The Games Industry Makes Me Sad

 

Let me just put it out there from the jump that this is not going to be a post bitching about the state of games themselves.  There is a lot to be said about the state of releases in an industry that's swamped year in-year out with remakes and sequels, an industry whos "best" game of the previous year just yoinked the plot of a PS1 game, the mechanics of a SNES game and the UI of a PS5 game smushed them together and made them French.  There's a discussion to be had there but that's not what I'm on about here.

I want to look back a little bit, to when I was a naive young boy.  A time before widespread use of the internet (my age is showing, I know, shut up) when most of the things I'd hear about games came from rare snippets on TV or magazines bought from the local supermarket.  One topic that always fascinated me when it came up was when development teams would get talked about, specifically Japanese ones.  Offices filled with people passionately bashing away at computers to make the latest and greatest games.  I remember hearing specifically, sometime around the Dreamcast era, that Japanese developers would quite often stay late at the office working on their projects, sometimes sleeping under their desks and then just waking up to resume work right away.  "Wow! That's so cool, these guys are so passionate about making games, I wanna do that, I wanna be like them" my young, idiot-ass thought at the time.  The sad reality of it though is that working like that sucks ass, even if its something your passionate about.  You may recall around the time of The Last of Us 2 coming out about the discourse around crunch culture, people working insanely long hours and burning out or suffering various mental and phsyical ailments as a result.  My dreams of developing games professionally got crushed by the staff at my high school because of my lack of general ability in maths was too much of a wall to overcome, according to them, but it was saddening to grow up and discover that the reality is not that these people are sleeping under desks and missing their commutes due to passion, but due to necessity and weird unwilling company loyalty, in a lot of cases.  Not a situation I would ever let myself fall into 

So my attention shifted, I may lack the skills to dev but I certainly have the skills to play games and write about them.  Having opinions on the media and reporting on industry happenings was something that a younger me rather liked the idea of.  But then, once again, this aspiration was mostly crushed by the reality of what being in games-media spaces is like.  An industry full of people who have no idea what they are talking about, writing bullshit in order to push magazine sales or, in the modern day, get ad revenue clicks.  A field where you aren't expected to have a deep understand or any real experience with a game before you review it, but where you play it for as short a time as humanly possible so that you can get a review up in time for release in order to drive traffic.  Not having any real opinions of your own but brown nosing indie developers and large publishers so that whatever outfit your writing for can recieve various perks such as early releases or even funding.  It sounds like a fucking miserable experience and judging from the joyless, skilless assholes that make up the majority of games media and games writing, I think if I had entered that side of the industry I would have left the mortal plane considerably earlier than intended.

So then I got older, I studied Japanese and became fluent and so the first thing I thought to maybe dabble in was game translation.  Well that turned out to be dogshit as well.  I started by doing a little freelancing, a few jobs for what mobile visual novels that I found on a website called Upwork.  The pay was low but it was a start, a foot on the ladder.  I figured if I kept plinking away at it then maybe I'd build a bit of a repuation, a bit of a portfolio and I could work my way up into higher profile things.  But then I got one job where the guy I was emailing back and forth with ended up just ghosting me after the job was complete and I didn't get paid.  I'm not working for free, so I took to looking for a salaried position somewhere and while I found some things I could qualify for, the salaries for these jobs are bullshit.  At the time, I wanted to get into translation as a way of escaping the English teaching trap a lot of gajin in Japan find themselves in, but the salaries for any positions I found usually only matched or were lower than the school I was working at.  Translating stuff is way harder than singing the alphabet to 3 year olds so I didn't really feel like adding the extra stress for basically no extra money, fuck that shit.  When my options were getting ripped off or extra stress for no reward I just bit the teaching bullet until I eventually got into translation and interpreting for an automotive company.  Not what I want to be doing per se but getting to use my Japanese and earning a real salary is nicer than having the field of education drain my soul

 All is not lost though.  Thankfully we live in an age where doing things by yourself is not only possible, but with a bit of luck and a bit of skill can even be profitable.  Working for a big game studio making things at the behest of investors and crunching so hard I never see my family sounds like shit, but engines and tutorials are avaliable and I can dev in my free time.  Thanks to services like Steam and Itch there's even avenues to put it out there.  The enthusiast press may be full of metrics driven idiots who couldn't tell a 3DO apart from a Sega Saturn but the mass adoption of social media and YouTube means it's extremely easy to just write your own shit and publish it to your own spaces and, once again, with a little luck even turn that into a living.  Translation is a bit harder to think positively on but at least I get to do it for real money even if its not about games.  A shame because the state of the average JP to EN translation for video games is actually embarassing, I'd like to do something about it, but without the coin behind it I'm happy to just play in the original text

So if the industry is making you as sad as it makes me on occasion, don't give up, just ignore it and get out there anyway.  Let me know about your indie projects so I can continue to avoid all this bullshit too.   

 

 

The Skill of Games Journalists

 

Games writing the last handful of years has got a bad wrap over the last few years.  Whether it be the shoe-horning in of identity politics in reviews, giving perfect reviews to good or average games, giving bad scores to niche titles they don't understand or weird "gamer bad" opinion pieces, a lot of people on the internet have a certain disdain for gaming news sites and their writers.  One thing that often comes in to question is "Do games journalists actually need to be good at games in order to review them?"

Well to put it simply, yes they do you flipping twit, how on Earth is that even a question?!  But let's go into it a bit more shall we?

The first question that you have to ask yourself is, what even is the purpose of a game review?  What game reviews are SUPPOSED to do is help you make an informed decision as a consumer on whether or not you think a game will be worth buying.  Obviously these can't be written without a little bit of the writers own opinion on the title being peppered in but, as a customer, you would hope that the person writing the review would know what they are talking about.

Well that's where the problem lies with game reviews on these major sites such as IGN and Kotaku.  The writers for these sites aren't just clueless about most of the games they play, they seem to be clueless about the entire medium in general.  The biggest example of that that sits at the forefront of peoples memories was the review of Cuphead.  The person who put that review together struggled SIGNIFICANTLY with the tutorial stage of the game.  Specifically on one of the first jump where the player is expected to perform a jump followed by a dash to reach a high up platform.  Cuphead is considered to be a fairly challenging game but this is something that a 4 year old perform in seconds and yet it ellued this guy for quite a while.  Another example would be The Independant slamming Astral Chain on Switch for "not giving grades after combat encounters".  The only problem is that the game DOES do that, but foregoes the feature if you're playing the game on the casual setting.  Not that there's anything inherently wrong with playing the game on casual but avid fans of that kind of game will want to know how the higher difficulty levels stack up and they will not be able to get that information from a review.

These writers are not fit for purpose.  I'm not saying that every games writer needs to be a top 5 speedrunner of a game in order to write a review on it but to be able to get a good idea of how the game is really like you need to AT LEAST be able to clear it on Normal.  Playing a game on easy may give the writer an idea of basic stuff like the control scheme or maybe they can put down some thoughts on the story, but because they often miss the real meat and potatoes of a games content it is IM-POSSIBLE for them to write a review that will successfully help a person make an informed purchase.

Let's imagine if we weren't talking about game reviews and instead we were talking about cars.  Let's imagine you aren't much of a gear-head and you have zero idea what kind of car you want to fit your needs.  To maybe educate yourself on the topic a little bit before heading to the dealership maybe you'll go online and check out some reviews of car models that you might think fits your needs.  You find a car review and it says stuff like "the car handles terribly and all the extra features make it confusing to operate".  Only here's the kicker, the guy writing the review can't drive, like at all, and doesn't know a steering wheel from a gear stick.  In fact, the guy writing the review for this car sucks SO BAD at driving, that when he took it for a test spin in order to write his piece, he crashed into a food bank for starving children and everyone in the village went hungry that day.  The confusing features he talked about? He was referring to thinks like the indicator and gear box.  If you found that out about the guy who wrote the piece, you'd be pissed off.  You NEED a good quality of information to make an informed decision on a purchase that big but instead you got a guy who can't drive and a 800 word article about how the back seats are sexist and the colour of the tyres are racist.  

Well that's the kind of enthusiast press we have have with gaming.  Not passionate users who care about making sure you spend your hard earned money on the best games for you but shitters who don't know a face button from a d-pad telling you the bare minimum in the shortest possible time frame in order to farm you for traffic clicks to their shitty websites.

So here's my proposition for how a review SHOULD be conducted

1) Make sure the person doing the review is at least somewhat versed in the genre of the game they are reviewing.  If you have a guy that loves JRPGs but hates fighting games, then for the love of God don't have him review Guilty Gear Strive, his opinion on that particular topic isn't worth shit

2) At least TWO playthroughs of the game in question, preferably the second being on an elevated difficulty or a New Game +.  If you really want to inform people about the easy mode have another writer whos less well versed in whatever genre give it a go for a little bit and just include it as some quick extra thoughts at the end

3) No rushing.  Stop trying to get reviews out either for or just before release day.  Some people "wait for the reviews" before buying, so how about making sure their wait is actually worth it?  If they really care about the game they'll buy it anyway and if they are on the fence an extra few days to make sure they get the information they need wont bloody kill them.

4) Keep your opinion as far away as possible.  Not 100% possible I know but if you think giant anime titties in whatever RPG you're reviewing are "sexist" then save that for a different article.  In the main review you can just include it as something like "a stylised look that might not sit right with everyone", for example. That's really what I mean by this

and I think that's all I'm really asking for.  Modertely skilled players giving me a basic rundown of what a game is like so that I can get a vague idea of if I want to drop 6-8000 yen on it.  It REALLY isn't  that hard, if YouTube boi with 500 subs and a mic from 10 years ago can do it then a salaried "professional" games writer can do it too