But it’s actually better that Slash is not on this album. What’s cool about Chinese Democracy is that it truly does sound like a new enterprise, and I can’t imagine that being the case if Slash were dictating the sonic feel of every riff. The GNR members Rose misses more are Izzy Stradlin (who effortlessly wrote or co-wrote many of the band’s most memorable tunes) and Duff McKagan, the underappreciated bassist who made Appetite For Destruction so devastating.

Because McKagan worked in numerous Seattle-based bands before joining Guns N’ Roses, he became the de facto arranger for many of those pre-Appetite tracks, and his philosophy was always to take the path of least resistance. He pushed the songs in whatever direction felt most organic. But Rose is the complete opposite. He takes the path of most resistance. Sometimes it seems like Axl believes every single Guns N’ Roses song needs to employ every single thing that Guns N’ Roses has the capacity to do—there needs to be a soft part, a hard part, a falsetto stretch, some piano plinking, some R&B bullshit, a little Judas Priest, subhuman sound effects, a few Robert Plant yowls, dolphin squeaks, wind, overt sentimentality, and a caustic modernization of the blues. When he’s able to temporarily balance those qualities (which happens on the title track and on “I.R.S.,” the album’s two strongest rock cuts), it’s sprawling and entertaining and profoundly impressive.

Runner-up:

Throughout Chinese Democracy, the most compelling question is never, “What was Axl doing here?” but “What did Axl think he was doing here?” … On the aforementioned “Sorry,” Rose suddenly sings an otherwise innocuous line (“But I don’t want to do it”) in some bizarre, quasi-Transylvanian accent, and I cannot begin to speculate as to why. I mean, one has to assume Axl thought about all of these individual choices a minimum of a thousand times over the past 15 years. Somewhere in Los Angles, there’s gotta be 400 hours of DAT tape with nothing on it except multiple versions of the “Sorry” vocal. So why is this the one we finally hear? What finally made him decide, “You know, I’ve weighed all my options and all their potential consequences, and I’m going with the Mexican vampire accent. This is the vision I will embrace. But only on that one line! The rest of it will just be sung like a non-dead human.”

* Remember, Chinese Democrasy is NOT a Guns N’ Roses album.

We live in the age of superheroes. And T-Pain. If you were to remove superheroes and T-Pain from pop culture, the world as we know it would devolve into madness and anarchy. Society would crumble. Incidentally, I’m listening to/reviewing the new T-Pain CD as I write this, so I apologize if my various roles at The A.V. Club bleed together. That’s why I’d like to humbly propose a new superhero franchise about a musician who stumbles upon a voice distorter laced with gamma rays, which gives him the magical ability to bang drunken skanks at will, secure half-priced lap-dances, wear ridiculous hats without shame or self-consciousness, and telekinetically convince rappers and singers who really should know better that their songs are fatally incomplete without his signature brand of creepy digital harmonizing.

So I can’t properly speak to the importance, quality, or influence of David Foster Wallace’s fiction. But, boy, his nonfiction was good.

Some of the essays and articles — okay, all of them — collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster are incredibly pretentious in parts. But Wallace still somehow managed to be one of the most interesting, thoughtful, observant, and absurdly smart writers I’ve ever read.

He took the cliche of cultural essay writing — the discovery of grand meaning in banal American minutia, or in a movie, or in an athlete, or in anything — and repeatedly made it true, through sheer force of intellect, imagination, and accumulated detail. I agree with John Seery: “Already it seems as if some special portal of human intelligence has been closed off.”

After Stephen King and Stephen Hunter, Wallace was probably the biggest influence on my own formative writing and thinking. (In college that influence expressed itself as blatant copycat pieces. I hope by now his influence is more a part of my thought process, and shows up in my writing primarily as purposeful homage, like using the word “tummies” in this post.) And I’m really, really sad that he’s dead.

I wish I could write more of a tribute, but I’d have to reread all his stuff to do it justice. You should just go read those two nonfiction collections (some of the essays in them are available online: a dispatch from the Maine Lobster Festival; an article on Roger Federer; a piece on David Lynch).

Anyway, writing about the suicide of creative-genius heroes sucks. So I’ll just end with the beginning of an appreciation of Elliott Smith I wrote in 2003. Replace the word “musician” with “writer” (and ignore the addiction part, I assume) and the sentiment still holds.

There’s a terrible irony to suicide. In too many cases when overwhelming loneliness and self-loathing ultimately end in death, it turns out that love and appreciation were there in abundance. They just couldn’t get through the barriers built of depression and addiction.

It’s even worse to think about musician suicides: They were unable to accept or process not only the affection of family and friends, but the joy, pleasure and awe they inspired in their many fans.

The truth is, I didn’t just want to be as good a writer as DFW — I wanted to be as smart as he was. But if this is the price of genius, I’m happy never to know what that’s like.

Blarg.

I want the Freedom Forum to sell off their monument valley installation and use the proceeds to actually support journalism. Like endowing a newspaper, for instance.

Just one newspaper? Those were the days. Nowadays — a mere five months later, that is — $450 million could get you 3 or 4 newspaper chains.

The reviews of the Playstation 3 game at Slate, Wired’s Game|Life blog, and The Onion A.V. Club (all sites I like and regularly read) are curiously and similarly schizophrenic, alternately criticizing a major part of the game (its story) while praising — well, it’s not exactly clear what’s so great about it. That such praise outweighs the ambivalence in each review shows just how far video games still have to go.

All three reviews agree on one thing: Metal Gear Solid 4′s story is as incomprehensible as it is ambitious.

“In the fourth and (presumably) final chapter, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots, Solid Snake has to defeat human war machines and thwart the biggest global military conspiracy William Gibson never dreamed of,” Russ Fischer writes at the A.V. Club. “Embedded are ruminations on self-sustaining war economies, privatized military forces, and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

That sounds cool, but apparently the story didn’t turn out so well: “The backstory is almost impenetrably dense,” Fischer writes, with “dozens of overwrought conversations” adding up to “hours of concentrated narrative abuse.”

At Slate, Chris Baker likewise describes “interminable monologues on the evils of war and private military contractors. These play out in ‘cut scenes,’ cinematic sequences that unfold with minimal input from the player. These scenes sometimes spool out for 45 minutes or more. Seriously. Despite (or because of) those huge dollops of plot, I still find the story utterly incomprehensible.”

Game|Life’s Chris Kohler first says that the game’s cut scenes “can be so riveting that you barely notice you haven’t touched your controller.” Then he actually describes them: “The story’s pretty much crazy. … There are so many expository sequences that deliver reams of information about the game’s military-industrial conspiracy theory back story, so many weird characters and so many last-minute twists and turns that it’s difficult to keep up.”

So if hours of the game are taken up by impenetrable narrative sequences that even the game’s admirers can barely take, what makes the rest of the game “as compelling as the very best the medium has to offer,” as Fischer puts it? I’m still not sure.

(Now might be a good time to mention that the Metal Gear Solid series is one of the biggest holes in my gaming experience, along with World of Warcraft and Sim City. I’ve only played a couple hours of the first Metal Gear Solid for the first Playstation. These reviews — and others, like Kyle Orland’s hilarious take on the game’s first hour [minute 32: "The game asks if I want to save. Save what? Nothing has happened!"] — haven’t exactly given me a reason to try part 4, let alone take on the first 3.)

Fischer writes that MGS4′s character movement is “slightly less artificial” than the earlier games; the way your character gets tired “isn’t a great” model but is “a good start”; the boss battles “are fairly routine,” not groundbreaking. He’s most impressed by the different ways you can complete each level. All this somehow balances the narrative shortcomings to push the game into A- territory.

Kohler argues that MGS4, like the recent Grand Theft Auto IV, heralds a new era of video games that focus much more on story than previous games have, even at the expense of interaction. He writes that MGS4 is leading the way by “showing that there can be a whole bunch of non-interactive story in a game, as long as it’s excellent. The stumbling block was never that movies don’t work in a videogame, but that terrible ones don’t.”

A few paragraphs earlier, though, he writes that “the story they’re telling is such a bizarre tale that I couldn’t see recommending it to a random person purely on the strength of its narrative.”

Kohler seems to be separating the technical aspects of the cut scenes — he lauds the quality of the graphics, camerawork, and voice acting — from the narrative aspects. But this amounts to having it both ways: ostensibly highlighting a game’s narrative to show how video games have matured, while actually focusing on the presentation of that narrative (which looks great) instead of the narrative itself (which, as all three critics note, is awful).

For his part, Baker’s loftiest praise goes to Metal Gear’s bizarre surrealism and the game’s creator, Hideo Kojima, who he says “gets the difference between games and movies in a way that many designers never will.” Baker defines that difference as interactivity’s potential for immersion, and notes that the trick with video games is that technical issues and gaming conventions constantly pull gamers out of their virtual worlds. (i.e. when a human character bobs along a street like a poorly animated Shaggy instead of walking realistically, you think “oh yeah, just a game.”)

So you’d think that Kojima getting the difference between games and movies would mean he finds a perfect balance between interactivity, immersion, gaming conventions, and narrative. Baker says no — Kojima is great because he plays up the illusion of immersion: “Kojima continually elbows you in the ribs and reminds you that you’re playing a game, as well as rewards you for doing something ridiculous. He breaks the fourth wall more frequently than the Kool-Aid Man.”

But breaking the fourth wall isn’t particularly original — Super Mario Bros. 3 did it in 1990 by referencing the “Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle” line from the first Super Mario Bros. — nor does it inherently make a game good. (Fischer and Kohler also reference the fourth-wall breakage.) It’s how Baker describes the fourth wall being broken that really creates a paradox for game critics, and points to how far video games still have to go:

“For instance, there’s a motion sensor in the PS3 controller. During one of the interminable cut scenes, you might discover that shaking the controller makes a female character’s breasts jiggle. It’s puerile, sexist, and ludicrous, but it makes it hard to take anything about the game for granted.”

Leave aside whether we should be winking at puerile sexism in a video game (particularly a tone-deaf sexism, as Fischer notes: “A conversation will detail the painfully damaged history of a defeated female boss, but only after we check out her tits. At length.”). Baker really seems to be saying that MGS4′s farting-in-the-back-of-the-classroom juvenilia makes it hard to take anything about the game seriously.

For a game with such pretensions, that’s a huge flaw. Combine the lack of seriousness with an incomprehensible story and bad writing, and the game appears to have flopped in every non-game respect.

As I’ve written before about the larger games-as-art discussion, that would be fine if games aspired to nothing more than being fun games. But many game makers and most critics do want games to be something more, as evidenced by Kohler’s persuasive thesis that MSG4 and Grand Theft Auto IV point to a future of movie-game hybrids. If we’re going to place games in the same space as narrative art, we have to start assessing those games — or at least the elements that overlap with narrative art — according to the critical standards of that art.

That means trying to answer the question Dave Itzkoff poses in a New York Times article about Metal Gear Solid 4: Can video games “tell a story as satisfyingly as a work of cinema or literature?” It means an impenetrable, unending story is not something extraneous to shrug off but rather is a central element of the work and deserves a serious critique. It means going beyond the technical aspects of the narrative portions’ presentation and assessing the narrative itself: pointing out specific cliched or original dialogue, calling out unoriginal characters or jarring shifts in tone. It means grappling with a work’s cultural or political arguments — including, yes, a creator’s puerile sexism.

If those elements are so unsophisticated or obtuse as to make such a critique impossible or pointless — if the answer to Itzkoff’s question is a resounding no — then the game has failed as a work of narrative art. No matter how many ways there are to get to the next boss battle.

Take two recent reviews from PC Magazine and PC World. PC Mag gave four stars (out of five) and an Editor’s Choice award to the Westinghouse TX-52F480S 52-inch LCD. I still have an old 32-inch CRT set, so I’m always on the lookout for good flat-panel tellies to file away for when we’re ready to upgrade. But despite the rating, this review was absolutely no help in my mental TV search.

The first paragraph says “this set has picture controls that help its more than two million pixels deliver crisp, detailed images” and calls it “a terrific value for a large-screen 1080p HDTV.” The rest of the review consists of lists of features I don’t really care about or techno-geek discussions of image quality.

First there are four paragraphs about the bezel, dimensions, remote, A/V ports, and input detection. The first real mention of image quality comes six paragraphs in, noting

a handy picture-scaling option that eliminates overscan when displaying 720p and 1080i/p HD video. This scaling can be achieved over component video input as well as through HDMI. Standard-definition (SD) images were overscanned by an acceptable 6 percent.

I don’t know or care what picture-scaling and overscanning are. Judging by this mention, I think I should care — but the review doesn’t explain why or what these terms mean in plain English.

Next we have paragraphs about color settings, brightness, and contrast ratio. From reading up a bit on TVs, I at least know what these terms are. But this means nothing to me: “dark-video black levels coupled with a correctly calibrated picture produced an average contrast ratio of 1186:1, a new record for an LCD in a darkly lit room.” What does that mean for actual human beings watching the TV in their living rooms?

Finally we get two paragraphs that talk image blur and jaggedness in terms of real-world use, with examples of Indiana Jones’ hat and Darth Vader’s helmet. Those are interspersed with more lab-test-speak like:

Despite some stumbles on the HD HQV Benchmark test, performance with HD material was good. As with the SD version, the HD benchmark test highlighted the TX-52F480S’s inability to eliminate jagged edges along moving bars on the suite’s video-reconstruction test.

The review concludes, “Overall, the TX-52F480S sets the current standard for what you should expect in an LCD TV priced at around $2,000.” Overall, I would never buy this TV set because to an average reader like meself, the review in no way reflects this conclusion.

A good review wouldn’t go down the checklist of TV features and talk about each in turn — just as a good movie review doesn’t go down the checklist of acting, directing, script, sound, cinematography, set design, costume design. A good review would explain in real-human terms why this TV’s image quality — the only feature that actually matters — is better than other TVs’. And it would do so at the top of the review, not eight paragraphs in.

Moving on to digital cameras, PC World’s review of the Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS has the same flaws as the PC Mag review. There’s a mention of “outstanding image quality” in the first paragraph, but then we get four paragraphs about the lens, “burst capability,” rounded edges, buttons and menu, white balance, and face detection. The sixth and penultimate paragraph is this:

In our lab tests, the SD1100 scored higher on overall image quality than nearly all of its competitors. On the sharpness scale, only a handful of the cameras we tested beat the SD1100 (including Kodak’s EasyShare V1253, Fuji’s FinePix F50fd, and Casio’s EX-Z1080), but they all cost more. To combat camera shake in low-light situations, Canon added its Optical Image Stabilizer feature, but I found its presence pretty unnoticeable–as it likely would be on most point-and-shoots.

Image quality is the one thing that should matter to average camera users. Yet this paragraph talks only about lab tests. It isn’t accompanied by examples of actual photos taken with this camera, juxtaposed with other cameras’ shots so readers can compare the two.

I realize these are both “enthusiast” magazines/Web sites, and readers are assumed to both understand and geek out over these technical terms and features (CNet’s review of the Canon camera has the same problems). But even a tech-savvy reader looking for a camera or TV isn’t going to buy a product because of the remote or menu buttons.

This reviewing style has filtered out of the enthusiast press. In his recent review of small high-def camcorders, the New York Times’ David Pogue spends 745 words talking about the video-cams’ features and descriptions before getting to the first big flaw — that they have no wide angle, so are useless for non-zoomed shots. It takes him 922 words before he gets to the most important part of any video camera: the image quality. And surprise! It turns out these cameras kinda stink:

When you hear “high definition,” you expect what you see in the TV stores: breathtaking sharpness, stunning color.

Unfortunately, “high definition” refers only to the number of pixels in the picture — not how good they are. On these cameras, they’re not very good.

Why is this not the lede of the review? Who cares about how small the things are, what sort of “sharpish edges” they have, if the cameras fail in their main function?

Here’s my philosophy for tech reviews: Don’t spend more than one paragraph on specs or anything else readers can find on the company’s Web site or press release (unless certain specs are relevant to your overall point). Don’t focus on lab tests and jargon; instead, use lab benchmarks as a supplement to real-world use and real-world language to evaluate a product’s primary functions. Most important, focus your review on the purpose of the product. If it’s a printer, the most important thing is print quality. For a scanner, camera, videocam, or TV, it’s image quality. The rest is techie noise.

(You can decide for yourself how well I’ve followed my own advice in these reviews of the PSP, a virtual-reality headset, and the Xbox 360 — though time has made my initial 360 criticisms moot.)

For the vast majority of people, a Friday night at the movies is just that — and nothing more. Most people really don’t care about and have no use for lengthy dissertations about the ways in which Steven Soderbergh borrows from Godard. They just want to know whether to see Ocean’s 12! Playing blame the audience doesn’t work for music studios trying to combat piracy, and it doesn’t work for cranky critics who remain convinced they deserve $2 a word for 1) their insights into obscure movies few people want to see or 2) their complaints about Big Dumb Movies that everyone’s going to see anyway.

I would add that a majority of criticism doesn’t even rise to this level of sophistication/pretension. When I led a session on criticism at the Poynter Institute’s High School Writers Workshop, I presented the difference between good and bad criticism as the difference between a term paper (an original thesis supported by examples from the text) and a book report (basic plot summary with maybe a cursory judgment). Many print reviews still tend toward the book report end of the criticism spectrum. (Plus more papers are experimenting with things like American Idol live-blogs and other “insta-criticism” that runs more toward summary/quick response but is totally appropriate for the subjects and form.)

Suderman makes an even more important point about the lack of perspective from those in the newspaper industry who mourn the loss of print critics. He writes:

Trenchant criticism hasn’t died; it’s just shifted venues. …

Meanwhile, I simply refuse to buy the argument that the loss of book pages and film-review jobs is a bad thing. Yes, it’s a bad thing for professional critics. Yes, it’s tougher for those lucky few thousand folks to make a living reading books and watching movies! On the other hand, the internet has actually created vastly more opportunity for aspiring critics to get their work read. The barriers to entry in top-end publications are still high, but those outlets are no longer the only options for critics on the make. So we’ll see fewer professional critics, sure, but we’ll also see far, far more criticism.

And yes, some of it will be bad. But on the whole, I’d guess that it will create a net gain in serious, thought-provoking criticism of just about every medium. Meanwhile, most of those truly elite outlets — the New Yorkers and the Washington Posts — are not going away.

Terrific points all. Jody Rosen is the best music critic in the country; he writes for Slate, not a newspaper. Newspapers that have a Jody Rosen should build an online brand and community around that critic and hope the critic doesn’t leave. If they don’t have a Jody Rosen, if their critics file one book-report review after another — and if newspapers increasingly need to think about what they can offer readers that no one else can — then they should treat every kind of critic as a luxury except for (maybe) local-music and (definitely) restaurant critics.

But there’s one crucial piece missing from Suderman’s analysis. Yes, there’s plenty of great criticism online. Yes, there’s going to be a net increase in great criticism thanks to that online crit-boom. But like so much of the online news-commentary-criticism boom, it is invisible to newspaper readers.

Suderman assumes that getting rid of critics won’t matter because newspaper readers will find the good stuff online. That would be true if you assume everyone has an RSS feed and reads Slate, Pitchfork, and House Next Door. Needless to say, not everyone does. If they did, that would further erode newspapers’ declining readership.

So if newspapers do get rid of in-house critics, they need to simultaneously start giving readers some of the material Suderman talks about. That goes for more than just criticism. Newspapers can no longer treat the online universe as invisible. They have to find a way to bring that great content to their readers, both via the Web and in print.

Paradoxically, at a moment when technology allows designers to create ever more complex and realistic single-player fantasies, the growth in the now $18 billion gaming market is in simple, user-friendly experiences that families and friends can enjoy together. …Put another way, it may be a sign of the industry’s nascent maturity that as video games become more popular than ever, hard-core gamers and the old-school critics who represent them are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience.

But taking a closer look at the numbers, his argument starts to break down.

Here are the top 10 games of 2007, via Kotaku:

1. Halo 3 (Xbox 360) – 4,820,000
2. Wii Play with Remote (Wii) – 4,120,000
3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Xbox 360) – 3,040,000
4. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2) – 2,720,000
5. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) – 2,520,000
6. Pokemon Diamond (DS) – 2,480,000
7. Madden NFL 08 (PS2) – 1,900,000
8. Guitar Hero II (PS2) – 1,890,000
9. Assassin’s Creed (Xbox 360) – 1,870,000
10. Mario Party 8 (Wii) – 1,820,000

Pokemon Diamond doesn’t really apply to his thesis because kids are always nuts for new Pokemon games; likewise with Madden, which is a perennial best-seller (thanks to the Guys Rain Man Gene). Before it was released, Halo 3 — the very top seller, mind you — had hard-core gamers and critics salivating over every screen shot and nugget of information about new weapons. Call of Duty 4 has a Metacritic score of 94 (I’m not a fan of Metacritic, but that’s what Schiesel uses to define what’s “critically acclaimed”), and intense first-person shooters are hardly the stuff of casual and family gamers. Assassin’s Creed, as Schiesel notes, is a one-player adventure game.

So basically he’s talking about Wii Play, Super Mario Galaxy, Guitar Hero II and III, and Mario Party 8. But Mario Galaxy is also a one-player game, and it got a 97 rating on Metacritic. And critics knocked Guitar Hero III for being too difficult — especially given the mass audience it’s attracting — so I’m not even sure that applies.

Right, so now we’re down to Wii Play, Guitar Hero II, and Mario Party 8. Now, the Wii was the top-selling home console of the year, with 6.3 million sold. Plus Wii Play was basically a $10 add-on when you bought an extra Wii controller, which all those millions of people had to do if they wanted to play with their friends and families.

What the top 10 list really seems to show, then, is that hardcore gamers (including Madden fans and Pokemon kiddies) still buy the most games, and that most Wii buyers were content to play Wii Sports, which comes with the system, and Wii Play when they needed a second controller.

Schiesel’s piece has a bigger hole in it. He tries to make the leap that as the mass market takes over, critics are becoming marginalized:

That is not so unusual in other media. In most forms of entertainment there is a divide between what is popular with the masses and what is popular with the critics. Plenty of films get rave reviews but never make it past the art houses. Plenty of blockbusters are panned.

His main support for this is the absence on the top 10 list of atmospheric shooter BioShock, the ambitious sci-fi role-playing-game Mass Effect, and a couple of other “acclaimed” titles. Again, the numbers bely the argument.

Mass Effect sold 1.6 million copies around the world in 2007 (in less than two months!); being conservative, let’s say 800,000 of those were sold in the U.S. BioShock sold 490,000 in its first month, and according to market analysis site Seeking Alpha, it shipped 2 million copies total; again conservatively, let’s say that means 1 million copies sold in the U.S. Sure, they might have missed the top-10 list, but those are pretty strong sales for supposedly “complex” games.

Compare BioShock’s success to an “art house” movie: No Country for Old Men. For the Coen Brothers film to have had the same relative success compared to the top-grossing movie of 2007 — Spider-Man 3, at $337 million — as BioShock had compared to the top-selling game, the movie would had to have grossed $70 million instead of $42 million. There Will Be Blood would needed to have grossed $56 million instead of $22 million to match Mass Effect’s relative success.

So in terms of sales, Schiesel’s critics’ picks are actually doing twice as well as their film counterparts. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Take a look at the 10 best-selling games from 2006:

1. PS2 Madden 07 – 2.8 m
2. NDS New Super Mario Bros. – 2.0 m
3. 360 Gears of War- 1.8 mm
4. PS2 Kingdom Hearts II – 1.7 m
5. PS2 Guitar Hero 2 – 1.3 mm
6. PS2 Final Fantasy XII – 1.3 mm
7. NDS Brain Age – 1.1 m
8. 360 Madden 07 – 1.1mm
9. 360 Ghost Recon – 1.0 m
10. PS2 NCAA Football 07 – 1.0 mm

For one thing, the basic mix is about the same as 2007′s list. Gears of War is like Halo 3, Ghost Recon is like Call of Duty 4; Brain Age and Super Mario Bros. are like Wii Play and Mario Party. But more importantly, maybe BioShock and Mass Effect didn’t make the 2007 list — but they’ve sold as well or nearly as well as half of 2006′s top 10. They didn’t miss 2007′s top 10 because fewer people are buying complex games. They missed out because more people are buying more games of all kinds — including critics favorites.

Schiesel writes, “There is hardly a question that two years ago all of those games [Mass Effect, BioShock, The Orange Box] would have made the list.” But of course that’s in question. Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Okami — there’s a long list of recent critical darlings that were commercial busts. His art house games are doing so well now because a rising tide is lifting all games.

There’s a more fundamental problem in Schiesel’s attempt to delineate a creative/critical hierarchy of video games. As I’ve argued before, video games have a long way to go before we can truly compare them to movies, TV, books, etc. (Some people argue we shouldn’t compare them to other media at all, but leave that aside for now.) For all their ambition, BioShock and Mass Effect don’t change that reality (exactly how they fall short is a topic for future posts). Moreover, a game like God of War II — another of Schiesel’s poster titles for missing the top 10 — is at best similar to a high-quality B-movie, not equivalent to a P.T. Anderson or Michel Gondry film.

Even as Schiesel is greatly overestimating the “high end” of games, he’s doing something worse to the games at the other end of his imagined hierarchy. He suggests that the success of mass-market titles is a sign that video games are becoming like other media, which have “a highly sophisticated cognoscenti whose tastes have little to do with the mass audiences that still drive those markets.” But there’s a huge difference between lowbrow movies and mass-market video games. Game “critics” don’t like Mario Party 8 because it’s essentially the same as the other seven Mario Parties (never mind that it’ll be new to all those Wii owners who haven’t played video games since Pac-Man or NES). Movie critics hate Meet the Spartans because it’s bad comedy, bad satire, full of bad gay jokes, and otherwise creatively bankrupt.

Mario Party 8 is not Meet the Spartans. Simple, even derivative gameplay in a game that is narrative-free and purely about the experience of playing can’t be compared to lowbrow narrative art. Notice that Schiesel doesn’t address games like Super Mario Galaxy and Rock Band — mass hits that are also critically acclaimed yet have no “high-art” ambition. Or take a game like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune — a critically hailed action-adventure game. I stopped playing after about half an hour partly because the older explorer guiding me on my jungle trip kept making sexist comments. I’m sure he has a change of heart later in the game after the female reporter character busts some heads, but I didn’t want to hear any more of his nonsense before that change. How does that fit into Schiesel’s hierarchy?

What emerges from his scattershot analysis is the confusion and uncertainty that are part of what’s stunting game criticism — and games themselves. There’s an assumption that all of these games somehow lie on the same spectrum and can be evaluated in the same terms. BioShock and Mass Effect are by default put on one end of the spectrum because of their ambitious worlds and dialogue — regardless of whether the dialogue and ideas are actually well-crafted, unique and intelligent. The quality of their non-gameplay aspects is almost irrelevant; what seems to be important is that those aspects exist at all. Meanwhile games without those qualities, like Mario games, puzzle games, racing games are alternately revered and slimed, depending on — well, it’s not clear on what, exactly.

All the top 10 list really tells us is that lots more people are playing and buying games of all kinds. All Schiesel’s piece really tells us is that we still don’t know exactly how to think about and evaluate the immensely varied world of video games.