Welcome back to another conversation with Cindy. We discuss the state of games crit, what a good game even is, and whether or not Mario Kart World is too slow. As always, be sure to read the second half on their blog!
Cin,
I need to level with you - I like bad games.
At least, if the Internet is to be believed. I've spent over 45 hours in Mario Kart World on my Switch 2 since I bought it... Two (?) weeks ago. Even between clearing Bananza and dusting off Tears of the Kingdom, I can't stop coming back to World. It's got two major hooks in me - the online meta and the lackadaisical, free-wheeling nature of the open world. Two itches get scratched here. I get to spec out the ideal racer depending on my mood and try not to get smoked in mostly Japanese lobbies. And I have a game to come home, smoke weed, and get tired with. As a religious online Kart player since DS, I am in love with how much more freedom and control I have over my vehicle in this game. Maneuvers that would have been impossible in MK8 are the bread and butter of moment to moment gameplay in World. I love that.
But going in, I was hesitant. The counter-jerk around Mario Kart World is very real. Opinions of the game from the Mario Kart 8 speedrunning community have breached mainstream containment thanks to events like GDQ and YouTube personalities. So much so, Sonic Racing CrossWorlds - a game I have negative interest in - used the 'lol too slow' community consensus in an ad for the game. Because that's what a lot of does boil down to - the game is "too slow." The reputation has stuck, codified by the "competition"
(I do not genuinely believe CrossWorlds will ever achieve MK World numbers, let's not kid ourselves...!)
This got me thinking about the dissonance of perspective that I often feel with the gaming community, which is something we've discussed in private on both of our ends. Common complaints or criticism of games that feel disingenuous, perhaps shallow, but that wind up dooming reputations of titles, studios, figures involved, etc. Of course, none of that will happen with Mario Kart - but it's a prime example of this memetic groupthink that turns into a homogenous catch-all to be wielded by a collective and rubber stamp something so they don't have to think about it.
I think this is a problem the gaming community has with interpreting the form and function of game design with any degree of integrative complexity. "The Last of Us Part 2 supports genocide," "The Medium excuses child abuse," Tomb Raider should be ended (okay look that one is fair)... The list goes on. Now - these are generally well received games, but they are games that have entire cults of hatred devoted to outright refusing any discourse beyond a didactic take they read from one writer they like. Of course, harsh divergent perspectives matter and I love when somebody can hammer home a good point that makes me think twice about something I like. Two of the takes I listed above are sourced from genuinely good pieces. But when these pieces by humans with hearts and convictions become meme phrases that people can condense in under 200 characters, we've lost the plot of why criticism - as an enterprise - exists.
But to be clear - I think is a problem with larger mainstream games press crit, and always has been. This is especially true of the era from 1997 to 2017. I don't need to trot out every survival horror game or JRPG or niche weirdo game from the last 30-odd years that mainstream criticism dismissed for shallow, reductive reasons. I guess some good examples are Deadly Premonition, D2, Rule of Rose - titles whose intent was largely ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed because "lol controls are bad." Things that actually pushed the envelope and raised the bar for what games could do, but did so outside of the standards of "good gaming" at their time. This is the converse of what I'm talking about - games doomed by the mainstream, whose reputation was salvaged somewhat by enthusiasts. It does really go both ways.
So I want to ask - how have your tastes felt aligned with consensus historically? Have you been at odds, fallen in line, somewhere in between? I'd definitely put myself in the latter category. And for that matter - is Mario Kart World too slow?
With love ofc,
Maddy
Hey Maddy,
I’ll start off with that last question and say “no it’s not too slow” but also “I can see where people are coming from”. Because it is, for all intents and purposes, slower to move around in than Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, at least for the older game’s 200cc mode. Lots of factors make World feel slower, such as wider tracks, a much further range of sight, and a lot of straightaways, especially as the courses lead to one another. If you are coming to Mario Kart to memorize turns and courses, figure out when the optimal time to start drifting is, and master whipping around corners, then yeah I can see how World is slow. But for me, Mario Kart isn’t about that. It’s about the interaction. There are tons of racing games that are about making crazy turns and taking the risks to get ahead of your opponents, but most of those also don’t feature items.
A lot of the approach to World feels very disingenuous as a result; it talks about the game as if it exists in a bubble of play. I watched a video ranking the many Knockout Tour tracks, and the creator put the Cherry Rally at the absolute bottom, citing how many long straightaways it has, including the extremely short and extremely linear third segment. It’s an analysis that ignores the fact that there are 15 other racers with you at that point and that every moment is a decision. The center lane features boost pads but also is certainly going to be a blood bath as everyone vies for there. Missing the item blocks before the final stretch can be a death knell. If you’re, as the video pretends, falling asleep and snoozing for that segment, you’re going to get wiped.
I could obviously go far more in-depth on how I think the reaction to World has been mostly annoying, but a huge part of it is a broader problem: analysis as competition. And this is different to me than comparative analysis. Goodness knows I love doing comparative examinations. Maybe half my essays are stacking two games next to each other. But a lot of talk about games is how one is better, one is worse. Sonic Crossworlds is faster racing in a non-open world so that’s better.
And that ad is, of course, throwing back to the bitter rivalry between Sega and Nintendo. Where the advertising was just that: advertising. Most homes were just going to get one console, and that console was then your gaming investment. The ad where a sales clerk tries to sell a POV customer on a Super Nintendo but the customer keeps getting distracted by the faster, cooler Genesis with blast processing. That tone unfortunately carried over to both media and fans, especially for the PS3 vs Xbox 360 and both companies’ follow-up consoles.
That same sense of just “everything is a competition” then bleeds into how we talk about the games themselves. Sonic Crossworlds can’t just be a good, standard racing game, it has to be the Mario Kart killer. This Soulslike isn’t as good as Dark Souls. Why doesn’t Pokemon look like Breath of the Wild?
That last one is definitely one where I feel like a big contrarian. I keep seeing posts about how bad the newest one, Z-A, looks and…it looks fine? Like, it looks like a city. And a pretty city. I genuinely don’t know what people want sometimes. I end up going against the status quo a lot more by being a grump, though. For every Pokemon game that I’ll defend and Mario Kart World I’ll dive into, there’s a Skyrim that I gained nothing from. A Donkey Kong Bananza where I pushed myself through the last half just to see it through but was absolutely done by the credits. A Hades 2, that I don’t think is just a surprisingly mid-game for a studio that did nothing but bangers, I think it is actively bad.
And maybe my contrarian side is because gamers and tons of reviews are so much about consumption and a product that is both fun and functional. Donkey Kong Bananza is something of a technical wonder; the fact that it lives up to its premise of smashing everything and manages to still look that good is enough to get a guaranteed good score. Reading IGN’s review of it, which gives it a 10/10, it feels like half the review is just explaining facts about the game, how mechanics work, coupled with a little “and it’s fun to do so”. And while Donkey Kong Eurogamer’s review does a decent job of emphasizing how much Pauline and DK form an emotional core to it. But that review also has requisite moments explaining how the game just functions, how it has a skill tree and Bananza transformations, and these sections feel more like telling a reader what they can expect to do rather than what the critic felt. IGN’s format also carries over to other reviews. Their Clair Obscur review is mostly telling about how each aspect functions. Silksong starts off promising with some examination of the world and what that means, before going into, you guessed it, explanations of how things like map structure, platforming pacing, and the Crest system works. All three of these reviews are from different writers, by the way. It all feels less like the writing of personal experience and more like a product overview.
So is this where we’re at on “bad games”? If a horror game has a choppy framerate and “outdated” controls, is it suddenly incapable of getting a perfect score? Do we hedge bets about an RPG having random encounters and just call that something to be left in the past? I constantly feel like people are expecting things out of each and every game that they should technically be under no obligation to provide.
— Cin
That last point you make is a really good one - "under no obligation to provide.". Because it really cuts to the heart of what we're talking about, whether it's random encounters, challenging controls, or a Mario Kart game being "too slow."
Because it encompasses all three, and so many more bad faith discussions around gaming. There are these expectations of games to provide the experience that the player envisions going in, and the less the game adheres to that vision, the more discontent they become. It's at a point where developers devote time and resources to allowing players to play their own ideal "version" of something.
In theory, this is a good idea. But when it gets to a point where, say, Shadow of the Tomb Raider fundamentally allows the player to change visual design elements of the game, or Grounded has a mode that takes spiders out, that we have to ask how realistic or sensible these choices are. I understand that dealing with arachnophobia is a very different thing than a ledge being a different color, but the idea that a player expects to be able to play a game about being outside and in the grass and not have to see spiders is a little ridiculous. It's an expectation nobody would have expected to cater to in any artistic medium before this one.
To wrap this back around to games crit, and what a good or bad game even is, I think this phenomenon plays a really huge part in that binary framework that you're talking about. The idea that everything is a competition, that because Digimon has some novelties over Pokemon, it's actually "secretly better." The notion that Mario Kart World and CrossWorlds are attempting to do the same thing. Or hell, even the age old Battlefield versus Call of Duty debate, which has swung back towards the former this year. (Weird, huh?) All of these boil down to Sega versus Nintendo, my guy versus your guy. And on some level, it's always been ingrained in the culture around the medium.
But I think we are hitting this point where the framework of viewing games like this is holding the enterprise back, at least in big money spaces. There's this idea that games need to spend X amount of money to make Y amount of people to make back luscious sums of money - and it's a fool's errand. If Nintendo, for example, capitulated to the folks who wanted Pokemon to be a bloated open world game with UE5 visuals and the biggest Pokedex known to man, it wouldn't break a profit for Nintendo or Game Freak. As a product, it wouldn't have the value Pokemon has always had. Because the virtue and utility of Pokemon has never been realism, or cutting edge visuals. It's been bright, appealing cartoon designs with simple glance values and a social hook for all ages.
Yet there is this expectation that Pokemon become this thing it never was. To the point that even when it does change gears and try something new, it doesn't make people happy. Z-A has a fair share of folks who seem to think it's a weaker entry due to the smaller scale focus and the simple graphics. The battle system, the repeating music, the story... I've seen a laundry list of complaints. (I think the Pokemon fanbase is where you'll find these weirdly arbitrary standards the most.)
Something I've noticed in this discussion is how interchangeable how much of my own language - both of ours, I suppose! - is with what the "reputations" of these games are versus what the actual critics say. I think that's because over the last ten years, I feel there's been less and less distinction. An era of fans with strong, confrontational opinions based in fairly superficial understandings of art got in the door at outlets paying pennies for headlines. I'm not a particularly gifted writer, but when I got into games press, I was surprised by not only the lack of media literacy and basic writing ability across the board. You learn very quickly that a distressing majority of games media is made of up of unqualified men and the women that pledge loyalty to them. That said, this phenomenon is omnigender.
And many of these writers didn't grow, didn't change. They stuck around, outlet to outlet, byline to byline, coasting by on a battle of attrition and believing - truly - that playing enough games was a substitution for experience. Some of those folks did it enough to squeak in as editors. And so the standards slipped - expectations became more unreasonable because these people often never really grew, they just got new titles and got to play bigger games because they ground themselves enough. This was true of me, for a period.
So i posit this question - do you think that the devaluation of criticism as an art form at large is what brought us here? The incestuous enmeshing of fandom and crit until the Venn diagram became one circle? And do you think this is larger than games - or that perhaps the way we discuss games, and the standards we set for them, had a detrimental impact on media comprehension en masse?
Read the second part of this conversation with Cindy on their blog
