coleman or whoever, are only enjoyed by a select few - the same in books where 50 Shades of Grey sells millions whilst no-one (except of course me) has read Ulysses. There is almost an inverse relationship between sales and artistic quality (with a few worthy exceptions).

This is not true in games where the most critically bigged up are also usually huge sellers - gta v et al


Maybe we need things to advance a bit so we atart getting Greil Marcus of games journalism? Maybe you're the man Dave?

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Col. Asdasd
19/11/2015 07:50:11 pm

I've read ex-PC Gamer types write openly about Introversion taking them out for a curry in the run up to the releases of Uplink and Darwinia. I'm not saying it was corrupt but it never struck me as right in my gut. These were people I trusted and it felt like that trust was casual thrown in the path of danger.

To this day a sympathetic undercurrent runs through UK-on-UK press/dev relations, and it was quite starkly noticeable during the lean pre-Prison Architect years when soft-lit puff pieces seemed to come along like buses every time a bundle or Steam reissue was in the pipeline. It was almost more charity than promotion. Band Aid For Chris Delay.

See also any Eurogamer review of a British-developed game for the last decade or more. Review and preview were awash with charming anecdotes that shone light on the personal connection reviewers had established with their plucky pals in the local cottage industry. The sense that they were rooting for these guys was palpable. And then, what's wrong with rooting for the home team? Not a lot. It's perfectly understandable. But it did make all those friendly 7s and generous 8s seem a bit suspect.

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Steve McPayola
19/11/2015 09:07:59 pm

I actually appreciate the idea of PC Gamer being honest about how they were being courted. At least readers can make up their own mind on how much of a pinch of salt to take the review with. I can understand why games journos accept the nice things offered to them, especially given how writing tends to pay, but I do appreciate being told if they're getting nice things in an effort to influence them. Of course, I can't imagine the PR types like having what they do revealed to the public... Certainly didn't go too well for Rab Florence.

It's a difficult one. Basically as it is, as readers we have to be more diligent about questioning the reviews we're reading, and finding sources that we think we can trust (for instance, this site). Admittedly, it's a pretty bad situation if the best way to engage with media is to fundamentally start from a place of mistrust...

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Col. Asdasd
19/11/2015 10:31:26 pm

Oh, they never said anything at the time. This was years later, when they'd moved on to pastures new.

Hamptonoid
19/11/2015 08:28:39 pm

I started writing a response to this, but I even bored myself. But....

...look at the sadness in their eyes.

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Ali Bongo
19/11/2015 08:31:07 pm

Good work Dave.

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Tom
20/11/2015 07:29:38 am

Interesting comments about the army. It was pretty similar in the navy tbh. Part of the reason I left. But yeah, great article as ever!

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Mr Biffo
20/11/2015 08:12:12 am

Cheers, Tom. And everyone else.

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Lucius Merriweather link
20/11/2015 01:45:37 pm

Nice one, Dave. I'm throwing some tips in the Patreon jar.

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Mr Biffo
20/11/2015 04:04:54 pm

Bless you, Hendril.

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Hit The Lever
20/11/2015 02:50:58 pm

Regarding the Sausage Factory this happened to my stepbrother in the late 80's.

He was a massive fan of U2 and The Jam in his teens and even saw U2 live once, he had all the T-Shirts, Videos, Tapes posters etc.

He joined the army and when he came back 3 months later first thing he did was bag up every bit of U2 stuff and gave it all to my Dad but kept the Jam stuff up.

I know U2 are bobbins but he'd have probably knocked someone out for saying it before he enlisted that's how much of a fan he was.

He's a Postman nowadays and has an Irish Wife

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Mr Biffo
21/11/2015 09:44:02 am

Blimey. Bono's annoying, but teaching soldiers to hate U2 is a bit much.

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