[Lumines, which I've begun to play lately despite embarrassing level of suckage]I continue to believe that games have far more in common with music than with any other media, in terms of how the biz is experienced and discussed -- regardless of how useful the film and game connection can sometimes be.
I started to realize this when I began, for the first time, to really take stock of how broad the audience for games really is, and what the culture is like far beyond the audience that reads video game websites. In particular, learning how opaque and generally useless most people find game reviews was the catalyst -- because the attitudes I observed for them eerily mirrored my own feelings about music reviews.
Having recently moved to Brooklyn, it's been tough to avoid becoming a music hobbyist, and I've taken much more notice of local music, independent bands and new acts than I did previously. And yet, is it really possible to be "content complete" in one's knowledge of music? No matter how much I listen to, I'll never hear everything, not even within a given niche that I prefer.
Some tunes are artful, others are formulaic -- and while to an extent there is a "right" way to play an instrument, there's such a thing as "bad" singing, it's ultimately a fully subjective experience, with such a broad spectrum of variety that it's hard to judge the quality or appeal of any given song or band on a consistent scale.
Further, any given song has such a complex balance of elements at work -- there's technique, and in many cases technology; there's innovation and creativity, there's melody, lyrics, to name just a few -- and all these elements must combine seamlessly.
The "Objectivity" Issue
So as with games, music's very hard to judge "objectively", because of that weird marriage of subjective elements with technical ones that can be said to "succeed" or "fail" -- and like games, the selection's so broad and so continuous that there is a need for a prevailing critical opinion to help audiences shape their listening habits.
I used to have trouble reading music reviews, actually, because they didn't really tell me anything. High-level music reviews of the Pitchfork ilk are incomprehensible to casual listeners, requiring readers to not only understand the finer points of the art of music, but to care. I used to scan through them frustratedly, and huff: "But this doesn't tell me if I'll like this band."
Sound familiar?
Reviews that compared artists to other artists were slightly more helpful -- but it reminds me of the conflict we as game reviewers often have as we're pressed to weigh each game solely on its own merits. It's considered weak to compare games to other games, isn't it?
My reaction in general to music reviews was so like to the complaints I usually hear about the inadequacy of game reviews -- a long-overdue revelation!
But Will I Like This?
Now that I have a slightly larger appetite for music and a somewhat further evolved interest in it than I did, say, a year ago, I find I'm reading music reviews more often -- even though they still can offer me only clues onto whether a band is worth investigating and can't tell me whether or not I'll like it.Notably, in our internet age, I can scrounge up a couple tracks by the artist under consideration and have a listen before buying an album -- but there's not always a way to check out a $60 game without going all-in. Hopefully the rise of digital distro and the increasingly common pre-release demo offerings will help evolve this a little.
Most often, though, I read album reviews to validate my own opinion on things I already own and listen to. I read to find out from an expert if my taste is good, or to look for articulation on why I like this or that, to stash information, descriptive adjectives, that might help me choose another artist in the future. And I believe that's what the majority of people use video game reviews for, too.
That doesn't make them useless, though -- or inadequate. Perhaps, with games as with music, it's just a small percentage of the audience that reads them, the hardest-core adopters -- but the impact and influence of tastemakers on the music biz can't be denied, despite the democratic nature of music.
And again, the score comes into play -- a music review analyzes such a range of factors, some personal and subjective and others not, that the number feels necessary to unify the text into a single, understandable rating. The assignment of a number helps readers take what's essentially a stranger's opinion and distill it into a ranking they can weigh against the strength of their own sentiment.
It Totally Speaks To Me, Man
Speaking of sentiment, another point of comparison for music and games lies in just how strongly people personalize them. I think this happens for slightly different reasons -- music's such a primal part of culture, which leads lots of enthusiasts to adopt their musical taste as a form of self-expression, making it personal.
Games are very experiential too, and people seem to take game reviews just as personally -- I think this might be rooted in games' development as a misunderstood "niche" medium, where the audience responded by adopting a defense of gaming as part of their identity. Our unheard-of, unappreciated video game favorites become as important to us as the undiscovered indie band is to the passionate music fan.
The similarity between music and games extends far beyond the way we cover them and respond to them -- for one thing, consider the spectrum of huge-manufactured, precisely engineered formula hits versus independent cult favorite acts. Both games and music have venerated classics that have been knocked off again and again through the ages until they've become memetic. Music has a huge schism between its mainstream and its indie, where the latter's considered more sincere than the former, just as we've begun to see happening in games.
Agree, disagree? What are some other ways you think the game industry might be like the music industry -- or some ways you think it's not?
