You’re absolutely right in that I’m using purely subjective measures in this piece. This, actually, is my entire focus – although the theory isn’t quite ready for writing on yet, I believe that game criticism is fundamentally subjective, and must be in order for it to fulfill its purpose. This is because I find that the single most important aspect of any game is the experience of the player, whether that player is the critic or the consumer, and to attempt to separate this experience from the game rejects the entire point of gaming. When listening to an album, you and I hear the exact same songs. The same is true for films and books. Sure, we bring different things to the table, but the input on behalf of the media is identical (assuming we’re both using legal copies). However, this isn’t generally true with games, especially in open-world styled games like Fallout 3. Hell, I never even bothered with the main campaign and ran around the world shooting zombies, and I know you played the storyline – out experiences were radically different, and if I’m to do any justice to the game, this must be acknowledged. Thus, its possible for me to examine a game according to my experience with it; even were I to spend a month trying to dig into every crevice of the world of Fallout 3, my experience with it – as a result of having different experience levels, weapons, etc. – would be different than any other player’s.

You are trying to use objective measures to a field that, I feel, cannot be objective. The very nature of criticism depends on the critic having previous experience with other elements in the field they are concerned with, and what they are or are not familiar with will shape how they view something new. Can one really objectively remove themselves from what they know about a field to look to something new? If so, then how are they to examine how the piece forwards or detracts from the medium, or speak on how it is significant?

I’m not sure that it’s fair to say I “conveniently left out other games,” particularly given your examples – the focus of 40oz is primarily PC games, and I play almost exclusively PC games and thus, I can’t really effectively write about non-PC games. Further, this piece was already 2,000 words – far longer than than most people will bother to read as-is, and to include every hypothetical would fill hundreds of pages. As with any other essay, examples are chosen based on the strength the writer feels they will bring to the argument – thus, I made a few selections, and left it at that.

Although it may have been a problem on my part, I feel that you somewhat missed the point of this piece. The title is slightly misleading, and was meant to be provocative – the focus here wasn’t on cutting-edge, realistic-looking graphics, or beautiful scenery, or even awesome-looking character models. It was about the overall visual design of games in general, although the examples I chose mostly succeed on all counts. Interestingly, I’d argue most of the games that you mentioned – Mario Kart (and pretty much any other Nintendo-developed game), Plants vs. Zombis, Diablo II/Starcraft, Advanced Wars, and so on – are all remarkably well-designed games. For that matter, I found the Metal Slug series to be among the most beautifully-animated 2d games I’ve ever seen, easily deserving to be among the ranks of Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I’d be curious to hear your argument on how Metal Slug was a poorly designed and not-beautiful game.

Look to reviews of games like Plants vs. Zombies and Smash Brothers; while they’re likely to acknowledge that neither game is of cutting-edge graphics, they’ll likely all say that the games look damn good and charming – and that the design works very well. (To quote the oft-cited Kieron Gillen: “Everything about this gorgeous cuddle of a game is a daft pun or visual gag.”[http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/05/05/the-plants-vs-zombies-review/]) This speaks to what I was getting at with functional design; at any given time during Smash Brothers, an experienced player can immediately identify, without ambiguity, what’s going on in the game world. What ability the enemy is charging, what projectile is heading your way, which bastard Pokemon came out of the Pokeball. This ease-of-understanding is not a goal unto itself – the ease-of-understanding removes the interpretative layer from the player, and leaves them responsible only to respond, in the game world, to it.

Again: the point isn’t great graphics for the sake of looking pretty – it’s great /design/ for the sake of aesthetics and adding to gameplay. If the visuals of a game do not forward gameplay, then they have failed – even if they are beautiful. This is why I chose the examples that I did – they’re all beautiful in their own way, but they also embrace the games they’re found in and add to them. I mentioned Fallout 3 because I hated the item/stat/etc interface – it looked cool, but moved clunkily and I often felt like I was struggling with it more than it was helping me understand the game. The VATS thing, while certainly often awesome-looking, did more to slow the game down for me than anything else after the initial glee of shooting off arms grew dim. After awhile, I just wanted to kill the damn thing, not watch it slowly and agonizingly die from a shotgun-blast to the leg – but in order to effectively move through the game, I more or less had to use VATS to maintain optimal effeciency in monster-slaying. Again, subjective, but I didn’t find it to my taste.

That’s a general statement. You didn’t specify that we are looking specifically at PC games. The rest of your article, which isn’t a review of a specific game, uses language such as “games,” indicating that you are talking about a wide variety of games, not specifically PC. The “criteria” you set forth was not PC specific, though the games you mentioned were. If your subjective “metric” isn’t applicable to videogames as a general rule, then it becomes incredibly limited in scope, further limiting its usefulness. Since videogames beyond simply PC games follow similar ideas of design – the PS3 being capable of producing graphically beautiful games, and all games requiring an interface/design features to make them operate, I fail to see how bringing them into the discussion isn’t a valid argument. If your metric can’t be used to contend with these other games, then it highlights yet another issue of limitation. What is it about DS, console and other such games would prohibit your metric from being applied to them which would otherwise leave them out of this conversation?

“Again, if the focus of the piece was games that actually succeeded on this basis, why would I give equal time and space to games that failed?”

You keep changing what this article is about – is it about creating and explaining a metric? Is it about PC games and this metric? Is it about games that succeeded because of this metric? Is it about graphics being “super-important?” You wrote an entire piece about a metric, about how you gauge success/failure – if you can’t demonstrate how this metric is capable of measuring failure/success, you are eliminating the credibility you are otherwise attempting to generate.

As to elitism – I brought it up because of your language directly. You twice indicated that your position was brought about because you either spent money in order to access better graphics or inexperienced players being outside of your considerations. By using this language, you express specifically what you are looking at – people who have the money to buy nice systems and “experienced” gamers, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Beyond any of that, to your “abstractions” (which are irrelevant to any argument I made regarding elitism) all I can say is that in any game which does not offer a walk-through tutorial as part of the first time playing, no, there is nothing in the gaming environment which any player can inherently assume is dangerous without otherwise being told. Unless a player is familiar with the environment, they have to learn control, habits, and practices through playing. Some of these may not be easily learned, and may take somebody telling them how it works in order to play out. I don’t think I’m looking for elitism, I think it more likely you just didn’t notice it as being part of your normal opinion. Sometimes the best observers of the self are not within but without.

As far as the rest – blah blah, subjective measures. We’ve already covered this, and we don’t disagree – you are more than capable of establishing measures by which to define good or bad games. This article reads like an it’s making an argument that game design is key in defining whether a game succeeds/fails. Since you didn’t qualify your article by indicating that it was designed to define your metric system, there is no reason I would have assumed it was anything than what it appeared to be: an article which criticizes games as being good or bad based on a subjective measure but doesn’t necessarily hold up beyond your own perspective. You in fact end the article asking your reader to look back at their past games, indicating to me, a reader, that you are looking to generalize your position past subjective measures. Since you asked us to participate, I feel as though I can, comfortably, argue against generalizing that position to my view.

Also, please don’t mis-characterize my arguments for convenience sake XD. “Just the same, I’m not sure that you can argue that anybody actually prefers poorly designed games (from a strictly visual sense) over very well designed games.” I never argued, once, that poorly designed games would be preferred by anybody – I argued that defining whether a game fails/succeeds based on a subjective metric isn’t fair. Further, I argued that your specific metrics of “good” or “bad” design aren’t fair. I don’t think Fallout 3 was a poorly designed game – I have very few issues with that game, none of which are about interface or graphics. What is immersive to me is apparently bad design to you, further limiting the “design” metric to further subjectivity. Your comments on WoW, again, don’t seem to mesh with me at all – I found quite a bit of WoW to be ugly. This explains why I only leveled characters in very specific areas and did not play specific races/classes – I thought they were ugly/boring. So yah, design does matter to me, but as you rightly observed, it didn’t stop me from playing the game, putting other aspects above design features.

Despite taking the position of writing an opinion on a subjective measure, you make grand statements. Your most recent violation?

“good design is universal – both the novice and the expert can appreciate when what a game is trying to tell you is clear and easy to understand, and both can become equally as frustrated when a game fails in effectively showing them what’s going on.”

There is a difference between the novice and the expert which makes game design not universal. Beyond that, game design, as I think I have effectively established, is interpreted differently by different people and is therefore again not universal.

I guess the tl;dr is – I think you should be careful with your wording – this piece comes off, to me, as being assumptive, generalizing and elitist in places. If you are going to write something about your subjective measures, you should be quick in noting that instead of making statements that sound as though they are saying something a bit more.

Ah, well, to avoid accusations of elitism I must turn to abstractions. Think of it like this, then; does a game make it easy to immediately understand what is going on in the game world, or is there an extra layer of interpretation required? Would a new player understand something is a threat, why, and how to counter it, or would it require delving into the manual and in-game FAQ system? Does the game, in general, facilitate play through its interface and overall design, or does it make the game more difficult? I used the example I did due to common ground; I think you’re looking for elitism where it is not. I am not at all understanding why “ease of understanding” translates into “Only higher-skilled players need apply/appreciate,” as even a new player to the Smash Brothers franchise will at least have a basic understanding of what is happening at all times. (Barring when the camera zooms out too far, ofc.)

“What you seem to be saying here is that there is a segment of people who appreciate aspects of games, and it is these people who for some reason should determine how a game functions and is designed.”
…well, I’d imagine most game developers aren’t writing massive story arcs for the sort of players that skip all plot segments of games in lieu of action, and most developers aren’t building elaborate crafting systems for players with no interest in crafting. I’d guess that not all aspects of all games are designed for all players to enjoy and appreciate; not every gamer is the same, and if a game is to appeal to many gamers, there must be many different things worth appreciating. However, as I said in the OP, good design is universal – both the novice and the expert can appreciate when what a game is trying to tell you is clear and easy to understand, and both can become equally as frustrated when a game fails in effectively showing them what’s going on. Top-tier graphics, surely, aren’t meant for everybody – they’re meant for people with top-end systems. There isn’t really a way around this – the PC that I have sitting idle in my closet simply cannot run Crysis, and it would be silly of Crytek to dumb their engine down enough to run on the old PC when one of their focuses /was/ cutting-edge graphics.

Here’s the thing with all reviews and criticism of any field: it’s always going to be “your word versus somebody else’s.” Just in the context of this article, we both have clearly different opinions on the successes and failings of Fallout 3 – and neither of us are wrong. In that sense, I’m not writing, thinking, and publishing specifically for you – nor any specific individual, as I cannot know their tastes. Rock, Paper, Shotgun is a personal favorite of mine due to the admitted subjectivity of their work – but as it happens, I find I share similar tastes rather often with many of their writers. Similarly, you may have other gaming writers that may or may not strive towards objectivity in their writing, and you’ve found you share similar tastes with them – so when they say a game is good, it’s pretty likely that you’re going to like it, too. This is a good thing, and is, I believe, why there are such huge quantities of critics with hugely varied voices.

Part of the purpose of these [relatively] early writings on theory and opinion are to establish the methods by which I, as an individual, look at games. This piece in particular should tell people that, well, I find graphics and design to be important. If a new or returning reader does not, then they should take this piece and immediately understand that we do not have a parallel here – no individual writer could ever cater to the wants and hopes of all readers, and I’m certainly not interested in trying. If readers come upon 40oz and share my views, then they may come back and continue to read 40oz. If not, they’ll move along, similar to how ign.com, RPS, Gamasutra and so on function.

Just the same, I’m not sure that you can argue that anybody actually prefers poorly designed games (from a strictly visual sense) over very well designed games. Sure, enjoyment of actual gameplay may influence whether or not we play those games, and you and I will both have different opinions on what actually constitutes good design. We may also even disagree on just how important, in the overall scheme of the game, design is – you and I clearly place different values on it. But as you’ve hinted towards in your complaints with WoW, design, at least on some level, IS important to you. You clearly still played the game (albeit with the help of addons), but still acknowledged struggling with the interface. I’d be surprised, however, if you told me you found the design of the overall world – the character models, Azeroth, specific dungeons – to be terrible, however.

Given that this piece was quite clearly (at least, it should have been) an opinion piece, I believe that I can, comfortably, develop a system I will follow and judge games based on the merits established therein. (see http://www.40oz1game.com/2009/10/a-theory-of-game-metrics/ for an example of this type of attempt.) This is what most critics, whether videogame, film, or print, do. Most criticism fields don’t follow the /same/ system, necessarily, but they generally have a system of their own (even if, as with RPS, it is non-formal). If calling a game a failure for meeting what is clearly a subjective measure is somehow grandstanding then, well, so be it. I’ll have to jump on a thesaurus and edit that sentence to cull the offensiveness of “fail.”

Regardless of media, opinions and observations of any form are wide and varied. The experiences you list with music or reading are no different from video games, otherwise you would not have the great debates as to the meaning of lyrics, the images generated by sound or the arguments about plot that you see in the realms of critique and debate on those issues. The game is being presented in the same medium – you are just taking a different experience. All the devices are there – how you interact, how you target – your review of the game could be just as applicable to my playing as it would be to anybody else’s. You choose to bring the subjective measures in, you choose to decide which are more important features to review. Our experiences of music or reading can be as radically different as our experiences playing a game – in pronunciation of words, in interpretation of feelings, in an imagined landscape of fictional experience.

I played Fallout 3 – I found the Pip Boy charming and neat. I don’t recall being frustrated with it, and thought it was an interesting part of an immersive game. If you are focusing not on just graphics but overall design, you have to acknowledge that your focus on VATs and the Pip Boy are not generalizeable to everybody’s experience, and therefore isn’t a reliable unit of measure by which to size up the game.

Again, in your response, you hint again at elitism. “This speaks to what I was getting at with functional design; at any given time during Smash Brothers, an experienced player can immediately identify, without ambiguity, what’s going on in the game world.” Are the vast majority of people reading your review of a freshly released Smash Brothers going to be experienced gamers? The vast majority of players are casual gamers, are they not? Taking that into consideration – will all of them be able to see the elements you are looking at? Take for example any number of people who come over to my house and may play Smash Bros or Mario Kart – they may have played it before, but they have no idea that when a POW hits in MK you can jump to avoid it – they may not even know that you could jump to begin with. What you seem to be saying here is that there is a segment of people who appreciate aspects of games, and it is these people who for some reason should determine how a game functions and is designed.

Again I return to WoW – it’s UI was awful. Personally, I couldn’t play WoW effectively with the original UI. Yet it was a game that had mass appeal, it was a game which had an immense amount of casual players and a smaller population of hardcore players. Blizzard didn’t design a game to appeal only to one group of people – they made a UI that could be understood and used by a vast array of people. To many it may have been perfectly fine – were I to review WoW with a heavy bias for design, I would have mentioned that the UI was crap, with mods being necessary to make the game playable (I honestly felt this way throughout most of my WoW experience). That is a legitimate concern to me and others who were in a similar situation. It was not a legitimate concern to anybody who thought WoW’s UI was working as intended XD.

You cannot remove subjectivity from nearly any experience. That is ultimately true – objectivity is merely a living fiction that some of us chase with regards to our fields. However, with acknowledging subjectivity so too comes the acknowledgement of your limitations. Your view is limited, not generalizable. You cannot generalize your experience to mine, you cannot tell me what is important about a game. You can write a review about a game which focuses on experience through design/graphics, but I will read it, not be affected, and move on finding something that tells me about a game in terms that I care about.

Using the example you choose to focus on at the end of your response, Fallout 3 – you did not need VATS to get through the entire game. In fact, I played the first part of the game having no idea that VATS existed, or once I realized it existed, how it functioned. Once I realized what I had been missing, I loved the element. Arguing that a game design must have necessary functional representations within the structure of the game isn’t really fair because game features, like VATS, weren’t meant to drive the gameplay forward. It’s just a neat thing you can do. Even in the original Fallout games, VATS existed but wasn’t really essential – it was an added thing you could do and use AP on during fights. Neat, not necessary. In fact, in Fallout 3 – when you are out of AP you can’t even use VATS, which would seem to indicate that using VATS as a measure of whether the game is good or not unfairly taints your review, especially if you are regarding it as something which should drive the gameplay forward. VATS was not an essential part of the game, but it was a neat part of the game which people could act on if they really wanted to use it.

Games of any sort are enjoyed for any number of reasons. You acknowledge your subjectivity, but make such grandstanding remarks as, “If the visuals of a game do not forward gameplay, then they have failed – even if they are beautiful.” Ideas such as this cannot be backed up subjectively in a generalizable way. This is my issue with your argument – the inherent subjectivity is fine, but the idea that through subjectivity you can fairly make a statement like the one quoted above would likely not be vetted from a generalizable, statistical sampling of the entire gaming population. When you make general remarks on what elements of gameplay are more or less important, or even essential, measures of objectivity are the only verifiable methods through which to back up and represent that view as realistic. Otherwise, it’s just your word versus somebody else’s.

You’re absolutely right in that I’m using purely subjective measures in this piece. This, actually, is my entire focus – although the theory isn’t quite ready for writing on yet, I believe that game criticism is fundamentally subjective, and must be in order for it to fulfill its purpose. This is because I find that the single most important aspect of any game is the experience of the player, whether that player is the critic or the consumer, and to attempt to separate this experience from the game rejects the entire point of gaming. When listening to an album, you and I hear the exact same songs. The same is true for films and books. Sure, we bring different things to the table, but the input on behalf of the media is identical (assuming we’re both using legal copies). However, this isn’t generally true with games, especially in open-world styled games like Fallout 3. Hell, I never even bothered with the main campaign and ran around the world shooting zombies, and I know you played the storyline – out experiences were radically different, and if I’m to do any justice to the game, this must be acknowledged. Thus, its possible for me to examine a game according to my experience with it; even were I to spend a month trying to dig into every crevice of the world of Fallout 3, my experience with it – as a result of having different experience levels, weapons, etc. – would be different than any other player’s.

You are trying to use objective measures to a field that, I feel, cannot be objective. The very nature of criticism depends on the critic having previous experience with other elements in the field they are concerned with, and what they are or are not familiar with will shape how they view something new. Can one really objectively remove themselves from what they know about a field to look to something new? If so, then how are they to examine how the piece forwards or detracts from the medium, or speak on how it is significant?

I’m not sure that it’s fair to say I “conveniently left out other games,” particularly given your examples – the focus of 40oz is primarily PC games, and I play almost exclusively PC games and thus, I can’t really effectively write about non-PC games. Further, this piece was already 2,000 words – far longer than than most people will bother to read as-is, and to include every hypothetical would fill hundreds of pages. As with any other essay, examples are chosen based on the strength the writer feels they will bring to the argument – thus, I made a few selections, and left it at that.

Although it may have been a problem on my part, I feel that you somewhat missed the point of this piece. The title is slightly misleading, and was meant to be provocative – the focus here wasn’t on cutting-edge, realistic-looking graphics, or beautiful scenery, or even awesome-looking character models. It was about the overall visual design of games in general, although the examples I chose mostly succeed on all counts. Interestingly, I’d argue most of the games that you mentioned – Mario Kart (and pretty much any other Nintendo-developed game), Plants vs. Zombis, Diablo II/Starcraft, Advanced Wars, and so on – are all remarkably well-designed games. For that matter, I found the Metal Slug series to be among the most beautifully-animated 2d games I’ve ever seen, easily deserving to be among the ranks of Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I’d be curious to hear your argument on how Metal Slug was a poorly designed and not-beautiful game.

Look to reviews of games like Plants vs. Zombies and Smash Brothers; while they’re likely to acknowledge that neither game is of cutting-edge graphics, they’ll likely all say that the games look damn good and charming – and that the design works very well. (To quote the oft-cited Kieron Gillen: “Everything about this gorgeous cuddle of a game is a daft pun or visual gag.”[http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/05/05/the-plants-vs-zombies-review/]) This speaks to what I was getting at with functional design; at any given time during Smash Brothers, an experienced player can immediately identify, without ambiguity, what’s going on in the game world. What ability the enemy is charging, what projectile is heading your way, which bastard Pokemon came out of the Pokeball. This ease-of-understanding is not a goal unto itself – the ease-of-understanding removes the interpretative layer from the player, and leaves them responsible only to respond, in the game world, to it.

Again: the point isn’t great graphics for the sake of looking pretty – it’s great /design/ for the sake of aesthetics and adding to gameplay. If the visuals of a game do not forward gameplay, then they have failed – even if they are beautiful. This is why I chose the examples that I did – they’re all beautiful in their own way, but they also embrace the games they’re found in and add to them. I mentioned Fallout 3 because I hated the item/stat/etc interface – it looked cool, but moved clunkily and I often felt like I was struggling with it more than it was helping me understand the game. The VATS thing, while certainly often awesome-looking, did more to slow the game down for me than anything else after the initial glee of shooting off arms grew dim. After awhile, I just wanted to kill the damn thing, not watch it slowly and agonizingly die from a shotgun-blast to the leg – but in order to effectively move through the game, I more or less had to use VATS to maintain optimal effeciency in monster-slaying. Again, subjective, but I didn’t find it to my taste.

You are arguing from a subjective standpoint which is not generalizable. You even say, ” Partially, this is because I spent a thousand fucking dollars a year ago, and I want to feel like I’m getting value out of that investment and pushing the old rig as far as she’ll go.” Many of us didn’t spend $1000 a year ago, and aren’t getting the most out of a graphically amazing game. And your VHS argument – of course it is a fallacy, which you acknowledge, but then you attempt to put a metric on it by creating a scenario which does not exist and therefore can’t actually be tested.

You also conveniently leave out other video games – what about the Nintendo DS? The most popular handheld gaming device on the world market has substantially less good looking graphics than its PSP alternative – yet many of the games from that system reach heights of incredible popularity. Off the top of my head – Final Fantasy Tactics Advance II, Advanced Wars, that Attorney game, that detective game, that IQ game – if graphics were really such a hugely necessary function of successful gaming, would the DS have achieved such marketability as well as popular game shares?

What about other games – StarCraft, Diablo II – still both remarkably popular. By today’s standards, relatively ugly games. We both know somebody who won’t play the game because of its look – but still Blizzard sells the Battlechest for StarCraft, still it is purchased and played tournament-style in Korea.

There is a market for older games – XBOX, Playstation and the Wii have shown that with the sales of arcade-style games, or older 2d games. Metal Slug, arguably not a beautiful side scrolling 2d game, still gets released with relatively high volumes of sales.

Interface and graphics are not the end-all be-all of game design. If WoW hadn’t allowed modders to come in and modify it’s GUI, would it have been as popular? Yes, I think it would have been. It matched up on any number of other great features, but initially had a pretty lousy GUI. Would that have stopped people from playing it? I am curious, with their development of a mass appeal game, how common mods are for various populations within WoW. Their interface has gotten substantially better, but even in the past, would players have continued playing it?

What I am basically saying here is that you’re making an argument based on subjective measures which may or may not appeal to a wider audience depending on genre, the person playing the game, interest in the platform, etc – would Dwarf Fortress have gained the small but strong following it has without people being able to push aside graphical/interface qualities? What about Plants v. Zombies, which is still purchased, played and replayed? Mario-Kart for the Wii? Smash Brothers for the Wii? Your argument comes off as being elitist in ways, arguing as if to say that your standard of what makes a good game is the standard, and I don’t see that measuring up in the gaming world at large. To this day I still want to see a new top-down, 2d fighter plane game that is fun to play because good lord did I love those when I was a kid. People like what they like, and while there are a good amount of people who would like to see great graphics, there are still plenty who just want to see a good game in general.