Why I Hate Critics

Two of my favorite albums I’ve discovered this year are Ray LaMontagne’s Till the Sun Turns Black and Ben Harper and Relentless 7’s White Lies for Dark Times. Both albums are 5-star efforts in my book, though for different reasons. LaMontagne for his evocative lyrics and velvety melodies, and Harper for a jammin’ collection of pure summer rock riffage. As I often do when I get absorbed into an album, I check out what the critics had to say. And often I am startled and disappointed that not everyone shares my impeccable musical taste.

Here is Rolling Stone on the LaMontagne album, which it rates 2.5 out of 4 stars:

“Neither his hushed murmur nor his raspy vocal swoops pack much charm or originality, and the same goes for his songs. He gets Van Morrison comparisons, but LaMontagne doesn’t approach the Gaelic soul or deep undertow of Morrison’s good stuff. Soundwise, LaMontagne is more like Nick Drake without the drama and emotion, or even a Windham Hill artist — all airy beauty and not much backbone.”

And here is The Onion AV Club on Ben Harper:

“White Lies For Dark Times … is another jumbled grab bag of uninspired blues-folk … the compelling moments are drowned in a sea of bland jams, a churning mix of pointless repetition and noisy, tired riffing.”

They graded the album a C.

I suppose I should know better. I just let my trial subscription to RS lapse after they put the Jonas Brothers on their cover, proving beyond doubt that the magazine no longer packs much charm or originality. And as for The Onion AV Club, home to the snobbiest bunch of critics in the industry, their reviews have always tended to be jumbled grab bags of uninspired derision. Any compelling points are drowned in a sea of bland superiority, a churning mix of pointless repetitio and noisy, tired complaining. 

 

Is Motion Control a Failure?

Stephen Totilo over at Kotaku makes the case that, yes, it has failed. At least if you judge by the number of blockbuster titles that rely primarily on motion control.

As right as Nintendo was about so many things, maybe it was wrong about this. Or, as is so often the case with Nintendo’s Wii project, the failure here may be one of critical imagination. That happens. Forty years ago on Monday, a human being first stepped on the moon, and what people assumed would happen in the next four decades — trips to Mars, cities in space — have not been built. The guessers often guess wrong.

Great stuff. Of course, motion control was wildly successful when measured by one, easily quantiable metric: Nintendo’s profits. Maybe motion control didn’t transform every single game experience. But it changed the rules for the industry. Wii Sports was so compelling that millions of people, people who would never in a million years call themselves gamers — rushed out and bought a Wii.

And while maybe there haven’t been dozens of epic motion-control games on the market selling millions of copies, that didn’t really matter to Nintendo’s bottom line. They made money on every Wii. And most of those new Wii owners also went out and bought Wii Play. OK, probably many of them did it just to get the extra controller, but they liked Wii Sports enough that a Wii Play pack-in was attractive. And then what did they do after that? They bought Wii Fit in droves.

So even if motion control hasn’t been as broadly successful as Nintendo envisioned, it succeeded wildly in bringing more people into the industry. And now that that trail has been blazed, there’s no going back. The motion-control genie will not go quietly back into his bottle. Microsoft is going big with Natal and “controller-free games and entertainment”. Sony is bringing out its wand.

Only time will tell if these new technologies will have the far-reaching impact that, in Totilo’s analysis, Wii games have fallen short in achieving. But it’s a pretty safe bet that all forms of motion control will be a part of the gaming landscape for a long time to come.

Are Games Approaching Virtual Murder?

Gamasutra is one of the more interesting and professional video-game sites out there. Their writers consistently produce thoughtful, analytical pieces about the industry. So when one of them pens a column saying he is genuinely worried that games are evolving towards true murder simulators, you know you’re going to get a well-written, even-handed take on the issue.

However, the article ultimately shares something with every hysterical op-ed decrying video games as an amoral medium helping to twist a generation of kids into super-predators. And that is simply that the author stumbled across a game that disturbed him. For many parents and anti-game crusaders, that game was one of the Grand Theft Auto series. Or Manhunt. Or Counter-Strike. I don’t know why Bioshock did it for this particular author. Many of us who played the game all the way through didn’t find the enemies disturbingly realistic, though the game itself is disturbing (and excellent) due to its overall atmosphere and story rather than the realism of its character. In fact, the most disturbing part of the game for many players lies precisely in the moral choice you make, about whether to harm the innocent for personal profit (and pay the consequences later), or do the right thing now at the expense of short-term difficulty.

Personally, I have found scenes in the recent entries in the Call of Duty series more disturbing. Sometimes when you shoot an enemy soldier, he starts dragging himself across the ground, trying to get away. You have to walk up and finish him off. Otherwise, he will pull out a pistol or grenade and try to do you. Call of Duty 4 also had a segment, titled “Death from Above”, where you’re in an AC-130 gunship and you use that greyscale thermal targeting system to just grind up guerrilla fighters. The gunship’s crew talks to you in this matter-of-fact tone, like you’re taking out the trash instead of killing actual humans.

But to the article’s point, he got the willies and fears that we’re reaching a point where we all start sliding down a slippery slope towards callousness and inhumanity. Yet, there’s no evidence that the huge advances in realism we’ve seen so far have led to increased violence or disregard for human life. In fact, despite the hand-wringing of politicians and moralizers everywhere, youth violence has hit its lowest level in 40 years, even as “murder simulator” games like Grand Theft Auto IV, Bioshock, and Call of Duty sell tens of millions of copies.

Of course, it’s possible that we just haven’t reached the “tipping point” for this phenomenon. Perhaps there will come a time when games are so real and the act of playing them so visceral that it fires the right set of neural pathways that will turn our youth into cold-blooded killers. Based on the evidence so far, however, I’d say that’s unlikely. The simplest reason is that the vast majority of people, believe it or not, are actually capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. People know when they are playing a game, and they know that bludgeoning someone with a wrench or lighting them up with a molotov is not socially acceptable behavior, and that they will suffer extremely unpleasant consequences for doing so.

For all their realism, video games really pale in comparison to the ultra-realistic violence portrayed in films. I remember being appalled and sickened by the brutality in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Now, of course, I love those movies as classics. Look at The Departed or the Saw series. Those are 10 times more graphic than anything you’ll see in a video game. Part of this is that the industry self-polices (or self censorships, depending on how you look at it) pretty well. The Entertainment Software Ratings Board has pretty exacting standards for the kind of violence that can be depicted and still get an M rating (equivalent to an R). Moreover, the console makers — Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo — won’t let unrated or AO (Adults Only) games get published on their systems.

Finally, video-game developers are actually pretty thoughtful about using realism judiciously. You get the few teams that push the edge, like Rockstar with the Manhunt series, but there aren’t many games that actually set out to disturb you with their realism or that make you torture characters or revel in the pain you cause. And here’s my prognostication: when the day comes when games are basically indistinguishable from film, virtually no one will make games that actually simulate murder and death in all its bloody, painful mess. The reason? That shit isn’t fun. It’s the reason Transformers makes hundreds of millions of dollars while Saw makes tens of millions.

Furthermore, I’d argue that the key to making things disturbing isn’t the photorealism. After all, the author of the Gamasutra piece admits to being disturbed by the original Wolfenstein, hardly what we would call a realistic experience today. Clearly, graphical fidelity isn’t everything. Things like the writing, dialogue, voice acting, and AI are much more essential to creating a desired emtional reaction. Having a victim crawl away from you, crying, and then beg for his life in a realistic manner will be much more effective at recreating a life-like scenario than having a photo-realistic victim who stands there passively while you hack him to bits.

And the upside is that as technology improves, so does the scope for making games into a more impactful art form. Think about a military game that actually puts you in the moral dilemma of having to decide whether the guy on his knees begging for his life is really an innocent civilian or an insurgent desperately trying to get out of a jam so he can continue planting roadside bombs. Think about having an AI partner, girlfriend or pet that responds to your choices and actions. I get excited thinking about this stuff, and think it’s much more likely than Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStation suddenly turning generations of kids into killers, something that would completely defy the last 40 years of video-game evolution.