Monthly Archives: October 2015

So I Accidentally Started A Misdirected Witch Hunt

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So yesterday I got home from an incredible week at Indiecade and I sat down on the couch, super jetlagged, to catch up on my emails. One of them was a PR email about Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate that seemed really weird and self-congratulatory. I tweeted out a screenshot of it in this tweet.

I deliberately ensured the PR’s email address and name wasn’t visible in the screenshot so as to not send an angry mob their way in case the tweet blew up. I just wanted to say I thought this was a terrible way of advertising a game, but I know how detached PR usually is from a game’s actual development so I had no interest in some individual just doing their job getting a whole lot of hate over a poorly worded email. What was obscured in me doing this was the fact the email was sent from a third-party PR company, not Ubisoft’s internal PR. This wasn’t helped by my phrasing “Ubisoft’s PR” in my tweet, which was me trying to condense the phrase “PR sent on behalf of Ubisoft” into 140 characters.

The tweet got retweeted a whole bunch! Like, 200 times at last check. Then people pointed out that it reads like perhaps it is PR for the actress that the text seems to focus on, not for the game. Ubisoft then confirmed this to be true in a couple of tweets to me this morning.

So straight up: I screwed up! To be sure, I think it is entirely understandable that when a games journalist gets a press release about the most recent Assassin’s Creed, that it would be safe to assume that Ubisoft has signed off on that press release. But still, I was wrong and the wording of my tweet did not help things at all in the way it suggested this was sent by internal Ubisoft PR, so I truly apologise to anyone at Ubisoft PR who had to deal with any fallout from that.

So choices I made to deliberately ensure there would not be an angry online mob thing instead ensured the opposite occurred. My intent to just tweet “hey this thing is kind of crap” snowballed into a whole lot of people getting really angry at the wrong target. I guess I will just add this to the growing list of reasons why I increasingly feel that Twitter is not a useful place to have any sort of real conversation.

I apologise unreservedly.

On The Beginner’s Guide

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I didn’t spend too much time with Davey Wreden’s previous game, The Stanley Parable. I felt like I got it pretty quickly. I did, however, spend quite a lot of time watching students play it and listening to game scholars talk about it. While thematically I found it pretty to-the-point (all choices and agency in videogame play is an illusion), it was quite spectacularly put together. Just really beautiful and clever environment design.

What I couldn’t stand about The Stanley Parable was most of what was said about that game. I have an issue with analyses (especially academic analyses) of games whose themes are incredibly obvious. Suffice to say, I could live the rest of my life without seeing another conference presentation on what The Stanley Parable says about choice or what Papers, Please says about ethics or what This War of Mine says about war. It’s not that I think any of these games are bad, but more that they are games that I guess I don’t think require any thematic analysis. It’s pretty obvious what they are doing! Analysing how they do these things is still worthy (the difficulty of desk space in Papers, Please, for instance) but simply pointing out that The Stanley Parable is about choice just seems… boring and easy. To stress: this isn’t a fault of the games themselves.

I would rather analyse games that aren’t so obviously about a specific thing. Perhaps this is why I end up writing more about blockbuster titles than indie or amateur titles despite the latter two almost always doing something far more interesting. Writing a critical analysis of a blockbuster title is more difficult and thus (for me, anyway) more rewarding.

So on the one hand, writing about Wreden’s second game, The Beginner’s Guide, seems like a pointless thing to do as the game pretty explicitly tells you what it is about. The Beginner’s Guide is games criticism so to analyse it would almost be an excruciatingly meta exercise. My three favourite essays on the game so far (Cameron Kunzelman, Laura Hudson, Cara Ellison) all kind of circle around this challenge in different ways (and each has far more interesting things to say about the game than I do). It is an incredibly meaty game for a game critic to latch onto, but I’m also wary that perhaps that is because it is just too obvious what it is doing and, thus, any further analysis might not even be necessary. Continue reading →