Even if two players could have the exact same playthrough of a game and play a game in exactly the same way, they may still have radically different experiences with and interpretations of it. But even with that in mind, what is at the core of subjectivity is experience and interpretation. A playthrough may never be stable from one play session to the next, let alone from one player to the next. Innumerable decisions (conscious or not) go into the construction of a single playthrough. In my previous work, my take on differences in “how to play a game” hinged on the variability of playthroughs.
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As he writes, “a lot of people still believe you can invalidate your opinion by ‘playing the game wrong,’ which means there’s still a specter of objectivity floating around the whole thing.” Deciding how to play a game is a part of one’s experience of it-and those decisions absolutely do not invalidate the experience or the resulting criticism of the game. In his take on this issue, Trautman contends with the idea of playing games incorrectly. But how could we study play in an objective manner? What could we possibly say about experiences of play that would be purely objective ? I think that many scholars and game players themselves often lose sight of this notion. To start, what I want to highlight is the act of play. So here, I’ll build on a few of Trautman’s ideas while revisiting and elaborating on some of my own. Given that this debate is ongoing and that I’ve lately been witnessing comments that either denigrate “weak” subjective methods or that wistfully muse about how wonderful it would be if there were actually widely-accepted subjective methods for game analysis, I want to return to the fray. And last week, I was excited to see Shawn Trautman’s piece arguing for subjectivizing games criticism to an individual level, which got me all fired up to jump back into the debate again. I recently tried to throw in my own two cents on the matter with an article in the Journal of Games Criticism. In fact, good luck finding a domain of gaming discourse in which this topic doesn’t arise. So too has the popular gaming press at large. So too have online games criticism communities. Objectivity is.Īs an academic discipline, game studies has had to endure some growing pains where the strife between objective and subjective analysis is concerned. That’s not what’s valued either inside or outside of the academic establishment. And in case my fellow academics need some reminding: most of us aren’t going to receive fellowships or research grants for subjective criticism projects any time soon. Some of them are coming from fellow critics that still need convincing. Many of these sources and angles are coming from positions of power that have interests in maintaining the status quo. It’s still marginalized, still needing to justify itself, and still under constant attack from various sources and various angles. Because, let’s face it: subjective player-centered criticism is still very much on the defensive, especially where video games are concerned. We say it like it’s something that doesn’t need saying anymore.īut it does need saying. Everybody already knows that interpretation is subjective, we like say to each other. Even so, many cultural and media critics like to pretend we’re way past this whole objectivity thing. It is no less cherished by much of popular gaming culture (see, for instance, the rampant desires for objective, unbiased video game reviews). The pursuit of objective meaning is a holy tenet of much of academia. That, in turn, must mean that strong methods locate meaning elsewhere-somewhere outside the dark subjective cave of player experience and in the bright objective world of game forms. According to this assumption, methods of criticism that focus on players and their subjective experiences are weak. At its base is a fiercely-defended value: objectivity. Quite the contrary: it was that this opinion is a widespread, domineering one. What made me so livid about the comment wasn’t that it was some lone graduate student tossing out an opinion that I happened to find objectionable. The comment was an approving one: the commenter believed that the article was a fine example of an approach to games criticism that was not “weakened” by a method that focused on the player as a site of meaning-making. I recently saw a comment about an article on academic games criticism.
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