I wrote about review writing the other day and I’m going to write about personal essays now. I hope this will still be interesting, because I’m taking just about the same approach as I took to the Dead Space 3 review. I’m a creative writer, so to me, everything looks like a craft problem, just as to academics, everything looks like a theory problem. I understand that theory is important, but so is craft, and since I have no understanding of what is right or wrong in terms of theory, all I can talk about is how clearly and effectively ideas are being conveyed through writing. For me, this is actually where personal essays break down whether they’re about video games or anything else, and if I had to define a problem in the way we write about games, I’d say it’s the connection between the personal and the games (or whatever the subject is) isn’t clearly established. There are plenty of personal essays (if you think about referring to them as confessional essays or confessional writing, please contact me immediately so I may imprison you in crystal for a thousand years) that contain very interesting ideas that never fully come across to the reader because their metaphors are buried and unclear and I want to hopefully help explain how that works.

Although this may get far too meta for anyone’s taste but mine, I’m going to look at a personal essay that critiques personal essays, Joel Goodwin’s post on Electron Dance called “The Ethics of Selling Children.” Though I like its attempt to open a conversation on a serious subject, I have problems understanding its extended metaphor, which is that a certain kind of personal writing can be compared to selling a child for profit. I say a certain kind of personal writing, because while the author distinguishes by example works he finds uncomfortable from those he doesn’t, we the readers never get to understand what his criteria are or the reasoning or feelings behind them.

We start off with his negative reaction to an issue of Kill Screen which dealt specifically with intimacy and personal stories:

“It made me uncomfortable. This urge to put such private details out there felt so alien and, as a reader, I was duped into prying. There were not just limits to how much I wanted to tell people about myself, but also limits about how much I wanted to know about others.”

Here are my questions: How was Goodwin ‘duped’ into prying? What about the writing made him feel this way? If there are limits to what he wants to reveal and what he wants to know, what are they? Why does he draw the line there? Where is the line anyway?  I feel like Goodwin is assuming I will agree with him, but I don’t exactly. I’m a different human being with a different philosophy of life. I may never agree with him. Still, failing that, he can clearly and honestly explain to me what he believes and why he believes it, which is the closest anyone will ever get to writing something that might change someone else’s mind. I rely on him to convey or explain his feelings in some way, so that even if I disagree I have a reason to follow him.

“I confessed and was rewarded. It is what the internet hungers for and this taste of traffic persuaded me that personal stories are where fame is to be found.”

Here Goodwin’s language suggests, by depicting readers as a faceless networked maw, that these tastes are unwholesome. I am ready to believe that and I find his metaphor conveys that feeling well, but I don’t see the reasoning behind it. By way of counter example, there are times in which my personal writing have felt, far from the violation Goodwin continuously suggests, like I was finally able to be myself. Clearly this form of writing brings Goodwin misery, and he only does it because he feels forced. Why does he feel forced? What about it feels violating? I don’t share his experience, so it is the task of the writer to draw me towards understanding his feelings, even if I still don’t agree. His language disparages the subject but doesn’t explain where that feeling comes from, so he’s sort of just attacking a faceless target and making that attack acceptable because he has made it faceless (a sort of circular rhetoric). I’m not asking for a logical argument, just an understanding of where he is coming from. With the language the author uses I am guided into his reluctance at writing with emotion and his trepidation in doing so. “I was encouraged to write with emotion wherever possible” he say again, but I’m just not clear why looking for emotional connection is a bad thing.

“We treat these confessionals like videos of a cat doing funny things on a printer, something to consume then throw away. It may be YouTube comedy gold but we rarely stick around and subscribe to the uploader’s channel.

…

Still, I hope he is okay.”

I’m not sure I understand this. Goodwin appears to feel just reading a personal essay should not be the end of the reader/writer relationship, but I’m not sure why. Should readers care more about writers? What about writers that feel happy not wondering if their readers like  them personally or not? Why isn’t it sufficient? What sort of relationship should readers have with writers? Is the problem that our engagement with subjects is not honest enough? That we don’t truly care about strangers, just stories about their lives? Is that bad? The author implies, with this last sentence, that he, at least, does truly care. But I don’t know what that means or why his emotions are any different than the faceless maw of the internet. How does he now that they not truly care? What makes him different? What is the difference? Does it matter? 

“Susan Shapiro is an author and a journalism professor. She has been instructing her students to indulge in confessional writing, no matter who it hurts. In fact, if your writing hurts someone, you are doing your job well. Recently she wrote about her approach to writing in a New York Times opinion piece.”

“This brings me to my one caveat: while readers will applaud your brave, tumultuous disclosures, your relatives won’t. The first piece you write that your family hates means you found your voice, I warn my classes. If you want to be popular with your parents and siblings, try cookbooks.”

Do not just use yourself. Use friends and family if it can sell your writing.

Nolan Hamilton wrote an acerbic response on Gawker titled “Journalism is not Narcissism”:

“Writing about yourself can be part of a balanced journalism diet, but it sure ain’t a whole fucking meal. By plundering your own life for material, you are not investing in yourself as a writer; you’re spending the principal.”

This seems to be a core point of the essay, but the quotes don’t speak for themselves and Goodwin doesn’t clearly explain what I am supposed to bring from this discussion and then relate to his wider claims. Is the problem with confessional writing that it might hurt my family? Nolan’s metaphor also bothers me, for sentence and craft reasons: “You’re spending the principal” he says, but how? I’m not being purposefully difficult here. My life memories are not money. They are not gone when I write about them. So what exactly am I losing by talking about them? Is it the family relationships at stake that is morally indefensible? If so, why should that be anyone’s concern but the writer’s? What if the family I alienate is full of terrible people who abused me? I don’t understand because the author drops a metaphor and then doesn’t connect it to the rest of his larger points. An author can say “X is like Y” all he wants, but it doesn’t mean anything unless the metaphor is explained. A great metaphor builds both subjects up; a poor one loses the reader. I feel this way about a lot of personal writing, and it doesn’t require that much more explanation to clue me in.

“Just as I was about to send it, I realised I was selling my son for internet traffic and deleted the mail.”

There’s the extended metaphor again, in which Goodwin frames including his son in a trailer for Proteus as selling him. The author expresses how troubled he is by this, but does not frame it in a way I can empathize with. I can understand that someone might see this as wrong, but the author doesn’t tell me what the exact nature and texture of this wrongness is, and just as importantly, doesn’t show how this can be likened unto personal writing (or a particular kind of personal writing, the distinctions between the two I also do not understand).

Maybe this sounds dumb but I’m not sure if including his son’s voice in a trailer for Proteus is a bad thing or if it counts as “selling a child.” I could turn the TV to any given station and see kids being “sold” all over the place and I sort of take it for granted. Of course I can be convinced that this is a problem; it bothers me too. But the author must still do the work of explaining to me why this is a bad thing instead of assuming it will be obvious to me. Because it’s not just about the fact that it’s wrong, it’s how and why it’s wrong. That’s the real core of an essay; the understanding and exploration, not the recitation of (assumed) fact. The specific way, unique to the author, in which this act is transgressive is also necessary for us to connect this to the larger metaphor he’s attempting to use to connect to personal writing. It’s called “The Ethics of Selling Children”; the larger metaphor is that selling children is the same as a specific (but not clearly defined) kind of personal writing. So I’m not sure exactly what this kind of personal writing is (other than the kind that makes the author uncomfortable) but I know that it is like selling children.

That is another difficult point; I also don’t understand what the differences are between the kinds of personal writing are author likes and the kinds he dislikes. Goodwin does not fully commit to an explicit definition, which makes the essay frustrating and elusive, which I will go as far as to say is my personal problem with personal writing, which is to say it’s not a problem with the form or medium, but simply a problem with how it is written and how an author hasn’t done the work of connecting one metaphor to another.  What is this particular kind of personal writing that makes the author uncomfortable, and why should it also make me uncomfortable? 

“But it does not exorcise away the murky moral maze of confessional blogging that can become an addiction – for both writers and readers. How much of yourself are you willing to give away? What about those other people who may not have wanted to be sold for your benefit?”

These are interesting questions but I think I need to have some sort of answer to them, especially since they are followed by examples of essays that the author does feel are both personal and “moral” (or good) but there is still no clear difference between essays he likes and essays he doesn’t like, or essays that hurt people and essays that don’t. There is a hint that he finds the subject matter of essays he doesn’t like unsettling because they are too personal. I wonder what subjects he considers too personal and why. What might be the consequences of NOT talking about difficult subjects, such as Brendon Keogh’s anorexia? That’s a question that pop immediately into my mind when he argues that it shouldn’t be, seemingly without an understanding of why anyone would think otherwise.

Traditionally I suppose stories about abuse and sex and personal suffering are considered too personal, exploitative, obscene. I wonder then what the larger cultural implications are for having those subjects considered taboo while others are not, and what sorts of authors and writers and subjects that sort of writing favors. So I think it absolutely critical for the author to articulate just why, exactly, this “deeply personal” writing makes him uncomfortable. 

I can tell that this particular essay is thinking the point out and that the author might not have any answers, but the work I am asking for does not depend on having answers, just being clear about what the questions are. I can recognize an attempt at connect on the page and this author seems to be avoiding an explicit connection. The essay is I think meant to vaguely hint at wrongness in personal writing without stating outright what the problem was. This form could work very well if I understood specifically the feelings the author was trying to work through, and if the author feels like he can’t come to an exact conclusion, why that is and what is still unresolved. Even essays that are ephemeral have to be ephemeral in a specific and clear way (think to E.B. White shouting in his eponymous writing guide: “Be obscure CLEARLY! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand). If the author wants to subtly imply a problem and hasn’t yet completely figured out his own feelings that is certainly okay; what I am to gather from this essay is that a certain kind of writing is both exploitative and discomforting. Yet I don’t have the information to understand why the author feels that way, and so I can’t engage with his treatment of the subject or respond to it. 

I’m nearly done with a meaningless MFA in nonfiction creative writing, so to me, every problem looks like a line level or form problem. It’s difficult for me to see things from the academic side of things in which high level theoretical issues are involved at every level of discussion. What I can do, though, is ask whether or not I understand an essay and how it has done the work to reach that conclusion. I picked on this article because it was the opening of the conversations on personal writing and I thought it would make sense to go back to the source. I apologize to Joel Goodwin for writing this essay; I am twice as guilty of every sin outlined in it. But I like personal writing and think that, like our problems with reviews, there are some serious craft level problems that we should not fail to neglect as we discuss high level theory.

Instead, here is the only advice that is ever given in creative writing programs that ever has the merest hint of objectivity or universal truth: you can write whatever you can get away with. I don’t think that I can be convinced that some topics are off limits, but I am really fascinated about reading the reasoning behind that philosophy and I can get a lot out of it as long as I can understand.

I don’t think it does and I don’t think that the very nature of what a review should do is at stake either. I think a legitimate critique of a review is derailed by high level discussion that masks a pretty big problem in games journalism which is: never actually saying anything ever.

Here is what happened: Bennett Foddy called out Arthur Gies of Polygon for a poorly chosen sentence in his Dead Space 3 review and Arthur Gies told Foddy to read the rest of the article. Then they debated the nature of what a review “means” and what games get to be art. It isn’t a bad discussion (though it might be a useless one) but what I’m going to do instead is forget the rest of the debate and instead read those 1800 other words in the article apart from the sentence Foddy criticized, and see if, they contain the meaning the sentence “but the new crafting system and bigger, more open level structure join co-op to make Dead Space 3 one of the best action games in years” lacks. Gies told Foddy “put bluntly, if you’re saying i didn’t back up my opinion, i’m saying you’re wrong.” I think Gies in fact does not back up most of his statements about the game and the review suffers for it. I am going to spend this essay picking apart the article and I’m pretty sure that Arthur Gies will now hate me forever and I’ll be banned from the games industry, but here it goes.

Foddy said he rejected the “fundamentally mechanistic” criteria of Gies’s review. I’m not exactly sure what “mechanistic” means, but I think criteria based on mechanics are just fine. I don’t think Gies’s review adheres to a mechanistic criteria (link to the article there, but I’ll be quoting it a lot), if mechanistic means talking about the game mechanics and, more importantly, how they work and why they are in the game and how they elicit reactions from the players, what those reactions are, and how successful and original they are at doing that. Oh, just replace “reactions” with “fun” if you’re the sort who tends to not think of games in other terms, but I think Dead Space is a rare exception of a game that we can pretty clearly say is at least somewhat also about eliciting fear responses from the player. Though Gies says that most games are about nothing more than fun, and though I completely agree, not all fun looks or feels exactly the same. His review certainly reflects this sensibility as well, and I’m sure he wouldn’t say that crafting and shooting limbs elicits the same “fun” response. If it did, no video game would be different than any other. Anyways, I’m going to pull apart this article because I don’t think that it actually fulfills his criteria for a review of a game, as expressed in the tweets quoted in that buzzfeed article, because he never ends up saying why the mechanics are fun or anything specific about them, other than that they are “better” or “improved” in never stated ways from Dead Space 2 and other titles.

When the discussion devolved into what the purpose of a “review” or “criticism” is, the reason I think that it was a useless discussion was because the goals of any form of writing are fairly case by case and any all encompassing definition of either will fail as completely as a similar treatment of art. However, writers can make their case by case goals clear and then adhere to or fail at them. Gies is helpful in clearly stating what his goals are at the beginning of his article:

“Surprisingly, instead of watering the series down, Visceral has instead strengthened Dead Space’s single-player roots with some of the strongest combat design the series has seen. It’s also the biggest, most ambitious game Visceral has ever made.

But Visceral’s biggest accomplishment is attaining what I thought was impossible — Dead Space 3 avoids the traps of poorly implemented co-op, while capitalizing on all of its strengths.”

Over the course of the article I expect to see these claims supported. They’re meaningless statements by themselves, just words attached to value judgements without an indication of what, for example, poor or strong co-op is or what it means for combat design to be strong, or why it would be surprising for Visceral to not water down the series, but in the opening paragraphs the author doesn’t need to make these clear (though it wouldn’t hurt). I’m mentioning this just because I want you to know that Foddy’s point is right on— a sentence like “But the new crafting system and bigger, more open level structure join co-op to make Dead Space 3 one of the best action games in years.” is as meaningless as “Game X offers 143 hours of unique fetch quests and displays 143,000 colors on screen at once, making it the best action game this year!” These facts need to be attached to their results or they are devoid of meaning. 

Good writing tells you why those raw facts matter. Your game can have 2 billion guns and every one of them is boring; the role of the writer is to specifically detail how and why the specific facts of the game function to create an experience and what that experience is. Maybe it’s almost always “fun” but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the writing showing us how we get from flashing lights and number to fun, and if that fun is a right fit for me, the person looking to maybe buy a video game.

“In keeping with the last two games, Dead Space 3 is a third-person action-horror game with a specific mechanical twist. The undead necromorphs don’t have traditional anatomical weaknesses — instead, Isaac must cut off their limbs to take them down. Each enemy type is vulnerable in a different way, and Dead Space 3 introduces new wrinkles to that equation over the course of its 18- to 20-hour campaign. The dismemberment-oriented combat is paired with stasis, which slows enemies and environmental hazards, and kinesis, which allows Isaac to grab objects and fling them at enemies with deadly force.

Dead Space 3 further refines this combat trio with more responsive controls and better shooting than the last two games. Combat is more immediately satisfying than it’s ever been because of this, which is good, since managing multiple on-screen enemies is more important than it’s ever been. Visceral frequently gives in to the kitchen sink approach, throwing what feels like everything in its repertoire at the player.”

The first paragraph is a dry list of the features of Dead Space’s combat but not how they function. Since it is more difficult to list games in which you do not shoot enemies or parts of them, this writer has a lot of work to do he wants to distinguish how this particular form of combat is different from any other game’s. Gies does not detail why shooting limbs is interesting or fun or scary or even different from any other game which involves move a reticle over something and pressing the trigger button. Nine out of ten games I grab off a shelf at Gamestop will have this exact same format of gameplay and maybe 2/10 will do it in a way that’s fun enough that I would consider paying $60 for it. What makes Dead Space different? I would argue that it is having to shoot multiple points on a single enemy(rather than just the head) is harder and it emphasizes the unstoppable inhuman power of the alien nemesis in Dead Space, and that the action and horror compliment each other in kind of a neat way that few other games do, but Gies doesn’t say anything about that. This is the bare minimum of a mechanical analysis: this factual component of the game results in this result for the player. Instead I get the facts that I can slow down or fling around objects but not why that is a fun thing to do or if dead space implements it well. Are the puzzles as fun as Portal? As frustrating as Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Why?

The bolded sentences in those paragraphs are meant to highlight the words that don’t actually mean anything. He says the game has been refined with “more responsive” controls and “better” shooting. Okay, better how? More responsive how? Does the autoaim let me hit things more often? Are Isaac’s attack animations faster with shorter startup? What specifically has changed? What feels different? What salient feature can you point out and describe that would explain this change to a reader? Articulating this specifically is not just the role of a game reviewer but the role of any writer writing about anything at all. Better doesn’t mean a thing unless we can point to something specific.

On the plus side, Gies’s critique of Visceral’s “kitchen sink” approach is a good one; it’s specific because it says “okay well the weakness of Dead Space is that it has so many buttons I never know which one to press,” but again he doesn’t detail the problem very much outside of that and he also doesn’t tell me any specific change that has fixed this weakness. Those features are all there: is the circumstance of their use more clear? Do I have to worry about them less?

“There’s a new aesthetic sensibility, sure — most of the necromorphs Isaac faces throughout Dead Space 3 are based on creatures that have been dead for more than two centuries, rather than fresh corpses. They’re less gooey.”

 I like this part a lot actually because it clearly describes what the game looks like. What it doesn’t answer is why it matters. Does the aesthetic make the game scarier? Scarier in a different way? Emphasize the time that’s passed and presumably why that matters for some reason? Especially since he criticizes the enemies for being the same as their previous incarnations, does it do something new and is it enough?

“These stories, told via text and audio logs throughout each area, tend to feature specific characters repeatedly in a successful effort in developing these long-dead people enough to want to know what happened to them.”

A “successful” effort, but no indication why it’s successful. Specific characters is our keyword, but does the game do a good job of getting us to care about them? A lot of games have specific characters that I couldn’t care less about. Especially if they’re dead and in audio logs—I can barely bring myself to care about video game characters that are paraded in front of the screen for hours by their fawning creators, so I really need more than just that the audio logs have specific characters if I want to be convinced that Dead Space is going to make me care.

Important detail: I don’t necessarily have to agree with the evidence the writer gives me, you know. I can vehemently disagree with reviews that are ultra specific—I feel this way about ActionButton.net reviews more than I agree with them—but I understand any game they talk about a billion times better because they can talk about their games with specific words that mean things. I understand why they hate games even if I love them. There is no such thing as an objective review, remember? So the only way to write a good one is to be as detailed as possible, to punch down your reaction so specifically that someone can read it and decide whether they agree with your reasons or if they don’t, and even if they don’t, they’ll still understand better how the game works and probably even why they like it in the first place. I have instantly bought games because of bad reviews because the author was specific enough for me to be like, “you may hate that, but I know for a fact I would LOVE it.”

“These puzzles are a great palate cleanser from the more frequent firefights, and they make Isaac a more believable, relatable character.”

How does solving puzzles make him believeable or relatable? Is there dialogue during these scenes or what? The author also says the puzzles are more “organic” but what does that mean? They make more sense, sure, but what changed to make them understandable?

“No weapon upgrade is irreversible, so every piece of loot you find can be reconfigured for maximum potential. There’s an almost playful attitude present with gear that makes it easy to get caught up in its systems in a meaningful way.”

I’m a fan of this part; he gives an example and then shows you how that specific game mechanic makes him feel. It doesn’t take much to show how the game works at giving the player an experience. Since the game lets you pull apart and put together weapons at will, it encourages experimentation rather than punishes you for decisions that you may not understand.  This is a good analysis and I wish it was applied to more things other than the crafting system. 

“Dead Space 3 doesn’t fall prey to the trap of co-op design. It doesn’t feel like something is missing when you’re playing by yourself — there’s no computer-controlled partner with you all the time to make sure the game functions properly. The only time you’d even notice that you could play the game with a partner is when you come across one of a few co-op-only side missions that can’t otherwise be accessed.”

What’s a little strange here is that from what he says it feels like something actually is missing when you play single player, though that something is minor. More importantly though, it seems as if a much bigger deal is being made about co-op than I understand the context for. I guess I never would have assumed that co-op would ruin a game entirely. If this was a fear the author had when Visceral announced co-op in Dead Space 3 (maybe fearing something along the lines of Resident Evil 5) he might have started the article out by contextualizing it. Even if most gamers are probably having a similar thought process, the article should articulate their fears specifically.

Finally, we reach a 9.5 score for the game. It comes as a surprise to me. Certainly the game was described as solid, and an improvement, but for a game whose enemies are described as being almost exactly like the last game’s, I’m wondering if, wow, the second highest possible score is really what an incremental advancement of an established AAA franchise deserves but hey, numbers aren’t objective either. I guess what concerns me is that I don’t really see the correlation between the mild but firm praise and the wild enthusiasm expressed by a near perfect score. I know—editors and all that (Skullgirls would have gotten a 9/10 from me if I’d had my way)—but still, I like to hope my unrepentant love for it came through in the review copy. 

So why should you care about specificity. Well reviews aren’t objective, remember? So if I say something is “better” or “worse” I’m really not saying anything at all. You can disagree with me all you want. But if I say why, you can still disagree with my interpretation, but you at least can see how I got there. Maybe you can then understand for yourself if that sounds like a reason to buy or not buy a game. When someone hates a game I love I like to ask them why, not to prove them wrong, but to understand better how the game works. Many of my friends hate how slow DotA2 is compared to the speed and responsiveness of League of Legends, but for me, that slowness makes all of my movement decisions crucially important because I can’t escape them after I’ve made a mistake. I have to not make a mistake in the first place, which is hard but it also lets me punish my opponents rather than seeing them slip away at the last second. I hope that does a good job of articulating a specific moment in a video game and how it works and why it’s fun. 

Specificity is so important that without it you are literally saying nothing at all. Here, listen to George Orwell if you don’t believe me because he is literally ten billion times smarter than I am. 

Surely Arthur Gies will now hate me forever, but I don’t think this review is especially bad, just symptomatic of how a lot of games writing and writing in general goes. I’m not innocent of this sort of thing at all but I do think it’s something that all of us should be working on. I think about this every time an argument on twitter explodes into a high level discussion of what the “true meaning” of criticism or reviews or any other specific term means, when I kind of think the real problem is some basic sentence by sentence level work that most writing simply doesn’t do. This sort of writing is hard but it’s what we should aspire to.