It's Okay To Be Bad: Skill, Shaming, and Game Literacy

Games Video Games
21

When it comes to game reviewing game “skill” and game literacy, as well as the ability to properly critique a game are two different sets of ability.

The idea that the requisite skill to beat most video games is a rarity is a total fabrication perpetuated for the sake of gatekeeping, generally against women, and I guess to discredit journalists for whatever reason.

If video games were actually THAT difficult to complete and be competent at they wouldn’t be nearly as popular a medium as they are.

I think I made a similar point when the Dunkey v Critics video came out, but the idea that video game outlets hire people with deficient skills at games has no basis in fact.

I think the divide comes from the fact that gaming outlets obviously DO place a premium on hiring people who are skilled at writing about and discussing games, because that’s what their job is. This is contrasted with the YouTube/streaming community where obviously personality and critical talent play a factor, but highly skilled gameplay can still draw an audience.

There’s obviously a place for both of these things.

For instance, while fighting games have been brought up as an example of a type of game that requires a certain level of skill to fully comprehend and review (and they do!) most major game outlet reviews don’t really review fighting games from a competitive perspective, because most consumers won’t play them at a competitive level.

On the contrary, whenever a fighting game comes out there are people in the YouTube and streaming communities who take the time to cover the game from those aspects by exploring the meta, explaining the systems and providing guides and tips.

While there are some games that are competitive in nature and some that are meant to be difficult and challenge a player’s skill, I think OP’s point that we don’t make this distinction about books, movies or music is enough to cement that there’s no reason to feel “bad” at games.

22

Sincere apologies for pedantry, but I don’t think critiquing historical non-fiction rules someone out from having insight into Kendrick Lamar. Academics have music taste as well, and this particular one might have an interesting and different perspective, alongside a decent ability to write clearly.

Back on-topic:

Game skill matters in importance depending on your audience. Waypoint takes accessibility and variety importantly, so it would make sense for reviewers to be ‘not-elite’ and more in-line with a wide audience. On the other hand, if the reviewer were writing for a strategy game website then it would make far more sense that they be actually good at the game since their audience will likely also have a higher-than-average aptitude, and higher expectations with respect to aspects such as AI and balance.

The intersection of game skill and literacy is interesting. However, it’s mostly going to be related to how much time a person spends playing different games, and a bit to do with how much a part games played in childhood.

I’m not particularly great at games - maybe just “good” - but that’s probably as much because I somehow end up spending far more time reading about games and gaming culture than I do actually playing games. Because I’m honestly pretty lazy, once a game starts to demand effort for me to improve then I tend to get bored and find something else. This doesn’t bother me.

23

Weird framing IMO.

I feel like really nobody is bad at games. Mostly they’re inexperienced. You’re not supposed to be good at things without practicing!

And most games won’t be worth committing to practice for most people, so most games are aiming to be basically easy (with varying levels of success).

24

What place do you think game skill takes in critique? Every game is a learning experience, even sequels that are very self-similar to the previous entry. I feel like the rate at which skill develops should be diverse in the game industry to reflect the fact that everyone has different rates at which skill develops by genre/game series that are kind of a unique fingerprint for them. I’d actually really be turned off by an outlet where everyone was a pro gamer savant who picks up any and every new game of any genre in the first 5-50 minutes of play. It’s good to have a spread of people with different focuses and strengths, but I don’t know if it’s good to have only the “strategy person” do strategy game streams, or only the “RPG person” do RPG streams, etc, etc. Showing that the learning curve is always personalized helps put your own face and the faces of people you know on game journalism.

How do you think game skill and game literacy intersect? I think some people who don’t have the best skill at games can still have played a ton of games (jack of all trades, master of none situation or a game dabbler) and still manage to be well read and experienced game historians/game journalists/industry experts. I think people who are incredibly skilled at games can wind up never being interested in learning the context within which the games they love are made, whether historical or social or economic or whatever. In short, they can intersect and probably inform each other, but I don’t think they’re necessarily going to pair and it’s not going to diminish either skill or game literacy for either/or to be the case in most if not all cases.

How do you feel about your skill and skill in general in games? My rate to gain skill at games varies with the genre, I take to RPGs, strategy/tactical games and sim games pretty quickly, most others I either never quite get (because I fall off of them usually, but sometimes it’s probably a focus thing with games and genres I keep coming back to without ever really getting better) or I gain skill at a vvveeerrrryyyyyy ssssllllooowwwwww pace. None of that makes me feel particularly proud or disappointed, since I play games to have fun and I can have fun doing poorly or ramping down the difficulty and just messing around, or playing with friends who are good and getting pwnd or w/e…like I don’t game to Git Gud, I game to feel excited or relaxed or some other positive thing, competition doesn’t usually factor into it unless it’s friendly competition between friends.

25

Never feel the need to apologize for pedantry to me, I smother myself in pedantry is if it were the warmest blanket.

The analogy I used was just something off the top of my head to think of two wildly different things. People have very diverse interests, I’m just trying to make the point that someone who has little no experience in a medium or genre might not have the background to have an informed critique.

26

I’m also recognizing a little bit of irony in this post, though. This is kind of silly of a silly segue but: there was a time when I watched a lot of Game Grumps. (I’m not trying to dunk on them here, FYI, just thinking out loud.) There’s a lot of reasons I stopped watching, biggest, of course, being that I grew out of their humor, but I can’t help but feel frustrated by the way Arin Hanson criticizes games for what frequently are his own oversights. Though this also might be due to the fact that his criticisms also come from a place of superficial judgment and hypocrisy, rather than an actual skill.

I feel like there might be a meaningful concern when it comes to making an assessment of quality, specifically concerning the actual design. If you enjoy a game despite having trouble with it, that’s not a problem, right? But if you assert that a game is bad because you have trouble with it, is that really a well-formed criticism? And if so, where do you draw the line between a reasonable complaint of difficulty and a less reasonable one?

So do you all think there may be a worthwhile distance we have to take from our skill in a particular game when we “critique” as in assessing quality, rather than just “critique” as in analyzing a game? Or is this concern also complicit in the meritocracy in games criticism?

27

while i think its often frustrating to see, especially given channels like that with HUGE audiences, it IS a legit reaction, at least in the moment, to get upset at game for frustrating you even if it is because you missed something. that’s kind of how we engage with games sometimes.

but i think its more useful to remove a let’s play from the idea that it’s a formal critique, unless its one that’s intentionally presented as a critical piece. let’s plays, particularly stuff like Game Grumps, is often more for entertainment than informing people. i dont think that performance should be used as a metric to judge merit of their reactions, because its more akin to what you’d expect the first time you play any game. you often have to fail to understand the game, right?

but i do share your frustration that this is going to be a lot of people’s ONLY exposure to certain games, and often the people playing them come with certain biases that mean they never intend to take something seriously, especially if its more funny not to. and a lot of people are going to take their reactions and use that to judge and write off a lot of games, which sucks because there might be plenty of good aspects that cant be explored in that format.

i saw this a bunch with the Castlevania playthroughs on Giant Bomb and it really bummed me out seeing those attitudes from the stream filter into the conversation as if they were the only acceptable reaction.

28

Right, there’s the publicity, and to clarify, I’m not at all saying that I would consider a Let’s Play or a stream as a legitimate critique of a game. Obviously, hosting a show and playing a game at the same time is kind of difficult. But the reason Arin Hanson is especially relevant, though, is because he made a what, 30 minute video picking at Ocarina of Time, and later went on to do a Let’s Play of it, which showed him doing many things that would, yeah, make the game unpleasant if you played them in that way, but they were extremely strange and inefficient ways to play. I’m not an OoT die-hard, but it’s hard not be perplexed by that dynamic

Again, to be clear, I’m not saying that this is something I believe to be correct or whatever. I’m trying to reconcile these feelings: feeling as though negative criticisms against something you may not understand may not be meaningful critique, and also feeling as though there’s no reason to place skill as an important criteria to make meaningful critique. It’s hard to shake either, but they seem somewhat exclusive to one another.

This post was originally just trying to support people and remind people that no one has to “be good at games” to enjoy and appreciate them. I suppose, as stated earlier, there’s a difference between being skilled at something and understanding its aesthetics. I guess it’s more a matter of literacy.

1 Like
29

This has already been discussed, but the fact that games are the only form of media where your progress is gated can really amplify the different experiences that people can have with the game. A lot of the examples discussed in this thread have been about more mechanical games, such as fighting games, roguelikes or multiplayer games. However, sometimes people can struggle with specific sections of single player games, and that can have a big impact on their view of the game as a whole.

If player A struggles with a specific puzzle or boss fight for two hours, while player B breezes through on their first try, they’re going to have two separate, but completely valid experiences. Maybe player A gets frustrated and either gives up, or just becomes soured on the game as a whole. Player B, on the other hand, has a wonderful time. Or maybe player B gets bored with the lack of challenge, while player A enjoys the challenge and has a better experience with the game.

Skill isn’t the only factor that can cause these differences. Different playstyles, bugs affecting one player but not another, or just pure luck can also cause people to have a different experience of the difficulty of a game. I think that the solutions to these differences is both transparency on the part of the critic as to their level of skill, and what affected their experience as a whole, as well as discussion between multiple people who have played the game. If multiple people discussing a game had the same issues, they’re more likely to apply to the game than if just one person had an issue.

30

I think this first point is often overstated.

Books absolutely have a huge potential for difficulty spikes and failing to make progress in one section (not understanding the text) can make it much harder to follow subsequent sections (the gating may be a soft-gate but works that are incrementally constructed arguments are very similar to a game that tutorialises as it progresses, only the book has no way of knowing if you’ve gotten the initial point before moving on). The advantage of the printed word is that there is an inherent “cheat code” to skip forward (something that games have somewhat lost from their PC peak of always shipping with debug codes/cheats - thanks DLC cheat codes!) but that is not itself sufficient to ensure no issues. Just as a section of a game that teaches a mechanic, if skipped, could chain into issues later in the game where that understanding is assumed.

I’d say that a lot of academic texts are rife with this issue (definitely papers but also broad academic books, eg Judith Butler springs to mind as both extremely widely read but also not constructed for ease of reading - see the army of transphobes who walk away from her work with exactly the opposite of her argument in many cases). The experience of having read a book and having just looked at each word in order is not the same thing so the guarantee that you can do the latter does not necessarily indicate a universality of the former. If given a book in German, I would not be able to read it but that would not indicate an issue inherent in the book. Clearly I should not review that book or act as a reviewer for an academic text in a field in which I have no experience. But avoiding this sort of issue is already how game reviews work. I’ve (and this goes back to the late '90s so almost 20 years) been assigned reviews and ended up saying that I’m just not able to properly review a game. It’s not common, part of the job is to be somewhat of a generalist, but having a review reassigned has always been a thing that happens. I’m not sure there is any deficit in reviewers already being quite open about their skill levels when discussing how they found games (which would suggest a solution need be proposed).

[Edit: So this is more an aside rather than core to the point I was making above. As a professional academic, I think that while some pieces are by necessity only readable by a small audience, this is far from a universal. A major weakness of the journal/peer review process is that we have typically ended up with this extremely brittle linguistic style, one which each new cohort of students is indoctrinated into without actually justifying - it’s just the form you write to get papers accepted to decent conferences/journals, even if a far more accessible style would not actually impede the comprehension or significantly increase the paper’s length. The “well actually you can only write this so the other 20 people who have this same specialisation understand it an no one else” thing is the height of intellectual snobbery and simply not true for the vast majority of papers. Yes, some terminology is required to enter but often not that much and you even signpost most of it when referencing previous work and related material anyway.]

2 Likes
31

as someone who has bounced off a lot of academic texts in their research I can confirm that academia basically does its best to be completely inaccessible to the average reader. the need to cover your ass from every point of argument makes it agony as you hear the same point iterated on again and again

32

Agree about academia, although math approaches the “covering your ass” differently: a lot of researchers will simply assert something as fact and have it accepted on the power of their authority, which may not be afforded to a young researcher trying to base their work on their results, so one is often reduced to try and invent proofs for things one is not always certain are true.

33

Like sports, I don’t think you have to be good yourself at games to be a great games critic. They’re two very different skills. One is about physical coordination and focused practice, the other about intellectual acuity and writing ability.

Also, re: academic writing, as a professional academic myself, I need to add that most academic writing is not written for non-specialists nor should it be. It’s highly technical and highly specialized for a reason. That’s why public intellectuals and journalists exist: to “translate” highly specialized material into language for non-specialists. There are academic game critics and popular game critics (and a few are both), and each group writes for a very different audience.

36

I 100% agree with the sentiment, but I really think we need to stop using the sports analogy as it actually empowers the other side of the debate. The easy counter they make is to say “sports writers don’t participate the games they cover, in that analogy developers are the athletes. To engage with the game they’re covering, a sports reporter need only have the ability to watch it. Being bad at a game is thus like trying to be a blind and deaf sports reporter.”

Again I do not agree with this at all, which is why I am frustrated seeing people use this analogy repeatedly only to get it turned around on them. The active participant aspect to games make it really hard to compare to other art criticism or even sports writing.

37

I really disagree with this. Most art by definition has an active participant role, it’s just that in the case of games it’s way more obvious because you can visualize physical button input. I mean you can choose to “consume the words” of a book or “images of a film” or to just “hear the music”, but to actively engage with say Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or Ryoji Ikedas Dataplex or most heavily improvisational music requires a heavy amount of active participation. I’d go so far as to say to 2001 demands more “participation” from me than pretty much any game I’ve played?
I mean if you go to a museum, you should spend a lot of time to try and analyze a painting from different angles.

2 Likes
38

I think game difficulty is complicated by how many different kinds of games there are. Being good at strategy games doesn’t mean you’ll be good at character-action games or racing games, and this extends into 2D and 3D games having their own wildly different skillsets! When my girlfriend decided to try dark souls after watching me play and falling in love with the aesthetic, she struggled quite a bit with it at first because she had almost exclusively played 2D games like Pokemon and Harvest Moon. She did adapt and has now beaten most of the soulsbornes, but it was a very steep learning curve. To suddenly be grappling with 3d level design, camera control, and more complex button layouts all at once is a lot to handle!

I consider myself decent at games in general but not amazing at most of them, because I’ve been playing games of all types since I was little. It was eye-opening to watch someone who was less familiar struggle with basic concepts that were second-nature to me, or miss things because their faux-3D spatial awareness was not as developed. We take a lot of aspects of skill and difficulty in game design for granted because they’re things we’ve become used to. As a whole gamers need to be more understanding and helpful towards people who are having a hard time. Helping people can be really fun anyway! But that would probably require a massive change in deeply ingrained, shitty cultural attitudes amongst gamers lol

All that said, difficulty can be a really powerful aspect of game design. A tough boss in a Dark Souls or a Bayonetta wouldn’t be nearly as thrilling or satisfying to finally defeat if you just steamrolled it without engaging the skills the game has hopefully taught you up to that point. Dwarf fortress wouldn’t be quite the story factory if survival of a colony was a piece of cake. Rain World wouldn’t feel like such a unique, desperate fight for survival if you were evenly matched with the predators hunting you. However, game designers could do a much better job with creating more intelligent, open difficulty options to accommodate less skilled players, people with less time to invest, and especially people with disabilities. That would obviously be a more complicated for some games but I always appreciate it when I see it. Even something like the “no time to grind” mode in Dungeons of Dredmor, where the proc-gen dungeons are made smaller and exp and loot is adjusted to match, made that game a lot more inviting and honestly more fun to play, without defanging the difficulty of the game as a whole.

As for critics and reviewers, they should try to be extra aware of their blind spots and strengths, so they can provide a more honest insight into their experience with a game. I think a lot of critics are pretty good at this actually, but you still will find otherwise smart critics reacting negatively to a game because of some unexamined bad habit or fundamental misunderstanding that has caused them to do poorly or miss things and thus hampered their enjoyment or insight. Which can often be just as much the game’s fault as the critics!

So yeah its a complex thing and there’s no easy solutions, but for everyone to try to be more understanding and less judgemental, while engaging with games in a more critical and self-aware way.

1 Like
39

I agree with this in sentiment, but I think this point is a false equivalency.

(also holy shit i ended up writing a lot, this is what happens when I sleep too much)

Yes, many texts make themselves incoherent to many readers. But that is fundamentally different from the denial of access to information. If I read a text and am unable to understand it, I can still literally see the text and can read it. If I am unable to match the skills asked for by a game, I am denied further access to the game in most cases. You call this a “cheat code”, but it’s a basic point of difference between most video games and most texts. Video games are, as far as I’m aware, the only medium which deny access based upon prerequisites. This is a distinction between the meaning and the information.

Just as you said. If I have a book in German, and I cannot read German, I can still look at the text in the book. If I cannot finish the first level in a video game, I am not allowed the play the rest of the game. They’re fundamentally distinct from one another in terms of accessibility.

In the discussion we’re having, there is that fundamental distinction between “I read the entire text, and found it too difficult to understand”, and “I played the game, and couldn’t finish it because it was too difficult”/"“I played the entire game and had trouble because it was too difficult”.

The distinction between these soft-gates and these hard-gates are the basis for this problem, and I would argue a piece of the basis for the very skill fetishism we are discussing. Games bar access to a holistic construction of meaning by enforcing adherence to it’s mechanics. (You can have a game that may be difficult to understand but does not require a high amount of skill, too!) As such, my “skill” (as in, ability to understand) with a text might change my experience based on it’s language, but it does not change the structure text itself. My skill with game based on its challenge changes both changes my experience and the structure of the game itself.

This is why, I would argue, at least in part, people are given so much shit for being bad games. Sure, there are plenty of people whore are obnoxious about being unable to “understand” a given form of art or text. This isn’t just in text, but also in film, music, art, and so on. But in games, “difficulty”, rather than this being at the high end of construction of meaning, is at the base level of consumption of games. Masocore games and texts rife with argot are not each other’s equivalents across media.

As a result, quality of someone’s analysis is thought to be derived from their ability to perform their games tasks. No one cared what Dean Takehashi actually thought of Cuphead, all they felt they needed to know is that he didn’t perform as well as they wanted him to. That means his opinion is null and void. But the quality of someone’s analysis has little to do with skill. My ability to press buttons in a proper order within the proper time-frames doesn’t say anything about how I think about how I think about games. This is why I think it’s important not to suppose their equivalence.

sorry im tired

2 Likes
40

I mean…everything you described there was passive participation, sitting watching and thinking. “Analyzing” is not actively participating and no, no movie in history ha ever had more “active participation” than a game as there is literally no way to input any action. It’s a medium that by definition is participated with passively by the audience.

41

Sorry 2 necro, but wanted to share this excellent video by “Big Joel” on the meaningful experiences that can comes from “playing a game wrong”

…Now, if we want to be critics, some part of us has to account for meanings created by events like this one. Not just the ideas that can be gotten from playing a game to completion, but also the ones that come from failing to understand the basic rules, and for all the spaces in between…

4 Likes
42

I have mentioned this before but it’s become more relevant as I’ve started playing Tekken 7: i have a relatively minor but still impactful hand eye coordination disorder. It’s forced me to come to terms with how I approach games and has shaped the way i appreciate games dramatically.

5 Likes