Pity the modern critic. The appetite and respect for authority that once existed now seem like relics in an age of Metacritics, Tomatometers, blogs, podcasts, walls, forums and Twitter. And some critics aren’t taking their devaluation all that well.
Before the internet revolution, the masses could only express their opinion in a crude, binary fashion: by spending their time and/or money on a particular cultural product. A handful of people might get a letter to the editor published, or participate in a man-on-the-street interview. But for everyone else, conversations surrounding, say, movies, were either monologues (the critic speaks, everyone else reads/watches/listens) or small group dialogues.
The internet diminished the standing of critics in multiple ways. The local dominance of individual critics was taken away when people became free to access reviews from across the country and around the world. Aggregators reduced the influence of any given critic, as Metacritic explains on its About page: “Distill[ing] the opinions of the most respected critics writing online and in print to a single number”; now what matters is not any individual opinion, but the consensus. And the average person could now unleash his or her inner critic by putting up a site or blog, or posting comments – in many cases, right below the writings of professional critics.
It’s the unintended consequences of parts two and three of this equation – the elevation of critical consensus over individual opinion and the democratising of critical expression – that have some critics increasingly concerned when it leads to attempts by commenters to transform consensus into orthodoxy and enforce it upon individual critics. As I write this, the most recent example has been the response to US television host Abbie Heppe’s review of the Wii game Metroid: Other M, which prompted a firestorm over her giving it a score of 2/5 and calling out what she saw as a retrograde take on the game’s heroine Samus Aran. This prompted blogger Michael Abbott to write the following, in a post titled ‘Backlash’: “I’m struck by this brouhaha, not because it’s new or especially rancourous… But it does illustrate what happens when a writer for a high-profile outlet chooses to address a game critically – I mean when he or she functions as a critic instead of simply a reviewer. All too often the backlash is severe and ugly. It suggests that, for a sizable portion of the gaming audience, genuine criticism is perceived as inappropriate, unnecessary, or even unprofessional.”
Of course, this is not just restricted to games. The strenuously iconoclastic film critic Armond White, whose regular and acidic departures from the critical consensus has made him infamous among a portion of online movie fans, described the situation thus in his essay ‘Discourteous Discourse’: “Consider how film criticism now works: Publicists select favourable media outlets to create advance buzz (embargoing others) and then, with frat-boy mentality in effect, no one else in cyberspace dares dissent from the hype… These new social networks overturn the informed judgments and occupational decorum of journalist-critics, substituting the glib enthusiasms and nondiscriminating devotion of apparently juvenile cliques. Worse yet, this schoolyard style of peer group fanaticism has devolved into all-out, ugly intimidation: internet bullying.”
White takes the worst of the internet to represent the whole. But journalist-critics are not and were never the only people capable of informed judgments and decorum. The intemperate and the ugly should be faced down, but no critic worth his or salt would be swayed by the mob, just as the objects of their derision should not mistake the mob for the majority.
In that regard, I prefer to focus on the best of the internet rather than the worst. It has enabled other thoughtful, considered and knowledgeable voices that would never previously have been heard to attract an audience to take game reviewing away from solely a consumer guide function and explore games from as varied a perspective as other media. Where professional reviewers have to be generalists, knowing a little bit about every genre, the internet makes it possible for critics to specialise in certain genres or franchises, and attract an audience looking for that kind of specificity. This should be celebrated, not dismissed along with the loud and the crude.
Some of this may be specific to the individual medium as well; in other words, I can see videogame criticism becoming even more reliant on what the internet makes possible than, say movies. If you take franchises like Call Of Duty and Halo, where far more time is spent playing multiplayer than campaign, how much does it make sense for reviews to devote even half of their available space to singleplayer?
We’ve still just scratched the surface of what the internet can do for criticism. And it’s too important to leave to the mob.
N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com, or read and follow all N'Gai's columns on his topic page.