omnybus replied to your post “Things that bug me: How a lot of critics come off as really tone-deaf...”
Well, first off I must clarify that at least a good majority of the fan backlash towards criticism is overreacting at best. Like, you’ve got your legitimately full of shit snobbish takes from people like Liz Ryerson or Yussef Cole, but most of it is more questioning than the flat out condemnation.
That being said, honestly I’d say that the constant hemming and hawing over review scores of games is a big one. IE, people getting angry over their favorites getting lower scores or “bad” games getting scored higher than “good” ones.
And, as an aside, I really fucking hate the belief that games; and in particular what games we consider “important” should be scraped of all pulp influences before we decide they’re valid. IE, the people who say gaming has no Citizen Kane it’s all just dumb fluff, which is why I tend to be so harsh on people who treat non-”art” games as holding the medium back.
While these reactions are wrong; especially in the horrifying extremes they go to, a lot of people dissecting why point to some pathology but never point to the way fans are constantly; silently told “Hey, if what you like goes out of favor, it will disappear!”
And the worst part is that that’s happened in cases that aren’t based around overreaction. For Exhibit A, see the death of 3d Platformers, JRPGs and survival horror in the Xbox360/PS3-era of games.
Like, my issue is less addressing the fact that they’re overreacting and more that we’re not accurately tackling why in a way that actually engages with the public to make change.
(Well, except for Jim Sterling who actually does a really good job at advocating for the audience/against Capital without being reactionary, but I digress)
We as critics really need to start talking about how “Stop liking what I don’t like” is less a question of individual evil and more a question of the perverse indoctrination regarding production economics.
Like, there’s a good reason Shaun of Shaun and Jen was immensely right when he called the “gamers vs reviewers” dynamic “a crude proxy for class”...
