Objectivity
On my earlier Brawl post, commenter “Misha from Mefi” says she’s been having trouble buying Wii games:
We based our choices on game ratings, but it seems we lack the shared experiences of the Nintendo crowd and so, for example, Super Mario Galaxy has been a huge disappointment. We cannot fathom why in the world the game was so popular and had such great reviews and can only attribute it to Nintendo Fanboy mindset.
To put this in perspective, we haven’t had the same experience at all with our PS3; all the games that came highly reviewed met or exceeded our expectations, as did Bioshock and Halo 3 (among others) for the Xbox 360.
But Nintendo devotees seem to have a much stronger connection to their favorites that transcends simple gameplay and causes them to embrace any vehicle which showcases their favorite characters, which I think has led to some pretty poor games as a sad side effect, like the “party” or “race” games that are just a bunch of cartoon characters thrown into very basic game play.
Now, we could argue specifics here; I don’t consider myself a Nintendo fanboy, but I happen to think Galaxy is one of the best games I’ve played in years, and I enjoy the Mario Kart series.1 But Misha’s comment raises an important question: what role, exactly, does our video game heritage play in assessing new games?
One of my professors was recently given a Wii, and he asked me if I thought Super Mario Galaxy was a good game. I told him it was. “Why?” he asked.
I was momentarily stumped. How could I describe Galaxy’s appeal to a non-gamer without resorting to boilerplate praise like “it’s fun” and “it looks nice”?
I ended up giving a brief summary of the Mario series — its thematic focus on exploration, the transition from 2D to 3D — and an explanation of how Galaxy enhances and expands on its predecessors. But is that sufficient? What does someone unfamiliar with the series take away from an explanation like that?
In other words, did I tell my professor why Galaxy is a good game, or why it’s a Mario game?
For some people this isn’t just an intellectual exercise. In a recent column for GameSetWatch, games journalist Leigh Alexander discussed the difficulty of dealing with “fanboyism” as a reviewer. She believes, as I do, that much of Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s appeal lies in the player’s familiarity with the characters. How, then, can we reconcile our collective Nintendo upbringing with our desire for an objective review?
Her answer? We shouldn’t bother.
If a reviewer’s positive experience of a game is influenced by its familiar franchise elements, it’s not a disqualification – it’s safe to say that most of the fans would experience that same influence. But for the sake of the industry’s future, the stamina of the developers (and please, the sanity of the journalists), let’s relinquish this idea that there is such a thing as “unbiased” for any single one of us, no matter how hard we try. I propose we embrace our own subjectivity, neutering fanboyism by accepting it — because it sure ain’t going anywhere.
In a way, Alexander came to the same realization that I did when trying to explain the appeal of Super Mario Galaxy to my professor: reviews are necessarily contextual, and trying to discuss a game in a vacuum is an exercise in futility. For professionals, the best we can hope for is full disclosure on the part of the reviewer. That way, we’ll know if the guy praising Mario Kart Wii is a lifelong Nintendo fan and perhaps take his opinion with a grain of salt.
Meanwhile, across the pond, British games journalist Kieron Gillen took Alexander to task on the PC gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun.2 While he agrees with her general point, Gillen notes that European gamers of his generation didn’t have the Nintendo upbringing that most Americans did.
Without that residual affection, Mario and Link are things I have to get past to enjoy Nintendo games. As the Escapist noted, Mario’s pretty much unmarketable. If you don’t love him already, there’s no reason to. Why on Earth would you want to enter his world? He’s a borderline-racist plumber in a land of mushrooms. The reason why I do so is because of my reason overruling my gut, as I know the games are at the pinnacle of the genre and I want to experience that. So I grimace my way through the cut-scenes and get on with it.
While I eventually grew to love Nintendo’s franchise characters and games, Misha doesn’t find appeal in either, and Gillen plays the games in spite of his distaste for the characters. Who of of the three of us would you most trust to review a Nintendo game? Would your opinion change based on your own past gaming experiences?
It’s a complex issue, and I don’t know that there’s a neat conclusion to be drawn. I’ll leave you with this excerpt from the Escapist piece on Mario that Gillen linked:
Without the established history of the character, Nintendo would be hard pressed to find the same degree of success if Mario was launched in the modern era. But those same elements of Mario’s design that would limit him commercially as a new IP are what sustain him as an existing character; his evolution, unlike Sonic’s, has been about lateral expansion. And while nostalgia plays a big role in maintaining his relevance, it’s the creative license and quality gameplay that cement the character as an irreplaceable piece of modern gaming.
- The Mario Party games are pretty dumb, though. Penny Arcade’s profane rant is a good dismantling of the series.
- I should point out that Gillen’s argument against Alexander is incidental to a greater point he’s making about a new freeware game, ROM Check Fail. It’s an interesting title, and I’ll likely have more to say about it soon.