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Just a quick reflection, but something I wanted to run past the community. More and more as I've gotten older, I've found that critics and reviewers of games, movies, books, shows, etc. have been getting less and less useful as guides to what I'll enjoy or find interesting/beautiful/inspiring. There's no single pattern, but to give a couple of examples, in videogames, I often find high-rated AAA titles quite shallow, soulless, and needlessly time-consuming, whereas I have a real soft spot for AA games that may be a bit janky or have dated graphics but but have real creative vision and create an immersive world. In cinema, it's something similar; I find contemporary superhero movies and the recent crop of Star Wars films to be extremely uninteresting, mainly because I find it hard to take their narratives seriously and get immersed by them - they feel more like rides at an amusement park than a serious attempt at worldbuilding and storytelling. Similar patterns apply for me in TV and literature, and these days, I'm wary of entertainment products that score incredibly highly with reviewers, and am more interested by those that have a wide spread of love-or-hate-it reviews and/or a big gap between critic/user scores.
I don't think it was always this way. I've always been a big reader of gaming magazines, for example, even as a kid, and I also tried out a huge number of games by renting them from Blockbusters and similar. There, the review scores were remarkably predictive of my enjoyment. And to this day, I can't think of many cases of truly great games on the Megadrive/Genesis or N64 (my main consoles as a kid) that were panned by critics but adored by a good chunk of fans. And I remember from roughly 2002-2010 thinking that Rotten Tomatoes was basically godlike, pretty much always accurately predicting how impressive I'd find a movie.
I'm interested in what's causing this. Four quick hypotheses.
(1) It's just me. For whatever reason, my tastes have shifted so they're no longer aligned with the dominant standards of taste among reviewers. Maybe this is just because of idiosyncratic ways my tastes have evolved (hypothesis 1a), but a related possibility (hypothesis 1b) is that whereas I used to be more agreeable and subconsciously attempt to align myself with critical opinion, tricking myself into aligning my opinions with theirs, in recent years I've become more contrarian, so that the placebo-pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and I now make a point of actively trying to dislike popular stuff.
(2) It's not just me, but it's a predicable generational effect. My positive experiences with reviewers started to change when I hit my late 20s and became a dad, thereby shifting marketing demographics significantly. Reviewers' standards of taste are very much aligned with 18-30 single consoomer demographic, but more weakly aligned with people who fall outside this group. If this were true, then I'd be curious to know, e.g., which 90s films resonating with my current demographic but panned by critics I might be able to retrospectively enjoy.
(3) Reviewers have gotten shitter because of corruption or politics. This is one I'm sure we've all been waiting for! It's a common opinion in many places that reviewers of movies, games, shows, etc. have either become very corrupt (1a) and/or have sold out to woke interests (1b) in a way that is not predictive of the experiences of mainstream audiences. If either of these were true, we'd expect a growing gap between critic and user opinion as measured by e.g. rotten tomates, metacritic, or Steam scores. I'd love to see data on this.
(4) Media markets have fragmented along taste lines, so reviewers - through no fault of their own - have a tougher job making recommendations. This is a tempting one for me, not least because it paints an optimistic picture of an era of cultural plenty, and it certainly seems we're awash in more varieties of content than ever before. If this were true, then we'd expect to see a growing standard deviation in review scores for art, games, and entertainment, as reviewers found themselves in a period of cultural continental drift and began drifting away from each other. I'd love to know if this is true.
What do others think? Does my experience resonate? Is it an age effect? What hypotheses am I missing?
There was a good writeup about that, years ago, probably in Russian, that I can't find now. Basically it's that niche journalism, and especially platforms like Kotaku and Polygon, is just testing grounds for Big Boy journalism, a place to polish and prove your wordcel technical chops and lack of squeamishness in producing essay-like content on a given topic. It's like being a technical writer before becoming Ted Chiang or Neal Stephenson – only an uninspired one. Would you, as an aspiring wordsmith, want to dedicate your life to anime reviews or video games, or do you hope to grow up into an Atlantic or New Yorker superstar who's paid well, gets invited to parties with Important People, and makes the world a better place with his blathering? Not much of a question, is it. And accordingly, many game journalists have disdain for their effectively captive audience with those infantile interests; and extreme distaste for more grassroots commentary that chips away at their relevance.
The same logic partially applies to creatives (writers and even designers) in big name studios.
Some links:
https://crappygames.miraheze.org/wiki/Blog:Top_10_Worst_Things_Game_Journalists_Have_Ever_Done
https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/cjs1g3/worst_game_journalist_moments/
But as for the specifics of the transition from enthusiasts to careerists – that's harder. Maybe it has something to do with the dynamics of publishing houses buying gamers' outlets.
Another aspect is that AAA games have become inherently more «soulless», and the same is true for movies. The latter can be partially quantified by paying attention to the share of expenditure that goes towards advertising. Inflation-adjusted advertisement costs seem to be stable. Production costs are only stable or growing if we don't adjust for inflation, like here. The obvious inference is that studios are becoming more reliant on advertisement (I suspect there are better sources on this), which must have corrupting influence on the reviewer/moviegoer ecosystem. An in games: for example, bloggers must compete for receiving pre-release access to publish their piece ahead of time and get their share of clicks in the fast-moving attention economy, so they've got to be on good terms with studios. Concrete case of how this turns out in practice: meh game Metroid Dread getting 88% on Metacritic with 124 reviews, while the crowning achievement of the genre, Hollow Knight has 90% with 27 reviews (recently it was 87% with the same review count, I have a screenshot; not sure what changed).
Now there's also a concerted effort to «groom» fanbases, build franchises... the structure of movie industry as an environment for producing art, even just mass commercial art, is unraveling into streamlined revenue pipelines. But that's the normal stuff of a hyper-optimized economy (I think there was a good substack post on that).
There's an alternative, maybe parallel take to this I think. J-school has been horrible for journalism across the board. It's that, instead of being Subject Matter Experts, be that Subject Matter anything from local politics to tech or whatever, people are just taught how to write more broadly. It's become an upward mobile, hierarchal structure, at least much more than it was in the past.
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