Here’s a personal rule: I don’t slag other people’s games off.
It’s a rule I’ve tried to stick to over the past decade, sometimes falling by the wayside, but a rule I believe is as valid today as it’s ever been. In the specific context of design and game creative, I also encourage other people not to slag other people’s games off. It’s a bad-habit that I’ve seen become an endemic team/company behaviour, and is as frequently applied to the games people are working on, as to the games people are playing. Once people have a ‘slag games off’ mindset, it’s tough to shake. And, let’s be clear, amusing as it can be in the pub, it serves no one.
Here’s the slaggin’ formula:
sweeping generalisation+focus on one subjectively onerous area+statement of reduced playtime=affirmation of intent never to repeat experience.
As an example:
Game x was shit. The controls were just terrible, I hated it so much I put it down after an hour. I’m never playing one of x’s games again.
There are myriad reasons why I don’t slag other people’s games off. Although I feel it’s as valid a factor as any, the fact that games are incredibly difficult and time-consuming to make, even the bad ones, and that talented people have given so much of themselves during the making of any game, good or bad, isn’t actually the main reason. It’s a factor, but it’s not the main reason.
It’s not even because emotive game critique is the preserve of journalists, bloggers and gamers, who are obviously much better than we are at calling out a game’s faults in entertaining ways. I’m happy to leave them to it. So it’s not that.
It’s this. I don’t slag other people’s games off largely because it serves no creative purpose. At best, it’s entertaining; at worst, it’s an endemic habit that encourages impassioned criticism of the whole, without looking in any objective detail at the good and the bad. It encourages the dismissal of a game outright, leaving important information undiscussed and unobserved. It colours the critical understanding and debate of games with the raw emotional response, which is totally counter-productive. It encourages debate about whether experientially a game is good or bad in the broadest terms, rather than exploring the factors that we should be interested in: entertainment, engagement, challenge, accessibility, variety, freshness. Slagging games off is the gamers perspective, not the designers perspective. Way too often I’ve seen design meetings descend into game slagging sessions, or debates about whether subjectively someone’s right to have enjoyed a game or not, a feature or not – as I say, this is the gamers perspective, not the designers perspective. It gets you nowhere.
You could say, well if you don’t play games as a gamer, how can you design enjoyable experiences? But not slagging games off is not about whether or not I play as a gamer, or whether I enjoy a specific experience – I’m more than happy to say whether, subjectively, I found a game to be enjoyable or not. Behind that, however, there needs to be a deeper understanding of all the factors that played into that subjective opinion, discussed objectively and in balance. The thing is, within a development environment you’re never not making the game – whether it’s during a meeting, in the kitchen, over lunch, at the water-cooler, wherever, every conversation is a part of the generative process and, as such, should be treated as such. Adopting a company behaviour of avoiding slagging, and being more thoughtful in the critique of games, can reap enormous rewards. It should be encouraged.
So, as a rule, I don’t slag other people’s games off. I encourage you not to either.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
“Adopting a company behaviour of avoiding slagging, and being more thoughtful in the critique of games, can reap enormous rewards.”
Absolutely. At first I disagreed with you, because I assumed that you meant “We must always be nice about other people’s games, no matter how bad they are.” But your conclusion makes things much clearer and I totally agree. Slagging off, that is, labelling a game as bad without actually considering why it’s bad, serves no purpose; criticising a game, ie. looking in detail at why a game is good or bad, and thinking about how that information can be used to improve your own game, is incredibly useful.
Thanks for the feedback! Bad’s a dangerous word, I think. Bad’s two things, see:
1) Highly subjective/emotive
2) A generalisation.
Both of these language traps cause their own problems, which I didn’t call out in the original copy, but am now sort of inclined to go and correct. I’ve seen these two traps do a few things, notably turning people off playing perfectly good experiences from which a lot can be learned because somebody of influence has called them “bad”; created situations in which someone who’s enjoyed an experience and has a valid perspective shys away from commenting because they feel their peer group will question their judgement if they do; colouring people’s perspectives of an experience before they’ve had a chance to play it, and therefore affecting their overall opinion of the game (there was some great research on how pre-conceived notions of quality dramatically affect subjective review scores recently which I’ll dig out). I’d also say that we all experience games in very different ways, with various leanings towards graphics, controls, narrative, audio, gameplay, the overall cinematic experience. This is an article in and of itself, but generalising that a game is bad doesn’t respect the fact that a person who’s highly visual would probably call Minecraft ‘bad’, whereas the core Minecraft player might not care a jot about the latest X360 or PS3 visual extravaganza. Ultimately, in the development environment specifically, I think it’s really good practice to manage these emotive and subjective opinions and focus on the individual components in as balanced a way as possible.
I agree, absolutely. What’s especially useless about labeling a game “bad” is that it frequently doesn’t even have anything to do with the game, but is, instead, about the game not meeting the player’s expectations of what they though the game should be.
I think even a carefully analytical critique of a disliked game isn’t necessarily useful. After all, there are a lot of games out there, and the reality is that most aren’t going to be great (as most books, films, television shows, etc. aren’t going to be, either). Thoughtful analysis of what a game specifically “did wrong” helps weed out subjective expectations, which, as you say, are likely to be unfocused or broad, but even this is only worthwhile if either the game was trying something new, or the failed bit is common in games, AND the critique also involves a solution to the problem. Even so, I’m more interested in discussing what a game does right (even, or perhaps especially, in games that are otherwise unplayable or badly regarded); ultimately we can’t make good games unless we can recognize what works and understand why. Slagging, certainly, will never get us there.
That’s it, really, moving our language and analysis from the subjective to the objective. Cutting through the emotive surface to the deeper structure underneath.
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