@Evan21 @MasterOfMordor It is pretty long I'll admit. But if you do take the time to read it, as I hope you will, I think you will come away with your eyes a bit more open to GameSpot's erratic use of their own policies, and lack of journalistic professionalism.
@shreddyz @MasterOfMordor Thank you! I appreciate the praise. Unfortunately, its hard to get the word out, so its good to see that its being read, at least by a few people. Carry the torch. Let other people know.
If what Kevin Van Ord says is true, and why shouldn’t it be since he is a Senior Editor at GameSpot, we are to believe that GameSpot views video games as an art, and as such can be reviewed on its artistic vision, morals or message. However, I put together a few points both refuting these assertions.
1.GameSpot, in its own review guidelines, mentions the word “art” only once, in the form of a medal given for artistic design, which in my humble opinion would have nothing to do with the “message” a game is trying to convey, but rather artistic graphical achievement. This is further proven by the following sentence quoted from these same guidelines: “But the medals aren't limited to facts about a game's audiovisual presentation.” Again, this DIRECTLY follows the mentioning of artistic design. To further that point, nowhere does it mention a moral code of any kind whether it be the games or the reviewers. Not only that, but please read the “Bottom Line” of their review policy: “We believe games are meant to be enjoyed, and our reviews seek to express what it is about a given game that is or isn't particularly enjoyable, entertaining, fun, amusing, interesting, memorable--any and all of these things, and more. Our philosophy is that if we succeed at reviewing each game on its own merits, against the standards of the point in time at which it was evaluated, then overall consistency of our ratings should naturally result. Ultimately, we believe that each of our reviews should be useful and engaging to you as a prospective player.” Where does a reviewers’ moral agenda fit into your “Bottom Line”? So I would say to Mr. Van Ord and the rest of the staff and management at GameSpot, if your policies have changed, update them to show them to the world, or follow them, but please stop breaking your own rules.
2.Not all games strive to put forth an artistic or moral message, just as not all movies strive to do so either. Borat cannot be put on the same level as Citizen Kane, nor should it. Beyond this comparison, we must also consider the fact that not all videogames are indie art house projects. Van Ord states that film critics do not just review costume design etc, but when a movie passes their desk that is intended to be a popcorn action flick or a raucous comedy, they do not judge it as if it is the English Patient 2. This does not hold true of your reviews, as you hold all games to some artistic vision that you have set for them. This brings me to point
3.While your guidelines state that you review a game on its own merits, this is again proven false by this review. GTAV does not strive to have a moral message. It strives to tell the story of gangsters and gang bangers and throw in a little potty humor while they are at it. While I am neither a gangster or gang banger, I would tend to doubt there is much room in that world for strong leading female characters. And getting back to films for a moment, can someone point out the strong female character in the Godfather or GoodFellas.
4.Torture is ok but misogyny isn’t. In Caro’s review for GTAV she has an entire paragraph devoted to a torture scene. However, the message from Caro at the end of that paragraph is that the game took leaps of logic with its characters, not that torture is bad or hard to watch. Yet the games misogyny is wrong and evil enough to be placed in the “Bad” section of the review, with torture decidedly missing. Heck if you look at GameSpot’s review of Hotline Miami, “gloriously violent” is a plus!
5.Kevin’s definition of objectivity is horse manure for lack of a better term. If your moral beliefs color a game to the point where it affects the score you should not be reviewing that game, period. Caro is the wrong person to review the game and whoever assigned it to her dropped the ball. It does not fit her moral code and should not be judged by someone that it was not intended for in the first place. GTAV has some juvenile humor in it, as does South Park. Many people are offended by South Park, but does that mean that say, IGN should have someone who is offended by their humor review the episodes for the site? Of course not, because there is no way that reviewer could be OBJECTIVE, they would be sitting there, angry, with a knot in their belly while they watched the show. This would be evidenced by their review, because it would be nigh impossible to remain objective. Does this remind us of anyone?
6. Objective vs. Subjective: Of course you should let readers know that a game lets you commit horrible crimes in a horrific manner, but don’t tell me that you don’t like the fact that I have the ability to torture someone in a game. Tell me that I can sleep with a stripper in GTAV, but don’t tell me that if I do I am a misogynistic monster. You can elaborate on the quality of what the game set out to do, but you should not hold all games to a moral code they never intended to keep. See the difference between objective and subjective?
7. Now this is where it gets dicey for me. I cannot believe the pompous arrogance of Van Ord telling people not to frequent GameSpot or any site in search of game reviews, because we do not agree with his polices, which as discussed are not GameSpot’s policies. As stated before, if your policies changed, state them on the website. Where is your journalistic integrity, when you cannot even follow your own made up rules? Beyond this, most websites, while having some flaws of their own, tend to keep things more objective and do not let the morals of the game, or their own conflicting morals taint their reviews. You do, you state you do, and you tell your readership to pound sand because they don’t like it. You are not a business man are you? Do the business men you work for like the fact that you break your own coda and tell your readers to screw?
8. Speaking of business men; do you think that possibly in a crazy scheme to make money, strippers and such were intentionally put into the game because it is what their audience actually wants? Or do you think that these immoral elements were added just to get on people’s nerves? Rockstar is a for profit business. All the elements of the game are put into place with the intention of being fun and making money. You cannot judge a huge commercial release with many millions of dollars on the line the same way you would judge an indie game where the developer just wanted to put his vision out there.
9. Kevin brought up some other reviews. His review of Happy Feet for example, he wasn't a fan of the phonetically spelled subtitles and their sporadic use. I ask you, 1. Did it lower the games score? 2. How big do you think the games QC budget was? 3. Do you think that was on the top of the list on fixes on a game you gave a 3.9? And in regards to ALL games mentioned in Van Ords’ post only one of them listed any kind of moral issue in the “bad” section of the review, and that only said “weird dabbling in morality". So these moral infractions couldn't have been all that bad. Certainly not on the level of what GTAV has done, since it is "profoundly misogynistic; right Caro?
10. Know your audience GameSpot. I am not sure because I am not privy to such metrics, but I imagine most of your audience in male, straight and younger than middle aged. Now I hate to tell you, but that audience actually likes scantily clad women. Right or wrong, that is what it is. As a game journalism website, keep your opinions on the morality of games to editorials. If you want to be a niche site that discusses the artistic merits of games or stands up for minorities, the LGBT community, the disabled, or anything else, go for it, more power to you, but do not masquerade as something you are not, and when you are called out you just tell your readers to leave.
11. Maybe your ads should change as well. If you are so against the misogyny in GTAV, why take a paycheck from a company that gets its money from links like “50 hottest female athletes”. Little double standard?
So there you have it; my rebuttal to Kevin Van Ord’s post. Hope it clarifies a few things that were said by Kevin.
If what Kevin Van Ord says is true, and why shouldn’t it be since he is a Senior Editor at GameSpot, we are to believe that GameSpot views video games as an art, and as such can be reviewed on its artistic vision, morals or message. However, I put together a few points both refuting these assertions.
1.GameSpot, in its own review guidelines, mentions the word “art” only once, in the form of a medal given for artistic design, which in my humble opinion would have nothing to do with the “message” a game is trying to convey, but rather artistic graphical achievement. This is further proven by the following sentence quoted from these same guidelines: “But the medals aren't limited to facts about a game's audiovisual presentation.” Again, this DIRECTLY follows the mentioning of artistic design. To further that point, nowhere does it mention a moral code of any kind whether it be the games or the reviewers. Not only that, but please read the “Bottom Line” of their review policy: “We believe games are meant to be enjoyed, and our reviews seek to express what it is about a given game that is or isn't particularly enjoyable, entertaining, fun, amusing, interesting, memorable--any and all of these things, and more. Our philosophy is that if we succeed at reviewing each game on its own merits, against the standards of the point in time at which it was evaluated, then overall consistency of our ratings should naturally result. Ultimately, we believe that each of our reviews should be useful and engaging to you as a prospective player.” Where does a reviewers’ moral agenda fit into your “Bottom Line”? So I would say to Mr. Van Ord and the rest of the staff and management at GameSpot, if your policies have changed, update them to show them to the world, or follow them, but please stop breaking your own rules.
2.Not all games strive to put forth an artistic or moral message, just as not all movies strive to do so either. Borat cannot be put on the same level as Citizen Kane, nor should it. Beyond this comparison, we must also consider the fact that not all videogames are indie art house projects. Van Ord states that film critics do not just review costume design etc, but when a movie passes their desk that is intended to be a popcorn action flick or a raucous comedy, they do not judge it as if it is the English Patient 2. This does not hold true of your reviews, as you hold all games to some artistic vision that you have set for them. This brings me to point
3.While your guidelines state that you review a game on its own merits, this is again proven false by this review. GTAV does not strive to have a moral message. It strives to tell the story of gangsters and gang bangers and throw in a little potty humor while they are at it. While I am neither a gangster or gang banger, I would tend to doubt there is much room in that world for strong leading female characters. And getting back to films for a moment, can someone point out the strong female character in the Godfather or GoodFellas.
4.Torture is ok but misogyny isn’t. In Caro’s review for GTAV she has an entire paragraph devoted to a torture scene. However, the message from Caro at the end of that paragraph is that the game took leaps of logic with its characters, not that torture is bad or hard to watch. Yet the games misogyny is wrong and evil enough to be placed in the “Bad” section of the review, with torture decidedly missing. Heck if you look at GameSpot’s review of Hotline Miami, “gloriously violent” is a plus!
5.Kevin’s definition of objectivity is horse manure for lack of a better term. If your moral beliefs color a game to the point where it affects the score you should not be reviewing that game, period. Caro is the wrong person to review the game and whoever assigned it to her dropped the ball. It does not fit her moral code and should not be judged by someone that it was not intended for in the first place. GTAV has some juvenile humor in it, as does South Park. Many people are offended by South Park, but does that mean that say, IGN should have someone who is offended by their humor review the episodes for the site? Of course not, because there is no way that reviewer could be OBJECTIVE, they would be sitting there, angry, with a knot in their belly while they watched the show. This would be evidenced by their review, because it would be nigh impossible to remain objective. Does this remind us of anyone?
Just because your sensibilities are offended does not mean you should impact the review or the score in a negative way, and if you were offended, the game should have been passed to another reviewer. For example, if you were offended by gun violence would you play Call of Duty? If asked to play the game for review, would you slam it for being violent? Would you damage its score? Was COD:MW2's score impacted by the No Russian level?
What I am trying to say is that you do not have a right to lower a score because a game does what it sets out to do as long as it does it well. If you do, then you are not doing your job in a professional manner.
Caro, I have a question for you regarding your review and your views on criticism in general. Isn't it the job of a professional journalist/critic to be objective in their writing and not subjective, unless you are writing an editorial. Now a review, in my opinion is not an editorial and therefore should not be colored by your own beliefs or morality. Do you disagree with this? Do you believe that you, as a fairly powerful figure in gaming journalism, should use that power, in your reviews, to push your own beliefs upon your readers and potentially negatively effect the potential sales of a game in the process?
If devs thought there was money in changing, they would change, it is simple as that. And lowering a game score because it offends your sensibilities while otherwise being damn near perfect is wrong. If you are a professional journalist, you should not be using your power as such to push your own agenda. That is unprofessional.
@grey_fox1984 @MasterOfMordor Well thank you, I appreciate that. I will say that you are wrong about me. I feel no discomfort at all with the idea of transgender. The issue as I see it is that as you say, she points out her identity. On a gaming podcast it should only be pointed out when directly relevant to the subject matter. She does it at every point she can. There is the difference and there is my issue.
She feels a need to bring it up fairly frequently, and when I say something about that fact, I am lambasted as sounding intolerant, as if I can't bear to think about a transgender person. That couldn't be further from the truth. However, if you want to be treated as "normal" (whatever that actually means), then act it. I don't bring up my sexuality or the fact that I am a man very often, nor does Tom, nor does Kevin. I can almost guarantee that if i had the time to go back to each podcast Caro would be the front runner by a wide margin when it comes to bringing up such topics as sex, sexuality and gender.
All I am saying is that it can/should be toned down a bit on a gaming podcast, not because I have a personal issue with the topic, but because this is a gaming podcast. If topics of sex, sexuality and gender are irrelevant to 90% of gamers in 90% of games 90% of the time, why do I hear about them in 90%+ of GameSpot Gameplay podcasts? I am sure there are podcasts for those topics to be voiced to the heavens, this is not one of them. If it is, I would like one of the staff to let me know, and I will find other gaming podcasts, where games and gaming news are at the forefront of every episode.
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