Article: You Don’t Need To Be “Good” At Games To Enjoy Them
Thought this was interesting, so I decided to share: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/05/18/editorial-an-end-to-git-gud-you-dont-need-to-be-good-at-games/
My thoughts are basically: This is exactly why I don't read reviews, because I'm not in the same "league" of player as the reviewer (claims?) to be and so their opinion is not helpful in me figuring out if this is a game I'd like to buy or play.A really unpleasant gaming trend is getting louder and louder of late, where it’s considered of vital importance to observe when other people are “bad” at games. And of course insinuating that one is “good” at them at the same time. Such an attitude reveals an extraordinarily narrow-minded view of gaming, and indeed of humanity. It’s really time for it to stop.
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Because a person can have a splendid time with a game while being terrible, mediocre, quite good, or brilliant at it. Because games aren’t exams. And treating them like they are is ugly and stupid.
Thanked by 1quintond
Comments
So I am definitely in agreement with you here. I recently bought Elite Dangerous by asking my friend who had it what he thought ... I didn't even look at a review.
Although I am biased, I played the first Elite on my ZX Spectrum 128k +2 in the 80s ... so it was always going to cup up on my radar. 8-}
p.s. Yes that is how much RAM the ZX Spectrum had ... I was the lucky one cos I had an extra 16k ROM pack add-on that also gave me 4 joystick ports instead of two ... Gauntlet at my house was always a 4-player fest. 8-}
As a designer, I approach it the same way. It's not that I design games specifically for reviewers or specifically for players. I make them for people (reviewers and players alike) who are into the kind of things that excite me. Cyberpunk, narrative, interesting strategic gameplay, roleplaying, whatever.
But agree that imposing some minimum level of skill on other people is nonsense. I find most people grow out of that sort of performative one-upsmanship once they leave their teens/early twenties. Most people.
I just don't have time anymore to be good at FPS, really.
Most of the time this means I am designing games that are not mainstream or are not going to "milk the cash cow", so to speak, but I am okay with that ... I leave that to the other people chasing those revenue streams.
Having said that, I will assist a reviewer as much as possible and I always keep the idea of game reviews in my head when designing, but it is by no means a driving factor in my decisions or audience.
There are a bunch of games that I do enjoy playing, but that I'm pretty bad at. I know I'm pretty bad, but I'm okay with it because I know that compared to my friends who're really good at them, I've put in a minuscule amount of time playing. (And when I do play, sometimes my brain's on low-power mode, or mulling over some problem at work or in my personal life, and I'm just going through the motions instead of genuinely trying to improve. I tend to do this a lot with Starcraft.) And I'll probably always be bad, because I care far more about getting good at making art, making games, than I do at getting good at playing them. They're not completely mutually exclusive of course, in that being good at one can help somewhat at the other, but they're not really the same skills.
And in the case of a reviewer, I'd argue that someone who took longer to play through a game might well have a better-considered critique. Speedrunning is pretty cool and has its place, but sometimes I think it's a bit like guzzling down a great meal. What did you really, really get in the end but indigestion?
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I do think the Polygon video was embarrassing though. I mean, I don't think you should shame people for playing badly, but I do think it was poor PR, especially considering the audience DOOM seems to have, unless it was supposed to be framed as a joke.
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I also tend not to read reviews much. I used to read them a lot when I was in high school. There were one or two writers at NAG that I felt were fantastic, both at having insight, and at being able to put forth their opinions in words that were interesting to read. (One writer, in particular, used to write in the style of the game she was reviewing, and reading those reviews felt like I was getting an extra layer of depth to the game that went past mere words on a page.) But I think that's pretty rare, and it's only gotten worse with the flood of people who've gotten into it online. If I check out a review nowadays, it's more to see if there are technical issues that'd prevent me from being able to play the game properly at all (like if I suspect it might be a bad port), or to see a little bit of what the gameplay looks like.
With Broforce we made the game easier specifically to cater to video reviewers. Some Youtubers kicked ass, but a couple of the Youtubers really struggled during our Greenlight campaign, and so Broforce got a lot easier.
Some of our fans were quite disappointed, but overall it made the game more accessible. And it's still not really an easy game, just easy enough for almost all of the playerbase of retro platformers, and challenging enough that the most passionate fans of that genre still feel somewhat challenged.
I guess I'm saying that reviewers in my mind were very average in skill (for the type of game we were making), with some of the reviewers falling dangerously close to frustration levels when playing Broforce. But at the same time we had fans of the genre (who were very experienced in the genre) calling for more challenge, and complaining it was a bit too easy for them to enjoy.
So in our case we definitely did some designing for reviewers, and it meant reducing the difficulty.
I've been de-emphasizing challenge in my designs lately somewhat as a result of this. Challenge as a core experience is always going to make the game less accessible (either because it is too easy or it is too hard). I don't mean to say challenge is obsolete, but I think it needs to be carefully tied to the theme of the game (Dark Souls is a good example of this, Doom arguably is as well) and carefully take into account expectations of the audience.
Of course regarding the link in the original post, shaming people for playing badly is really destructive and alienating... though as a piece of performance I would prefer to watch skilled players playing Doom, just as I expect live musicians to be experts at playing their instruments, but even with a bad performance shaming isn't called for.
And neither should being not skillful enough for a game invalidate a review entirely, though it might invalidate the review for you personally if you are an experienced player of the genre, just as an experienced/dexterous reviewer might write an invalid review for you personally if you aren't an experienced/dexterous player of the genre.
Full Disclosure: When I played the start of the new Doom I was slightly less skillful than the person from Polygon who got shamed. I'm very happy I didn't have to upload a video of my performance given the fanbase of Doom.
Certainly don't need to be good at games, not even your own games, to enjoy writing them.
After-all, I have 30+ years of actual experience. That is until seeing a 16 year-old play Destiny on my PS3 for their *FIRST* time EVER recently, was a humbling experience to say the least.
That was until he did some strange up-down man-oeuvre on a recently vanquished foe. Sies! Disrespect! Instant Hero to Zer0.
Git Gud. ("Get Good")
The term, idiotic spelling/grammatical errors included, would just infuriate anyone who is trying to like some game, but not even being respected for trying. It is like being shunned by a peer where the expected reaction should be sympathy/empathy/support.
The same happened when my death-match/LAN kill streak orgy on keyboard was ended, with disdain, by a circle strafe-ing mouse-wielding player (Doom, circa 1993-94) for the first time in months after I owned EVERYONE, EVERYTHING.
Git Gud, man.
It was humiliating, but enlightening... things change. But humanity is still the same.
I own and love Elite Dangerous, and have regrettably noted the latest "Git Gud" culture manifesting during the latest 2.1 Engineers/1.6 patch where the AI has been drastically upgraded and is now a real threat.
The player-base seems split in their opinion of the latest changes. The "Git Gud" camp have a real chance of alienating half the product's player-base and new players. It's really destructive. Does the developer step in and defuse the situation?
I don't think it's a new phenomenon though. There's probably some fancy psychological term for the process of feeling an inflated self-worth at the expense of others...
Unfortunately reviewers, like gamers will place themselves in some camp or the other and we simply need to change the channel if we don't like what we are seeing.
Its the price to pay when a once small industry becomes mainstream. Does one try to change the mindset or ignore it?
Edit: Spelling and grammar fixed :)