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Editor's Note: I agree with Cameron's idea only on the most basic, literal level. While nothing physically prevents you from passing judgment on a game without actually playing it, I feel strongly that you do need to experience it in its entirety if you actually want other people to place value on your opinion. I hastily judge things all of the time, but I also don't expect other people to ascribe to my point of view unless I am able to speak from experience and with authority on the subject. Nevertheless, I think Cameron gives us a good discussion point, and I'm curious to hear what the rest of you think. -Jay
On Friday, a certain film critic (who shall remain nameless) published his second attack on video games. In the course of writing off the entire medium (again), he called Braid and Flower “pathetic” on the basis of seeing a few seconds of video of each. In response to this attack, former EGM/1Up writer Nick Suttner wrote an impassioned comment (which he later turned into a blog post) imploring said critic to play some recent games before declaring the entire medium inherently inferior. I’m not mentioning the critic’s name here because I don’t want this to become about his remarks. He’s just poking at a hornet’s nest, then crowing about how immature the hornets are for stinging him. That’s not worth discussing. But Suttner’s “don’t knock it until you try it” argument does deserve a mention because, impassioned as it is, it’s wrong.
A lot of bad arguments in the world sound convincing if you don’t think about them too hard. “Don’t knock it until you try it” is one of them. I don’t have to try acupuncture to know that it doesn’t work. That’s because acupuncture is based on the magical concept of qi, and numerous well-designed clinical trials have shown that its effects are the same as placebo. I don't have to waste my time on it to know that it's a waste of my time.
Of course we’re discussing art here, not science. No experiment will prove that something is or isn’t a work of art because the definition of “art” is as nebulous as the definition of “game.” However, you can glean enough information about a work to know, without directly experiencing it, that it is not something you would consider art. I haven’t played BMX XXX, but I saw screenshots and read reviews which support my preconceived notion that the game is dreck. Is that unfair? No. In my opinion, a bad extreme sports game that rewards the player with exploitative images of women is not a work of art. The screens I looked at and the reviews I read confirmed that I was right about the game's content. Interacting with it would have no effect on my opinion about its status as a work of art.
But surely things are different where games like Braid and Flower are concerned. Certainly, if you just play them, you’ll see that they are, indeed, works of art! Again I say, "No, not necessarily." The exact same thing applies here that did with regards to BMX XXX. I’m not talking about our nameless film critic here, because his research of Braid and Flower, by his own admission, amounted to seeing clips of them played during a TED lecture. That’s not enough effort to justify an opinion. But, given the slipperiness of the definition of “art,” it wouldn’t be impossible for someone to make an internally consistent case that those games aren’t art without having played them.
Suttner makes the important point that interactivity is the defining characteristic of video games, but our nameless critic has said in the past that he considers interactive works, regardless of medium, to be out of the running for consideration as art. This extreme view is probably not shared by the majority of other critics. But if this is part of his definition of art, then playing games will do nothing to change his opinion of them. Aside from that, though, a medium’s defining characteristic is not necessarily relevant to the evaluation of a particular work in that medium. I played Dante’s Inferno, but I knew it was really bad art before ever picking up a controller, and doing so had no effect on my judgment. I’m not even sure that I would have to play something as complex as Sleep is Death in order to make a competent judgment about its artistic merits, if I could see video of people actually playing it and learn what goes on in a play session. With enough information, my subjective experience would take a backseat to other facts at my disposal.
I’m not saying that game critics can feel free to stop playing games, or that every game can be judged without anyone directly experiencing it. For one thing, subjective accounts of someone's experience with a game are interesting to read about. Also, many times the resources just aren’t there to sufficiently educate oneself without actually playing the game. My point is just that we don’t necessarily have to play a game to know that it isn’t a work of art, or that it’s a bad work of art. And, depending on how we define art, we can say consistently that no games are art. In that case, it’s perfectly legitimate to have an argument about how we define our terms, but “Don’t knock it until you try it” adds nothing to the discussion.
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