Anyways, I was reading some of Emily's postings in her blogs -- here's a couple recent posts that jumped out at me:
Re: Portal, and the revelation (either in-game or through developers' commentary) that when GlaDOS was created, there were supposed to be scientists around to activate a killswitch if she ever got out of control. Obviously, when playing the game, apparently the killswitch did not work -- there is nobody around at the killswitch panel (in the last room).
Emily takes this and posits that one thing that we might take from this story is not that it's just about a computer run amok, but that any AI created would necessarily be emotionally broken. The reason would be because we would create AIs with killswitches, or intentionally cripple them in some way as to protect the more (superior/important) human life (Asimov's Laws?). Therefore, any such AI would grow up in a surrounding in which the people around it have in advanced absolved themselves for killing it if necessary. What kind of emotional attachment/friendship/companionship do you think an intelligence could have if it grew up in such an environment?
Now, honestly, can you tell me that you would have thought about something equally provocative about Portal's story-line? This is why fuzzies exist.
Emily also wrote a blog on this article: I won't go into in too much detail, but essentially it talks about difference between critics and reviewers, especially with regards to video games. Reviewers are the people at GameSpot, 1up, Kotaku, etc... We hardly see and critiques of video games. I would argue that critiques are something that really show that something has been elevated to an art form. There are critiques on sculptures. There are critiques on paintings. There are critiques on books. There are critiques on movies (although note that today's "movie critic" is most probably a reviewer).
A critique does more than say what is good or bad about a piece of work -- it does more than assign a numerical score. It should also explore (not necessarily all of) the following:
Where does the work fall in terms of the historical evolution of its medium?
How does the work fall in terms of the creator's previous works?
What does it say about the creator's evolution as an artist?
What novel techniques/methods does the work introduce?
How does it compare to works of with similar themes?
What was the creator attempting to do? Was he/she successful?
What emotions/thoughts does it induce in those exposed to the work (see Portal, above -- also my previous post)
What is the political subtext of the work?
What does it say about gender subtext? Race subtext? Nature vs. nurture? Etc... (any particular intellectual question).
How often do you see these things addressed in game "reviews"? Not very much, I'm afraid. It's like we learned in school -- when writing an essay on a book as a whole, don't limit yourself to just the book. Include the author. When was the author living? How did the views of people in that era/location potentially affect the work? What message might the author have been trying to send that might have been particularly important in that surrounding? What messages was the author trying to send in works before and after? How do they compare to this work? Etc, etc...
The thing that I notice (and that Emily wrote about) is that IF (see my previous post) reviews contain a lot more of this information (see SPAG reviews, for one example). They talk about the author, especially if they are famous (Andrew Plotkin, Adam Cadre, etc...). They talk about comparison's with the author's previous IF works. It goes way beyond saying something like (This is another Wright/Miyamoto/Meier game). Here's an example from a SPAG Spider and Web review:
Andrew Plotkin posted on rec.arts.int-fiction a few years ago a list of implicit assumptions common to most IF, suggesting that experimental IF works might set about subverting those assumptions. Plotkin's Space Under the Window pushed the limits of IF, to be sure, but in a rather straightforward way; there, the author forced the player to give up the usual mode of interacting with the game environment. Spider and Web, though no less subversive in its way, is altogether more subtle--and Plotkin overturns the tropes of standard IF to great effect.
That is not to say that IF "critiques" do everything perfectly -- there's not a lot of political/deep thought discussion in these reviews (and one can argue, I guess, that IF works in general don't have a lot to say on those issues, though I would disagree). But in comparison, IF reviews are miles ahead in being true "critiques" than video game reviews are.
Maybe part of this is commercialization. You don't see critiques on commercialized products. You see it on experimental works, normally. You see reviews on butter-brands (commercialization), but no critiques. Works that are made to be commercialized (Transformers: The Movie) are reviewed -- works that are not (Syriana) are more often critiqued. Which is not to say that they can't become enormously popular afterwards (Kite Runner, Harry Potter)...
