This is Vigigames' 250th post, and it occurred to me that in the year that we've existed, we haven't laid out any sort of groundwork for how our website works, what we look for, or what we stand for. I mean, we've discussed it in the myriad posts on the site, but there's been nothing of a coherent mission statement on the site, and I think that should change. That's why I present the Vigigames Manifesto, which is really I suppose a manifesto of my own rather than one that represents the views of Christian, Stephen and John, but one that I think we more or less all agree on. Below, I'm going to break this down into two parts: what we expect from games, and what the purpose and methodology of our reviews and articles are.
WHAT DO WE EXPECT FROM GAMES?
Games, and the developers who make them, serve up a litany of promises prior to a game's release. "It's the RTS that'll change the genre!" "John Romero's about to make you his bitch." Etc. etc. But on a more fundamental level, games, as you play them, promise a number of things as well. Call of Duty, for instance, with its hyper-realistic graphics and voice acting and realistic-ish situations, promises to be a fairly realistic interpretation of the realities of wartime. When games fail is when they fail to deliver on both their explicit, marketing and hype driven promises, as well as the game's implicit promises that can only be ascertained through a "close reading" of the game's themes, storyline, and characters, as well as (and perhaps more importantly to videogame criticism) its overall design, aesthetic, control, and opportunities for player agency.
Great games tie all of these aspects together into a seamless, organic whole, where every part of the game contributes to the explicit and implicit aims of the game, while remaining reasonably entertaining. There are instances (I will point you towards my Fragile Dreams review here) where the developers will take the design of their game to its logical extremes in order to do exactly this, but end up gutting the entertainment value. You know what? That's more preferable to me than a company who is so concerned not with making a great game, but with making the player feel good. The greatest developers, like Shigeru Miyamoto or Yuji Horii or Warren Spector or Tim Schaefer, can somehow do both, but it's definitely a difficult scenario.
As I've mentioned before, I don't believe that games, right now, have a lot of organic solutions to the ambitious design ideas that they have. Theoretically, a game like Alan Wake should be a lot more interesting than it turned out to be, but because the developers had to shoehorn in some, you know, actual gameplay, they fell back on gunplay as the primary thing that the player does. So the game supposedly grapples with these "big themes," but you have no participation in any of the storyline that actually builds the story. That's an example of a game where all of the elements don't coalesce into an organic whole, and it's deeply unsatisfying when that happens.
Game development, then, becomes a sort of "risk vs. reward" scenario. It's obviously a lot easier, and often will result in more favourable treatment from me, if a game tackles a theme that's much simpler and much easier to convey in videogame language. That's perhaps why Super Mario Bros. is one of my all time favourite games – because everything, from the whimsically surreal world, to the perfect music, to the tight controls and the underlying rhythm of the game, ties back into the game's main theme, which is simply the joy of movement, and the necessity of moving from one place to another to stay alive. It's executed magnificently (and has been from the very start), so the game succeeds at delivering on its explicit and implicit promises. Occasionally, a game like Fallout will come along, and will grapple with much broader, far-reaching themes, and will succeed equally as well as Super Mario Bros. But not every game is Fallout, and more often than not, the "risk" of trying to deal with supposedly "deep" themes and then failing spectacularly, which is something that happens in so many modern, "serious" games, is way worse, in my opinion. I love bad movies, and I get a kick out of bad music. But bad videogames are another thing altogether. They hurt your brain and soul in a profound way, so the less games with terrible execution and uninteresting gameplay, the better.
What to make, then, of a game like Metroid: Other M, which I reviewed yesterday? It's a particularly hard thing to deal with, when a game fails so spectacularly in many areas, but is overwhelmingly redeemed in others. In those cases, I think it's best to just play it by ear. Not every game is going to fall into the category of what I'd consider "perfect" (or close to perfect), but if it's something you genuinely enjoy, then by all means, go for it. I mean, I have a weakness for sports games – NHL 94 is legitimately one of my favourite games of all time, and I know that by the conventional video game definition, it doesn't have much worth, artistically or otherwise. But here's the thing: I enjoy it. So that's as good of a reason to play a video game as any.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS WEBSITE
So consider what I've just said: there are games that people enjoy, no matter what anyone else says. What's the point of writing for a videogame website and assuming the role of the "videogame expert" (which I am not, by any means… heck, I just started thinking about videogames seriously like maybe five years ago)? I think it is important though, and not just from a narcissist's point of view. Too often, readers treat video game websites as a place to go to validate their own opinions, and video game websites, motivated by ad dollars, are all too ready to do so. As well, gamers, more than ever before, are being misled by the huge marketing campaigns put out for games that are less than stellar (I doubt that everyone who bought the last Kane and Lynch game was aware of the shady business practices surrounding that company, for instance).
I therefore think it's necessary to write about games to give a clear, unfiltered account of what the reviewer felt and noticed during the game, divorced as much as possible from the hype surrounding it. We're all writers in places that aren't exactly the epicenters of the video game hype machine (Saskatchewan and Texas), so our views are simply those of people playing games.
The difference is, I think, is that personally, I'm finding more and more that I'm almost completely outside of the game when I'm playing it, analyzing all of the various aspects that I can notice about the game, "pulling it apart and putting it back together," so to speak. This is the same method that a literary critic might apply, but it's a method that's not done very often in video game journalism. There are great video game reviewers out there, but there's also been an influx in recent years of easily swayed dullards who see game reviewing as as simple of a process as filling out a checklist. "Does this game have a variety of features that one could easily see on the back of the game's box? Yes? Well, then, I'll outline all of these points in my review, and finding them to be executed satisfactorily, I will write a positive review of the game."
Metacritic is perhaps the biggest culprit in this type of attitude, especially since I think gamers are more attuned to review scores than any other group of people who appreciate a certain medium. This can lead to pretty inflated scores for pretty mediocre games, and likewise, a positively brilliant game like Killer7, due to its divisive nature, will have a low score. Avoiding this whole rat race has always been important to me, because I'd rather games were analyzed in ways outside of what I outlined above, and that type of analysis doesn't lend itself to numeric ratings very well.
Alex Kierkegaard of insomnia.ac (a terrible example, I agree) has a piece that basically states that video game websites are being dishonest when they don't have scores at the end of their reviews, because all video game reviews (and indeed, any review of any kind) has a "hidden" score embedded within its words. Be that as it may, it's clear to me that attempting to attach a score to video game is an intellectually dishonest exercise. What legitimate difference is there between an 87% game and a 90% that can't be explained using only the most arbitrary excuses? That's why, yes, there is an embedded "score" in our reviews, but I don't think it's asking too much to ask the reader to suss this out for him/herself.
This perhaps sounds like an elitist attitude, but rest assured – when it comes to gaming, I think I'm a populist overall. Some of my most favourite games have been massive sellers – Ocarina of Time, for instance, is a huge seller and is generally considered one of the greatest games ever, and I totally agree with that assessment. Writing about videogames from a distance can often lead itself to a pretentiousness that does little except to leave the reader cold. I especially want my writing to appeal to people who perhaps aren't as aware of absolutely all of the little intricacies of the industry and modern gaming conventions, but still maintains an intellectual honesty about the subject matter. Whether that's something we've actually done on the site is something that you can decide for yourself, I suppose.