Here's another topic that went by on another site that I have words on but didn't really care to format in a nice way, so here's a rambly thing about it. Should you, a person who makes x, publicly criticize other people's xs that you think are bad? In my case this could be games, music, or writing, though it applies to creative work in general.
The reasons to not do so often go like:
"People worked hard on it," which is pretty flimsy; people work hard on terrible things quite often. It is possible to respect hard work and not respect the result. It is also possible to not respect working hard! Working hard on something in no way guarantees how people will react to it, and I don't think it should. Still, it remains very common for people to imply that, because they worked hard on something, others are obligated to like it or respect it.
"It's bad for your career," since creative industries are fairly small and you may end up working with people in the future who worked on things you hated. I have made this mistake! But safeguarding your career is a pretty dissatisfying reason to hold back on your creative viewpoint.
These reasons aside, there is another reason I, personally, have largely stopped sharing my opinions about other works.
There was a time when I enjoyed takedowns of bad work (for the purposes of this piece I am talking about work that is just bad, not actively propagandistic or otherwise harmful). When I was young I thought of myself as someone who might write a polemic so thorough that entire teams of people making AAA games would hang their heads in shame at their mediocrity and lack of imagination. But something changed over time, and now I usually let bad work go by without comment. This is not to say that I don't still have strong opinions about what's good and what's bad, sometimes in line with what seems to be critical consensus (hard to tell what that really is these days) and sometimes totally contrarian.
I'm still actively involved in creating this work, so of course I have views like these. The thing that's different now is that I realized my opinions change over time. There are works I've totally hated when I first experienced them, but years later I've reevaluated and come to appreciate. There are other works I thought were terrific when I first experienced them, but have never thought about since because they don't linger in memory at all. With those possible trajectories in mind, it's irresponsible of me to encode my very first reaction to a work in some kind of influential way.
Your first reaction to something can be pretty suspect! This is pretty well borne out in the history of criticism in any media. Incredible work goes unnoticed and languishes for years before someone champions it. By the time that happens, it's often too late for the creator to reap any benefit. Other times, a new work is completely overpraised by a credulous critical consensus that is so cringey and embarrassing that a few years later everyone pretends they had never even heard of it.
I can't be bothered to find the actual source for this, but someone once asked John Carpenter if he felt vindicated that The Thing is seen as a classic now when it was critically panned when it first came out, and he said, not at all, the time to praise that film is long past. He lost out on real opportunities because of the initial critical reaction to that film. It being seen as a triumph decades later isn't going to reverse that.
So, assuming I have any audience at all, I would be unhappy with myself if I allowed my completely fallible, imperfect, first reactions to someone's work foreclose a promising career, or to lend artistic legitimacy to a fatuous poser. That's the real reason I keep my initial reactions to myself these days. Sheepish reevaluations and mea culpas that go "actually this thing was pretty good, huh," even in the rare case they're written, aren't enough to reverse the effect your initial strong opinion has. It's like a work meeting where someone ventures what's actually a really good idea and a knee-jerk, cutting comment from the boss quashes it forever. I don't want to be that person.
I do still try to promote work and artists that I like and feel aren't getting enough attention, though.
definitely feel the points about how unreliable early impressions are. and it seems like that isn't as widely acknowledged as it should be, partly because early impressions are literally an industry (reviews), though one not in the rudest of health at the moment. and it's definitely a major reason that bioshock is such a weird awful moon-sized ball of emotional baggage for me; it clearly got the benefit of carefully orchestrated confirmation-biased early impressions, and then later everyone woke up from the piper's song and was understandably confused and angry. an odd double-invalidation of the work i put into it.
at this point in my life i think my main drive to engage with culture is to experience creative decisions that other humans have made. while i'm partaking of something my mind is constantly generating opinions and questions about these decisions. they don't occlude my enjoyment of the work in the slightest; they're how i enjoy the work, and why i can still "enjoy" some works that are undeniably of poor quality.
it's not just a creator identity thing either, i think i'd do this even if i gave up creative work forever. i see it as a major way i can communicate with the rest of humanity - though it's usually one-way; i almost never share my thoughts on someone's work with them. but it's very enjoyable to compare impressions with other people. the campfire was the original podcast, etc.
the psych-capitalist fixation on negative feedback has really become pathological. employers "review" us to tell us all the ways we fucked up (or avoided fucking up). creators who have fully internalized the hustle death-treadmill thrive on "consumer feedback". "takedowns" are a content culture staple. at this point when i'm formulating my own feedback i try to avoid even assigning a thought a particular polarity as much as possible. here are the thoughts that went through my head, in the moment. here is what i thought about it, afterward. value judgments are unavoidable, but there's something insidious and totalizing about making it a grading exercise. if we followed this idea to its heart we would probably dismantle the metacritic industrial complex and much of what feeds it.
the bit about keeping quiet out of fear of harming your future career prospects is pure poison, of course. i'm sure it happens, and it's directly downstream of all that bullshit about the meaning of negative feedback under our current bizarre gross systems of reward and punishment.
i think i have a problem with how the primary way people engage with creative work is by discussing it's quality. numeric rating, grades, thumbs up and thumbs down, etc. are very effective ways to talk about a can opener or an electric toothbrush. but paintings, songs, films, video games, etc. have so many nuances, uses, and interpretations... they're made to communicate something and it feels reductive that most conversations about them surround whether or not they're worth the cost of consumption.
like i could obviously have a conversation about how much i like or dislike a deck of bicycle playing cards, but giving a star rating to the CONCEPT of playing cards would be silly. idk.
as a creative person i do want other creators to have good faith discussions about the quality of my work, and negative (but constructive) criticism from an experienced person is a valuable gift to a person whose aim is to improve. but i hate conversations that reduce art to objects of consumption. i don't want my output to be talked about like an electric toothbrush. and i try to avoid talking about other people's art that way too.
One of the most catastrophic things that has happened to cultural and artistic production has been the equation and reduction of critique and criticism to ratings and scoring. If I want to talk about how Marvel movies are fascist propaganda and are destructive to cinema as a whole, I'm not providing a review. I'm not trying to apply a score value. Hell, I'm probably not even trying to tell you whether you should watch them or not; god knows, I thought Thor Ragnarok was super fun!
If we can't meaningfully talk about cinema, about music, about theater, and "we can only talk about these in ways that reduce to an X/5 score" is just as much an inability to talk meaningfully about them as "I don't want to pass judgment on other people's work" is, then we are ceding the entire cultural space to advertisers and capitalists.
And yes, sometimes talking meaningfully about something includes negative feedback. I would argue that it's all the more important to have intelligent negative feedback in a world full of extremely mid 7/10 reviews and CinemaSins.
