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.

This is just my opinion.

Leigh Alexander wrote a thing about subjectivity and objectivity in media in general and games in particular on her blog. As someone whose day to day activity involves doing science to stories, I am somewhat horrified by the blanket statement that "objectivity is a ridiculous notion," although I don't deny that it's a difficult question. We need objective measurements because the only way we can get technological or theoretical progress in the medium is if we can (somewhat) objectively justify that the development of that progress is worthwhile.

However, that, I suspect, is the exception that proves the rule (although I think "the exception that proves the rule" is a ridiculous notion, so what does that say?). Technology and theory aside, I do agree with the sentiment.

There is a saying: "There is no accounting for taste." I think that saying has lost its true meaning through overuse as an oblique way of ironically suggesting that someone else's tastes are 'wrong'. But I think we need the unironic meaning of the phrase back. There is no accounting for taste. We need to understand that there is no need to defend liking something, nor is it necessary (or even desirable, since it marks you out as a bit of a fuckwit) to rationalise your dislike of something in an attempt to make it seem more authoritative.

It took me a while to realise I have no need to defend liking Dragon Age II.

I encountered such a person, today, on an internet comment thread. It was the typical kind of thing: presenting a lens of preference and trying to pass it off as an objective truth. A value judgement masquerading as a theoretical concept. When I challenged them on it, by building an argument to the contrary, what followed was a cyclical litany of ever angrier bare assertions, circular logic, red herrings and fifty-foot strawmen. The kind of thing a veteran arguer can spot a mile off, and not something that really lends any credibility to the argument. In the end, I got bored and stopped arguing, because I went in expecting an interesting theoretical discussion, but found myself talking in circles with someone who just wanted to legitimise his own subjective opinion in just about the most pathetic way possible.

That's not to say we shouldn't talk about why we like or dislike something, of course. That discussion is valuable, and the ancillary ideas that come out of such a discussion can be very interesting. But that's only possible if neither party is intent on 'winning'. Other than in certain specific cases, dialogue is not a competition.

Tempting as it is to attribute this concept of "right and wrong" opinions to some innate competitiveness of gamers, though, I think its roots lie in a far uglier side of gamers, a word that people are sick of hearing applied to gamers by now.

Entitlement.

When someone attempts to claim that their personal preference is an objective truth about gaming, what they're really saying is, "Developers should only make games that I like." Aside from the obvious statement that gaming as a medium can and should support a diverse range of experiences enjoyable by a variety of people (seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?), and the slightly-less-obvious statement that restricting the cultural breadth of games can only impoverish the medium, there's also the simpler question of how it looks. Throwing a tantrum because a developer makes a game that someone else likes doesn't really do our image as gamers any favours. Likewise if their resentment of someone else enjoying a game means that they have to loudly complain about how bad the game is (with some of the creakiest rationalisations I've seen this side of Creationism) and call people who like it dumb, well, people are going to think gamers are dumb, but rather than thinking they're dumb for liking that game, people are going to think we're dumb for having huge sticks up our arses about what other people like.

Sure, it happens in other media sometimes, but in no other medium is it as endemic as it is in gaming. This kind of behaviour is part of the reason there is even still a certain shame about being a gamer, and it's really got to stop.

Now, in order to stave off accusations of hypocrisy, I'll have to pretend I don't think there's anything it's not ok to like. No, sorry, I just can't do it.

Twilight: Not ok to like.