Anonymous User asked: Hi, bit of a long ask. As someone that has experience with media coverage; How do you feel pre/reviews of small, short, personal games should be? I got into media critique and game study so I could attempt to increase exposure of these works, but find the more I learn, the more complicated doing so in a productive way becomes. I don't want the video to be as far as audience interaction with the media goes, and hope to increase the income of artists through these videos by more than popularization.
As someone with no formal education in games or critique, doing this in a respectful, poignant way is hard. To increase audience, without taking away the need to engage with the game yourself. Do you have any examples of coverage falling under this, or any advice on how to go about covering these games? People are resistant to exploring small games themselves. I don't want to leave the games with an imprint of my opinions coloring its perception, or a popular complete coverage taking away need to engage personally and directly, as I've seen with many smaller titles. I want sales. thank you for any thoughts!
i'm not really an expert on this myself! but my own feeling is that maybe right now criticism is more important than visibility?
like i'm thankful for anyone who does the overlooked job of poring through new releases for anything interesting. but when something does come up it often feels like we don't know how to talk about it. the language of gamescrit is still very consumer product coded - "does this offer x hours of entertainment without noticeable distracting problems?" - and when something doesn't fit that mold i think it can be tempting to lapse into a kind of... textureless supportive art-speak... well it's very artistic and unique and about an important subject and probably personal. AND it's cheap and only 15mins long! perfect as a palette cleanser as you wait for elden ring to finish downloading. but it's hard to get a sense from this of whether a game has an actual sensibility, or what that sensibility is - how does it imagine the world to be? what is its attitude towards its own medium, to life outside that medium? what argument is it making for what's worth doing or paying attention to? like, Gadget: Past As Future and Garage: Bad Dream Adventure could both be described as weird prerendered adventure games - but the ways they differ from each other are more useful for thinking about each than the ways they each differ from Doom or something. and i think without those kinds of distinctions it's maybe too easy for this stuff to all just blend together into "eat your greens".
(as an example - the most successful critical intervention i know was the electrondance piece on cart life, which not only got other sites talking about the game but also made it easier for people to express what they themselves found compelling about it. even if people enjoy something it's possible that they won't be able to articulate why - and if they can't express it they're more likely to think that feeling isn't real, or worth talking about, compared to the readymade ways we have of discussing Fun Factor or whatever. one reason i think a lot of smaller games are underrated is that we don't even know how to describe what they're doing when they're good!)
i think writing or talking abt something just means trying to take it seriously - and it's possible this won't pay off! like sometimes you try to extend a game some credit, to see where it's going or what it's doing, and it totally wastes it. i think it's ok to be negative or mean if it comes from a place of disappointment, frankly. it's a cliche but even when people have disliked something i've made in the past it at least felt like they really played it and had thoughts about it - when most people making games now face just face total oblivion, negativity can be the kinder option. (and if they're on steam or something, even vehement critical disagreement will never manage to be the WORST thing they see somebody say about their game).
one other thing i would say: no matter what your own tastes are or whether you felt you did justice to something in this way or not, i think it will have been worth doing, because every piece of criticism is also something for other people to build upon. even if they disagree, they can take your observations and ideas and run their own way with them - so don't worry about trying to minimise your own tastes. a decade plus of venture capitalism and press consolidation has created a kind of deficit in games criticism itself. people still bring up bioshock infinite when dunking on AAA, and it's not that nothing as bad has been made since - it's because that game represented the last point there was very visible discussion about the limits of the AAA form itself. the infrastructure was bought and dismantled, people left, pieces were buried in site redesigns, wheels redesigned. i think the only way out of that hole is just to post through it, to try catching up on what's coming out now, nevermind if it's necessarily the perfect or ultimate take on it. even if you try something out and bounce off it, it at least means there's the possibility that other people writing about other games will be able to have a wider frame of reference for these things than stuff from 2012.
my final piece of advice... Have Fun ;)
