This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?
I can't speculate on your particular scenario, but for me it's a combination of 2 and 3. First, there are lots of games I still like which just don't match up with the dominant tastes of today. Or, at any rate, what are thought to be the dominant tastes of today. The games industry is insufferably trend-driven and the big companies will routinely ignore opportunities because the executives have convinced themselves there's no audience for a game that doesn't follow the trends. But regardless, lots of people love things like FF being an action game series for the last 20 years, or Mass Effect going from "RPG with shooter elements" to "shooter with RPG elements". I just don't have the same tastes as those people, and that's OK.
Second, reviewers have indeed gotten shittier. Many games journalists are embedded in, and true believers of, SJW/woke/progressive/whatever you want to call it culture. Hell, I can scarcely think of any people in games journalism that aren't true believers in that ideology. And that tends to be reflected in their work. You can't go to any of the big sites (Gamespot, Kotaku, Polygon, etc) without getting a review that is driven by politics first, and game quality second. It's why I quit reading all those outlets, because I was sick of being preached at. Add onto that the straight-up corruption (e.g. Gamespot firing Jeff Gerstmann for daring to give an advertiser's game a bad review), and there's this huge problem where even if you agreed with the reviewer's tastes, you couldn't trust that they were being honest with you about the game. Unlike the previous paragraph, this one is not some benign case of "we differ and that's OK", but there's nothing I can really do about it either. I just have stopped listening to those people.
This has been the case since at least the 90s. Rascal is a PS1 game that is widely touted as one of the worst on the console, largely due to the godwaful control scheme -- imagine trying to play Ocarina of Time but with tank controls. And the camera is told to be behind the character and can't go outside the room, so if you back up against a wall the camera is just squished between the back of their head and the wall. And if you rotate the camera into a wall it stops moving but the character doesn't stop turning, so eventually your controls reverse.
Why would the devs do such a thing? Well, the publisher told them to. Why did the publisher tell them to? Because Tomb Raider had tank controls. And Tomb Raider was very popular! So people must love tank controls! So put some tank controls into our goddamned game! No we don't care that the render engine requires the camera to be inside the rooms at all times, just fucking do it! And so...
I would say it's been the case in the industry since forever. I recently read The Ultimate History of Video Games (great read btw). One of the things which stood out to me in that book is that even in the Atari days, it was pretty much a pattern of "one company innovates, lots of people imitate". It just is a fact of life, I suppose.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link