…she needs to use language that a movie goer would understand.
As if a ‘movie goer’ is some special demographic that have a hard time with long sentences and not all kinds of people - including those that like a bit more substance to their reviews.
And I like Dickens.
What Tom?! Are you saying those nice pr ladies aren’t trying to get me into bed? Here I thought I was valiantly fighting off their advances because I’m a married man, and you’re telling me they just want to get me to write about their crap… man, I’m not going to enjoy a junket ever again.
Ha! Someone linked me this article today, and the first thing that jumped out at me was the complaining about needing a dictionary for that section of the Schwarzbaum review. Are you kidding? Learn to read already.
The thing I love about articles complaining about videogame writing is that they’re usually written by the worst of the bunch. There’s plenty to complain about, and these articles should be easy layups. And yet the people who write them continually throw the ball into the crowd.
I bet Chris Buffa rolled back in his swivelly chair with a self-satisfied smirk on his face as he completed the article with the last masterful swish of writing: references! This dynamo of games writing has included references in his article! Doesn’t that just fertilize the bunnies? Why! References legitimize anything, including my Nazi Tea Time Club.
I would criticize him more, except I took his advice: I didn’t read something that could would be bad food for my own writing. I prefer not to wither through the osmosis of ineptitude.
I don’t find that clip of Lisa’s hard to digest, and if I don’t, and English isn’t my first language, I doubt others do. On the contrary, I appreciate the writer’s craft when it shows me an observant eye and an attention to salient and insightful detail. I think her summary of M. Night’s career tells a lot in a small space and is written with a certain pizzaz.
This guy (I’m not going to refer to him, I’m not that good a writer) also mentions “shock jocks”. Well, shock is a writing method preferred by genre hacks and tabloids. I think the truth, no matter how odd or disturbing is a preferable standard. I think good writers observe and then relate, not in perfunctory, exhausting detail, but in the way good cooks choose the right ingredients to engender a certain taste and imbue with memories and a lasting impression on the senses. Shocking just for the sake of it is hardly a good idea.
I remember this guy’s Katamari Damacy is exemplary of a one-hit wonder statement, both too premature because Keita Takahashi hasn’t done anything else yet, and off the mark because what he has done doesn’t really deserve that kind of criticism thus far and it makes you look like a whiney brat who wants to be different for the sake of it, like some fool who stands up in the middle of the theater during The Godfather or The Usual Suspects and says, “This is no good! I do not like it! Why are you all enjoying it?” It’s also quite off because it’s not clear the creator even wants to be involved in video games.
In the end, it’s more than a little annoying to get how-to-write primers from someone at a website that’s hardly distinguished itself from the other, more well-known and well-liked, longer-established places, like some sort of sanctimonious whale trying to teach other whales how to do whale calling by blowing bilge water up its blowhole.
I get what Lorini’s saying, but EW’s reviews are like that. They’re dense, thoughtful, and aimed at a higher-than-average attention level. Which, as John pointed out, is unlike the rest of the magazine!
And while I completely understand that some people don’t want that kind of review – either for movies or videogames – there’s a place for coverage that isn’t the typical low-brow ‘this game is teh cool so I give it 8.3’.
And it’s ironic that someone who’s being so patronizing needs a dictionary to get past the words ‘compositional’ and ‘torpor’.
Also, if Chris Buffa is in such a damn hurry to get out the door and get to whatever movie he’s going to see (might I recommend Little Man?), why is he bothering with writers like Schwarzman and Glieberman when he hop over to Rotten Tomatoes? Which reminds me, I wish Janet Maslin* had used some sort of rating so I knew whether or not she liked a movie!
Oh, and I think EW’s movie reviews are terrific, even if I get why some people may not dig them. I think they balance the art/populist part of moviegoing as well as someone like Ebert.
I think this article means that Friday Night Smackdown is too high-brow for Chris Buffa. There’s a wrestler on there that encourages vacations to his native Quebec, “an island of tranquility in a truculent world.”
I’m going to agree with Tom that Buffa’s article is pretty sophmoric, but I’m going to disagree with Tom that what game reviews need are more “context.” If I can make a perhaps dubious distinction, there are two kinds of commentary: “reviews,” which simply summarize the features/story/plot and then offer a typically summary judgment of the whole affair in a few handy paragraphs; and “criticism,” which sometimes dispenses with the details, often assuming the reader already knows them, to get to a more detailed, thoughtful analysis of the thing being reviewed. Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, John Simon; these are some of the more famous film critics.
Video games have almost exclusively “reviewers,” with very few “critics” that I can think of. For reviewing, I prefer brevity without the pointless first paragraphs of nonsense the lead the vast majority of mediocre reviews (Slate has an excellent recent article on the virtues of brief reviews.) So in that sense, I want less context. But if there is a video game critic out there – and there may be some great ones I just haven’t found – then, yes, I can see more context if Tom means the culture as a whole rather than, say, the history of this particular genre.
As a (hopefully) interesting aside, I’d like to talk a little about my favorite film critic of all time. He reviewed music and movies for the now long-defunct Supersphere. His nom de plume at the time was Sam Mcabee, and he sorta dropped off the face of the earth a couple of years ago. He briefly ran a website called Cocaine Illustrated, and then he ran a store selling Japanese candy and probably-not-even-quasi-legal bootlegs of impossible-to-find movies.
Anyway, here is a cache of his bizarrely admiring review of Hollow Man.
That film review, while verbose, isn’t for the ‘high and mighty’. For that you need to look up an actual film theorist like Andre Bazin or Laura Mulvey. Popular criticism, like the review indicated, is subjective shit.
Best Owen Glieberman tag:
The Man, Wood. Who? B-King.
(10 points if you can tell which film he was reviewing :o)
I think one big reason why Famitsu completely dominates the game magazine in Japan is because it somewhat combines these two: Famitsu never, ever, ever summarizes and offers a summary judgement in reviews, they only hone in on specific details and assume the reader knows everything else. They can do this because they are a weekly magazine and can depend on readers to read the myriad articles they have detailing what the game is all about, because one game, even a small one, will appear, maybe even several times in one issue and will do so for a good 10-12 issues. So they can rest easy knowing that if readers are reading their review, they’re probably attracted to it in the first place by knowing a little something about the game. That said, there is a very tiny little summary about one or two sentences long above the place where the four reviewers give their opinions.
These opinions are very short and function almost like badges or trophies: you instantly know who, what and when of what was awarded or recognized when you look at a trophy or badge and Famitsu’s sentences are almost as recognizable and easily identified. Just to give you two different reviewers’ views from a typical review:
“While it’s difficulty level is the sharp and severe thing from long ago, it will leave you dropping dead in agony. And yet, there has been a high level of applying a tuned balance to this, to face the game’s difficulty from the across the table, staring into its eyes, directly one-to-one and progress forward in little steps can feel miraculous. You can’t say it’s aimed toward the masses, the pain threshold is high, but as an action game the level of completeness on offer is also high. There’s no feeling of awkwardness to the addition of the novel actions, and the graphics are circle circle [you should recognize this, Jim]. If you want to play it, glue your legs down.”
“Simple controls and the series’ atmosphere have been left as they ever have been, powering up things like the action and the graphics. To say the least, from a beginner mode anyone can enjoy, to an instant death-grade mode aimed at professionals, every mode’s balance has been kneaded into circle [again, you’ll be familiar with this]. Because there is an generous abundance of hidden elements, it’s something you can play deliberately.”
It comes out longer in English than it does in Japanese–the first review is only 38 words, while the second is only 22. but all the little phrases like “can’t say it’s aimed toward the masses,” “level of completeness is high,” “balance has been kneaded ____”, “something you can play deliberately,” “atmosphere as it ever has been” is used like sentence badges attached to the shirt the game is wearing. Along these, more specific and curious criticism is often given, such as the writer’s observation that playing the game is like enduring a pain threshold, comparing it to the feeling when you drop down in exhaustion or intense pain, and the feeling of elation when you’ve endured something awful in order to get something wonderful.
It’s kind of hard to get across with only a few examples, but it’s a very specific, very Famitsu-like way of doing reviews. No one else in Japan does it just like them, which is the reason I suspect no other Japanese gaming magazine can claim their sales.
I think “game journalism sucks” articles are like thermonuclear warfare in War Games. The only way to win is not to play the game. Because as soon as you get up on your soapbox and piss all over the competition, you’ve pretty much lost all semblance of professionalism. Clearly, if you really want to piss all over the competition, a semi-anonymous message board such as this is a much better place to wallow in your petty rivalries.
Who the hell needs a quick movie review before they fly out the door?
“Keys keys…where the hell did I put those…ah! There they are. Oh crap, and I need a movie review! I’m running late…shit!”
Or maybe it’s
“If I don’t fly outta this door in the next couple minutes, I’m going to miss the beginning of the Lady in the Water. I better hurry up and find a review so I can know if I’m supposed to like it or not!”
I mean really… are reviews the kind of thing you just gotta have in a hurry? Either you have plenty of time to digest one so you know if you’re going to buy that ticket, game, whatever, or you’re already sold on buying it and you have plenty of time to digest the review so you can discuss how your opinion compares against others’.
While I agree that the words aren’t so hard you need a dictionary, I vehemently disagree with Tom’s claim that it is an example of good writing. The intro listed is WAY overwritten. I like a well-crafted sentence as much as anything else, but those sentences are well-crafted only in the sense that the Winchester House is well-built:
In fact, I am sure I saw a sentence structure that led nowhere!
