Let’s talk for a moment, if we will, about different experiences of content. Think, for a moment, about your favourite movie. Since your opinions are clearly going to be objectively correct in this case, you’re obviously thinking about A Goofy Movie*.
Now then, imagine if you had the experience of watching A Goofy Movie and found, after a while, that someone you knew hated that movie. And they hated it, because, in their words, nothing happens. What!? But A Goofy Movie is a modern masterpiece, you think, knowing in your heart of hearts that it’s objectively good. What sort of zany thing happened to your friend, what damaged them that kept them from enjoying this movie for what it was?
There’s this scene in A Goofy Movie where Max and Goofy get in a car and back down a driveway. And that scene takes maybe a third of a second. Except your friend refers to it as that endless scene. And with some more probing it turns out, in their experience of A Goofy Movie, that that scene, that one scene, took nine hours.
That’s weird. That’s fucking weird. And now I pull back the veil and reveal that I’m not talking about movies, but rather about videogames. We have a set of expectations of media critique and conversation that consider games as very similar experiences to books and movies. There are ideas we have – sanctity of spoilers, for example – that are born out of inheriting some of the worst traits of critique of books and movies. Some of our commentary on movies is weird too because of this whole idea of spoilers and the sanctity of the experience, but whatever.
This also puts reviewers in this awkward place where they have to talk about the thing, without talking about the thing in a way that you’ll know what’s in the thing, because that might ruin your experience of the thing, as if purity of information is the crucial element. There’s this idea of where do spoiler start? Back in the days of VHS-swapping anime, there was a meme that Trigun was an anime so laced in informational depth that literally its name was a massive spoiler, and saying anything that was in it was spoiling the series for someone.
In your copy of the movie, that scene barely took a third of a second. I guess my point is, if someone has a bad time playing a videogame, and that colours their opinion of the videogame, it’s not a commentary on your experience. And people need to be able to have the freedom to talk about their experiences.
* it’s entirely okay to not like A Goofy Movie. I’ve never even seen it.