Tag Archives: criticism

I believe in sitting down to explore your own feelings on a game, both good and bad. In this essay I do just that with Baldur’s Gate 3 to examine my own dislike of it and how the game’s mechanics meshed poorly with how I personally approach games.

Frustration in games is something we all deal with. And our first instinct is to blame the game for that frustration – it’s a problem of design. However, it is worth examining how we as players can create frustration by the choices we make in playing a game. In this essay I examine some ways in which players can play in “unfun” ways, and how we can start to identify and address those patterns in ourselves.

In commemoration of three years of blogging on this site, I reflect on the nature of systems – the interaction of different rules and mechanics within a game. I provide an argument that isolating any particular mechanic and critiquing it misses out on important context that could – if we were to act on such criticism – ruin the rest of a game. It’s only through an understanding of how everything works together that we can properly identify problems and solutions.

Most of us who consume games media are familiar with reviews, and as a consequence review scores. The numbers attached to a game tell us both a lot and not very much about that game. And yet people can often put a lot of stock into those scores, especially getting angry if a beloved game doesn’t get a stellar score from every reviewer. In this essay I explore review scores and how they are ultimately meaningless – they don’t really convey the information that they claim to.

Have you ever finished a game, and as the credits scroll by think about every bit you liked and disliked and try to review the game for yourself? There’s a fair chance the answer is “no.” And yet, if you’ve ever watched someone else play a video game, they will almost certainly do precisely that. In this essay I intend to explore that particular facet of performance and the possible pitfalls that we can run into when analyzing a game we’ve literally just completed.

We all have games that are old favorites. The games we grew up with. But how do we look back on those games? How are we supposed to engage in criticism of those games, given both the age of the game and what the game itself means to us? This essay explores some concepts of criticism as they relate specifically to older games, and how problems of nostalgia can impact our ability to discuss these games.

For people who play video games a lot, it can be common to run into games we don’t like. But how often do we keep playing those games once we realize we aren’t having fun? I offer a defense of playing bad games as a way of helping us to build up critical skills.