The numbers are made up and the questions don't matter

In quantifying fun, we've made video games miserable.

The lexicon of games coverage has expanded exponentially in the past decade.

We’ve gone from rendering a verdict on how fun a game is, to commenting on frame rates, network latency, concurrent players, and engines.

When, before, we may publish one to three articles about a game, preview, review, and reception.

We now can publish twenty to thirty, commenting on all aspects of the games lifecycle.

But at the end of the day, the primary goal hasn’t changed.

The goal of commentary is to try and communicate how fun a game is, and in turn whether you, the player, want to buy it.

With hundreds of millions gamers out there, each person has a different need from a game.

Some might love a game with all their heart sinking thousands of hours into it, whilst another can’t stand it for more than five seconds.

This is the problem every reviewer and critic is trying to solve. How do they take an inherently subjective question and homogenize it so it’s applicable to as many people as possible.

It appears as if the solution is to try and quantify the experience, with as many measurable things as possible.

We talk about the length of the game, the frame rate, the moments of lag, pop in, LOD, amount of wishlists, concurrent player count, and the engine it was built on.

We forcibly move the player away from the question, “is it fun?” and towards a mindset of "here is a list of things that might bother you.”

Whilst there are certainly scenarios where these are valid points to raise, we do it to such wanton abandon that it’s actually a net negative.

By elucidating readers to things that might bother them, we are teaching them to look out for it, and telling them that if they do notice it, then it’s bad.

However, what would have happened if we hadn’t turned their attention towards it? Would they have even noticed?

We have steadfastly locked fun behind an artificial barrier, a game must have X frame rate, Y wishlists, Z concurrents, and A sales for it to be fun, when in reality fun is subjective.

If fun was so truly determined by frame rate, no one would have enjoyed Breath of the Wild.

If fun was determined by sales, then Prey and Guardians of the Galaxy wouldn’t have been such critical darlings.

If fun was locked behind engine choice, then Bethesda games wouldn’t have sold as well as they continue to do, yes even Starfield.

We should be saving these talking points for when they are truly salient.

We should never be talking about concurrents when the game is single player.

We shouldn’t be commenting on frame rates when the dips are occasional.

We should never be talking about how well a game is selling unless we personally are an investor.

We claim to love this industry, but are taking a sledgehammer to the front door.

By consistently talking about aspects that only a fraction of players might actually care about, we are creating an artificial negative cloud.

We are inventing reasons for people, en masse, to not buy games. We are preemptively lowering sales of games by commenting on a lack of wishlists.

We are stifling the chances for a game to have a slow and steady sales trajectory by commenting on the lack of sales a few days after launch.

We are forcing the industry to pander to our bad habits and that comes at a cost.

More money and time will go into certain aspects of a game, like improving frame rate from 96% steady to 97%, out of fear of a backlash, when it could have gone into more fun aspects of the game.

We know that developers are petrified of showing us early looks at games out of fear of repercussions if the final product looks different.

We’ve scared the industry into a corner, but have the games gotten funner, has the industry gotten better?

Not really.

We’ve held the knife to their throat so strongly we’ve cut too deep and they risk bleeding out.

With 30,000 developers out of a job in the past 24 months, what have we actually achieved with our nit-picking. Whilst there’s plenty of blame to be had with publishers choices, and hardware releases, I can’t help but think we’ve been screaming about the wrong thing.

How many studios might have staved off some layoffs had we not been so dogmatic in nit picking their game, rather than talk about how fun it actually is to play. I’m not talking about Concord (though I think we did kill that game by committee), and I’m not talking about things like Kill the Justice League.

I’m talking about a general feeling of aggression players have adopted thanks to critical media. We’ve weaponized an entire player base by teaching them what to nit pick and how to spot it, rather than taking an entertainment product at face value and making an individual decision.

We’ve gotten to a boiling point, a race to the bottom, the opening of pandoras box if you will. None of this matters any more.

We can continue to talk about these things, but it doesn’t answer the question, is the game fun? I doesn’t tell players if they will enjoy the game, it tells them how convince themselves they won’t.

It doesn’t address the systemic issues in the industry, because those are fueled by external factors. You’re not saving jobs by talking about these things, your not increasing the number of games coming out, and we clearly aren’t increasing the quality of games that are coming out, so… lets just not bother.

Let’s refocus on the fun aspect. Let’s return to “Fans of X game will enjoy Y game” level of reporting. Let’s be happy about games for once.

Please.