Bias and Objectivity

There's been a lot of talk about the objective review of games, as Gamergate (yes, we're still talking about them. God, I wish we weren't.) have decided to paint having opinions as an example of journalistic bias. Now, before we go any further, let's talk about bias. Bias is where you claim to hold a certain position and have something to gain from making people think you hold that position. When oil companies claim that climate change isn't a thing, that's bias, because they have something to gain from making sure that people continue to consume what they're selling.

Simply having an opinion and expressing it is not bias. Yes, even if it is an opinion you personally do not share. It is ok to like or dislike a thing, and even valuable to tell other people that you like or dislike it, in order to either recommend it or warn people away. And yes, as a reader of reviews, you might dislike something someone else likes, or like something that someone else dislikes, and that review might not be 'correct' for you. But the alternative is to buy the game anyway and then decide whether or not you like it, which hardly puts you in a better consumer position than having read someone else's opinions. What this self-styled consumer revolt is actually doing is advocating a situation where the consumer takes on more, not less, risk of going out of pocket on something shitty. But hopefully we're past the point now where I need to explain to anyone that Gamergate's pro-consumer stance is nothing more than a smokescreen for misogyny. I think most sensible people get that.

But bias isn't really the subject today. I don't even really want to talk about the impossibility of objective reviews, as other people have done that beautifully. I just want to pick up on one point where something can seem to be objective, but actually isn't.

TotalBiscuit, before he decided to put his considerable YouTube celebrity behind a misogynistic hate group and spout transphobic gibberish, made a video where he said that someone's opinion on a game is mostly subjective (and how that's reconciled with his supporting Gamergate is anyone's guess). But he did say that we can be objective about certain things, like optimisation. If a game is poorly optimised, he says, it's poorly optimised and that's that. Anyone who knows half a fraction of a thing about software development knows that this simply isn't true.

When you optimise a piece of software, three things happen. Firstly, the program runs faster. That's the point. Secondly, it becomes harder to make changes in the code. Thirdly, it becomes harder to extend the code. The more you optimise, the more costly and difficult it becomes to patch bugs. The more you optimise, the less extensibility you give to your program.

Would Skyrim have been a better game if it ran faster? Undoubtedly, but that's not the question. The question is, would Skyrim have been a better game if it ran faster at the cost of the bugfixes it received post-launch and the power of its modding interface? Whether that cost would have been worth it is a judgement call that depends on which factor you think is the more important. And the relative importance of those factors can only ever be subjective. You can disagree with the decision Bethesda made on this relative importance, but you cannot say it was objectively wrong.

Gaming is both one of the most hardware-intensive and one of the most performance-critical applications of computers. All games do need to be optimised to some extent. But precisely what extent that is depends on a whole load of other factors, many of which are subjective. The idea that more optimisation is always better is sophomoric and naive, and has no place in real-world software development.

The larger point here is that things in games are rarely simply "done well". They're very often done well at the expense of some other factor. Even with the inconceivably large budgets the top-end AAA games have, spending money on one thing means not spending money on another. Part of the art of game development is striking the right balance, but critics and consumers alike have differing views on what "the right balance" is, because they have different subjective priorities.

Being a Boy's Like Sucking on a Lemon

Yesterday, Lionhead Studios tweeted a silly image in honour (if that's the right word) of National Cleavage Day. The image was of a barmaid with an ample bosom holding up two jugs (get it?) of ale. Many quite rightly felt that this image, in the social context of the current climate of video games, was tone-deaf and stupid.

Of course, Gamergate disagreed, because of course they did. Lionhead removed the tweet, which of course caused Gamergate to explode about how SJWs were censoring artistic freedom. Which is missing the point, because we SJWs didn't even want them to remove it - that was all Lionhead. We wanted to have an open discussion about it (you know, open discussion? That thing Gamergate used to pretend they wanted?), and perhaps would have liked Lionhead to apologise for it. That's very different to censorship, but that's an aside to what I wanted to talk about today.

I had a discussion with someone who was complaining that Lionhead was pandering only to straight dudes. That I took on board, but as a straight dude, it's also not flattering to be reduced to a boob-liker. To be fair, I do like boobs, but out of everything that makes up who I am, for that specifically to be chosen as the thing that would appeal to me felt manipulative and insulting. I wasn't, in making this point, trying to say "but what about the menz?" - I was trying to demonstrate that the tweet was doubly stupid because it excluded a large number of people and wasn't particularly flattering to the people it was including.

On reflection, I was right to feel manipulated. It was, "Here's some boobs. You like that, don't you? That's what you want." It was a condescending pat on the head for conforming to expected masculine norms. Where does that expectation come from? It comes from patriarchy.

I remember hearing about some feminist developers who complained that there are already a lot of games for men because there are a lot of games about shooting and racing and sports. I don't want to cast aspersions on how 'truly' feminist they are, but the idea that that is What Men Want is a deeply patriarchal attitude that they've internalised. At the time, I resented the fact that they thought that games with more substance, nuance and/or complexity were an exclusively female domain.

I still don't like the idea, but now I see it for what it is. It's an example of how the patriarchy harms men. The patriarchy sees male as default, and female as an exception. That idea contains a lot of advantages for men, and it's a large part of where male privilege comes from. But in gaming terms (which is, after all, what this blog is about), as soon as something breaks away from the default (and might thereby be more interesting), it's suddenly Not For Men, because male is default.

In fact, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a game with not one, but two male-coded words right there in the title, and, one could argue, a game that is brimming with masculine themes, and yet it "feels" like a game for girls because the masculine themes it covers do not conform to patriarchal expectations of masculine norms, nor do the tone or mechanics remotely resemble the games men are "supposed" to like. (Incidentally, it also happens to be one of my favourite games - go check it out.) Brothers is an exceptional game in two senses of the word: it is both excellent, and an all-too-rare departure from the patriarchal default.

The restrictive expectation to conform to masculine norms, whether that be of behaviour or, as in this case, taste, is certainly an area where patriarchy is harmful to men. And when it's compounded by an industry that seeks to maximise profits by targeting a 'default' audience, at the same time reinforcing masculine norms to keep that 'default' market stable, it's also harmful to gaming.

Playgrounds of the Mind

I admit to being something of a veteran of OKCupid. One thing I've noticed about online dating, one of the biggest pitfalls, is that the profile you see is necessarily not an accurate representation of the person behind it. I'm not talking here about people deliberately misrepresenting themselves: Even people who strive to be as true as they can in their profile will end up with little more than a sketch. There is a temptation for the online dater to see a profile, which always leaves something to the imagination, and fill in the blanks with their own ideals. That can lead to unwarranted feelings and overattachment, which can very easily lead to hurt, and certainly lead to a lot of the creepy behaviours we all have a car-crash fascination with when they're shared by the recipients on Twitter.

But what is a danger of online dating can be a benefit to video games. I often feel like this same phenomenon is precisely what makes Final Fantasy VII so dear to so many people's hearts. We have characters with double-digit polygons, who have no voices and communicate entirely in (poorly translated) text. These highly abstract characters are, by virtue of their technical limitations, necessarily playgrounds of the mind, where the player's imagination has a lot of freedom to fill in the blanks as they'd like, enriching their attachment to and involvement with the characters. In Mass Effect, my Shepherd is probably different to your Shepherd because of the way I customised her appearance and the choices I made in the course of the game, but Final Fantasy VII - whether intentionally or not - leveraged the most powerful customisation engine that exists: the human imagination.

Incidentally, this is a large part of the reason I didn't like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Here we had a film that made Final Fantasy VII's characters suddenly startlingly realistic. The film told me what these characters looked like, how they sounded, and what their mannerisms were. It not only didn't allow me to use my imagination to fill in the blanks; it trampled roughshod over all the investment I'd put into engaging with the characters in the game. This is also why I never want to see a remake of Final Fantasy VII. I can't help but feel a remake would take a game beloved precisely for its abstraction and fill in the blanks for you, denying you the power of your imagination. Even Cloud's appearance in Kingdom Hearts - itself hardly a paragon of detail - felt like it diminished the opportunity for engagement.

In recent years, another game used abstraction to allow the player to fill in the blanks with their imagination, and its characters were beloved, if not by so many, at least as much as were Final Fantasy VII's. I speak, of course, of Thomas Was Alone, where, forget double-digit polygons, each character was one polygon. And although the game was fully voiced, it was narrated by King of Lovely himself Danny Wallace, rather than acted by an ensemble cast, which again took a step back from the level of direct representation. Mike Bithell has done (I assume) intentionally what Squaresoft did (I assume) accidentally, and created characters who invite the player to engage with them by using their imaginations to fill in the blanks, thereby creating involvement and personal meaningfulness.

This may also go some way to explaining the appeal of anime-influenced visual styles. Granted, that particular art style is not to everyone's taste, but to those who like it, it appeals not just because it has more kawaiis per desu than any other style, but also because anime is abstraction-in-a-box. It is a style that - at first through necessity, and then through design - has been honed to encourage viewers to get personally involved by filling in the blanks with their imagination.

All of this is not to say that abstraction is all you need. There is an art to abstraction. In Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story, for example, it is important that Hyun-ae and Mute are abstract enough such that you can engage with them using your imagination, but not so abstract that they can be whoever you want them to be. This was writ large in the sequel, Hate Plus. Mute died, which evoked similar feelings in fans as Aeris' death in Final Fantasy VII, but whereas in Final Fantasy VII, Aeris was taken from you by the big bad, Mute's death was a suicide. An act of her own agency transgressed the mental image of the character players had themselves built up. This was used to great effect, but it could just as easily (and was, by some quarters) be seen as a betrayal. "What has Sephiroth done to my Aeris?" became "What has Christine done to my Mute?" The dynamic of attachment and loss is incredibly powerful - too powerful for some players to deal with - but would have been a damp squib without the abstraction that allowed that attachment to form in the first place.

There is a storytelling principle called "show, don't tell", but I feel it's mis-worded, particularly for such a visual medium as video games. It's very easy for a video game developer to say, "Well, we are showing, and with tens of thousands of polygons in HD no less!" Yes, that's true, but the spirit of "show, don't tell" might better be explained as "imply, don't make explicit". Janet Murray, in her seminal book on interactive storytelling, Hamlet on the Holodeck, partially rejects Samuel Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief", preferring instead the term "active creation of belief", and this is, I think, where I'm coming from. Creation of belief that does not engage the imagination is inherently less active.

If you're telling a story, and especially if you're making a video game, the onus is on you to give your audience something to do. And that goes beyond pressing buttons to control the action - your game's interaction with the player doesn't begin and end at their fingertips. It is, and must be, interacting with the player's imagination.