And so bearing all of the above in mind, I kind of got where Phil Owen was coming from. Were his complaints about the linearity of the journey totally baseless, or did we become more demanding after tasting open world games and choice-based games, and linear action-adventures don’t quite cut it for us anymore? Do all developers strive to maintain the feedback between the theme and the core gameplay loop? And while the gameplay is king, aren’t we all a bit tired with the grind, fillers, and padding?

So, after the first chapter, even though I disagreed with Phil Owen a lot, I was intrigued.

Also, a day before the booklet was released I tweeted this:

And so when something that had a hint of insightful critique appeared, I paid money for it.

I don’t regret it, even though every reasonable person could easily say I should.

Let’s start from the beginning.

PREFACE

I only ever wanted one thing from video games: for the act of playing them to be a good experience, and meaningful in a way that is reminiscent of other forms of art that I enjoy. People around me are constantly insisting that games today deliver that. Those people are very, very wrong.

To claim that today’s video game cannot deliver a good, meaningful experience is ludicrous. Even if we narrowed it down to single-player, story-based games — what seems to be Phil Owen’s main interest — pretending that Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect, Journey, The Witcher, Metro: Last Light, The Walking Dead or literally any other Telltale game from the last couple of years do not exist is dangerous to your health, because it means your head is currently up your ass.

Is every game great? No. Is every movie great, or every book, or every song? No. And those that are, are rarely perfect in every single aspect.

Same with video games.

Games still have a lot to learn and discover. But they can already be pretty awesome.

I don’t say that out of spite. I want games to be good and effective art, but games are not good or effective art. The accepted current consensus is that games are good enough, and that’s brought on a period of rather intense (to me) artistic stagnation. For me to say, then, that games are not good enough is not an insult, but constructive criticism.

What “accepted current consensus”? I literally do not know a single person who says “we’re done here”. Are you talking about the same art form that keeps evolving visually and technologically with the speed of light, and keeps inventing new genres and new ways of interactive expression every couple of years?

And no, that’s not “constructive criticism”. The definition of that requires a positive approach to the communication of the issues, and the criticism needs to be actionable. Meanwhile, even the title of your book is purposely antagonizing (“WTF Is Wrong with Video Games: How a multi-billion-dollar creative industry refuses to grow up”), and the book does not propose a single solution (“I don’t like it, change it” is a demand, not a solution).

As with any sort of criticism, it isn’t enough to just say that a thing is a problem. You have to say why it’s a problem and, if possible, how it can be fixed. My goal here is to do just that.

Then you have completely failed. The book offers no solutions. It’s a false advertising, actually.

The purpose of this book is to connect those dots for you by explaining many of the core problems all in one place. This sort of endeavor is long overdue, but it’s unsurprising that it hasn’t been done before — that inability by the games industry and those in the community, which includes the enthusiast press, to see the big picture stems from a lack of understanding of how all of this works. As a result, we point at symptoms of problems without truly grasping what the problems actually are. And the system is set up so that those who do start to see the big picture are typically cowed into silence because dissent means you aren’t a #truegamer or whatever.

Phil Owen, the only man who can see the big picture. No person in the games industry can see the issues. Phil Owen is the only one who can.

Phil Owen, the only brave and honest critic in video games history. Literally no journalist before Phil Owen offered any big picture critique of video games.

I guess by now you get a vague idea of the tone and quality of the book.

But you have seen nothing yet.

For obvious reasons, I won’t be quoting everything from the book nor commenting on it, so let’s skip the rest of the preface, then the chapter one I have discussed earlier, and let’s see what goodies await in…

CHAPTER 2: SAN ANDREAS

Phil Owen describes San Andreas as a movie that is a series of badly connected set pieces. He then argues that most games are like that: not created as a cohesive whole, but focused on features, be it the aforementioned set pieces (he uses Uncharted 3’s ship level as an example) or a fresh gameplay mechanic (he uses Dead Space’s dismemberment). “The design of the game isn’t serving the vision; the vision is serving the design”, claims Phil Owen.

Of course, that’s just an attempt to prove a hypothesis through cherry-picking, as if GTA, Batman: Arkham Asylum or Skyrim did not have their designs serve the core idea.

But it’s not just the hypothesis that’s silly, even the cherry-picking itself is awful. If you fail to see the cohesiveness of Dead Space, and how the design of this game served the top level vision, then that’s really your problem, not the game’s.

That’s not to say that all games are well thought out, of course. But how is that different from the Phil Owen’s beloved movie business? How many times we exit the movie theater asking ourselves, “What were they thinking?”? Have you seen the new Fantastic Four?

There’s more fun like that in this chapter, and it’s actually uncanny how little Phil Owen, a gaming journalist, knows about the process of creating a modern AAA game.

But let’s move on to:

CHAPTER 3: EXPLOITATION

In this chapter, consistent with his belief that story is art and gameplay is “substanceless activity”, Phil Owen argues that writers, not designers, should rule the act of creation and production of a video game.

He also confuses a narrative designer (a person who is a part of the team responsible for the totality of the experience) with a writer (a person who understands story-telling but does not necessarily understand how gameplay, mechanics and systems affect the player’s second to second and hour to hour experience):

Of late, some studios have even come up with a new position for such people which has a name that reflects the industry’s disdain for writers: “narrative designer.” A narrative designer actually just is a writer, but that title is a demonstration of values status — something easily understood in the tech-driven ecosystem of games.

CHAPTER 4: DEVELOPMENT

Phil Owen announces that the iteration process that game developers use is harmful.

All of this tangibly matters because the development system isn’t good for business, nor does it produce good games. When a game is good, it’s probably just an accident.

This is silly, but I’ll bite. What Phil Owen does not understand is that emulating the process of creation that is used in movies is impossible. The movie business is over a hundred years old, well established, and with not a lot of questions left unanswered. And yet, despite all of that and the fact they deal with linear, passive entertainment, Hollywood still produces a lot of duds.

Meanwhile, video games are a new kid on the block, with thousands of questions unanswered. And the art form is interactive. Which, basically, changes everything. How is it surprising, then, that the act of creation must somewhat differ from that of a movie?

And by the way, the iteration process is actually heavily used in movies. Scripts undergo multiple revisions. The point of rehearsals is to increase the quality of delivery. Filming involves multiple takes. Editing takes weeks or even months, and multiple versions of a movie are produced and tested on the audiences.

What’s different in games is that the iterations can only partially happen in easily separated phases like they can in the movies. No one can fully predict how all systems — gameplay, visuals, audio, etc. — will co-operate when they are put together, but you can argue that’s also true in movies to a certain extent. However, a movie director knows immediately if a scene filmed was good or not: they first watch it through the camera, then watch the dailies — and can correct the course quickly if they missed something the first time around.

Video games do not have the same luxury. Nothing is produced as fast as recording two people talking in front of the camera. Game/narrative designers use all of their knowledge and experience to anticipate the outcome of the implemented designs, but if something does not work, correcting the error is not just a question of “one more take”.

In other words, because of the nature of the beast and because of the relative youth of the gaming industry and because we are still discovering the potential of video games, producing a gameplay moment in a video game is more difficult and more costly to correct than in a movie. It simply has more unknowns than the well-established process of creating something that is more or less created the same way as it was created in the 1950s. Iteration in game development is, then, inevitable — unless you try nothing new.

To be clear, I don’t write this to convince Phil Owen he was wrong. I write this to explain it to those who wonder. Phil Owen does not wonder. Amy Hennig could not convince him, so I don’t expect it happening now.

Industry stalwarts like Amy Hennig (lead writer and creative director on the Uncharted series, now working on a Star Wars project at EA) preemptively brushes off any concerns about that by saying things like this: “Making a game isn’t like making a movie — it’s software engineering, which by definition is exploratory and iterative. You don’t create a plan and then implement on it, you experiment and refine.” I’ve spoken with a number of developers who defend that mindset by saying things like “you never really know how dynamic systems are going to interact with each other.” I can understand that point abstractly, but on the other hand I also know that people have been making games for a long time and so that explanation, consequently, comes off as a rationalization. It’s an excuse that belies their true priorities. Software development is what [game developers] actually care about, not making art. And that sucks.

CHAPTER 5: THE AMERICAN DREAM

Halfway through the book — there are nine chapters — Phil Owens stops analyzing video games, and decides that we should talk about socio-politics. I guess the idea is to explain that one of the reasons why games “refuse to grow up” is the industry’s refusal to co-operate with people who hate the current video games industry.

The Video Game Dream is the means of continuing that cycle by scaring off folks who don’t fully buy in to the way the industry does things. To succeed in video games, you have to really, really like video games. You have to be committed to the cause, in a sense, before you even start that quest. And so the issue is that not a certain personality type is drawn to games. The issue is that the ruling hegemony inside is intent on making sure only those they see as being One of Them are welcome.

This is idiotic enough, but Phil Owen does not stop there. In a completely dishonest, venomous attack on the industry he claims that it “props up the status quo”, “fully adopting the rhetoric of American Dream”, one that he defines as a system of racist and sexist oppression. And so the gaming industry…

It’s an industry run mostly by white people who are mostly men, and they’ll keep it that way as long as they can.

This is a serious accusation, and something that is 100% not true. It’s also when I realized I just paid three dollars not just to a failed gaming journalist often incapable of coherent thoughts and lacking basic knowledge on how the industry and video games work, but also to a liar.

Oh, and Ken Levine telling people they need determination to make it in this business apparently means this:

They say that using the skills you’ve obtained and honed for years to make a living will require a constant and painful struggle, but they just use this, knowingly or not, as an excuse for how obscenely unfair the business is. The truth is that many people — mostly white, mostly male — will not have to go through all that. [Ken] Levine himself being white and male is also convenient for dismissing claims of institutional racism and sexism. That Levine had to struggle and suffer for years before undeniably achieving much according to the metrics of the video games also helps the rhetoric. If Ken Levine of all people had to experience a decade-long struggle to make it as a creative, then what right do you have to complain? If it’s good enough for a famous veteran like Levine, it’s good enough for you plebe fucks, too.

CHAPTER 6: ETHICS IN JOURNALISM

This is a really weird chapter which can be divided into three parts.

In part one, Phil Owen talks about Phil Owen, despite the fact the next chapter is titled “Me”, and is entirely devoted to Phil Owen. For what it’s worth, Phil Owen also talks about Phil Owen in many more places, so it’s not like reading about Phil Owen is limited to these two chapters only.

In part two, Phil Owen talks about #GamerGate.

Its campaign of terror against women in the business is some legendary evil, and no doubt GamerGate has won some battles in that arena simply running off progressives of all sorts who eventually deemed the industry to not be worth the effort (or the sustained harassment). […] the reason why “it’s about ethics in game journalism” is such a joke is all the GamerGaters were doing was incessantly harass women and people of color within the community […]

It’s all a laughably pathetic lie, but hey, I am ready to mourn those progressives that #GamerGate ran off the industry. Please send me the list. If not delivered, I will accept watching “I am a big fat liar” being tattooed on Phil Owen’s forehead as an equally satisfying activity.

As a bonus, Phil Owen proudly informs the world that the fact that some journalists avoid discussing ethics not because it might cause all kinds of trouble for them, but because fuck #GamerGate being right.

In part three, Phil Owen talks about journalists not really doing their job. “Between the elements of control enacted both by the industry public relations and the commenters, game journalists are constantly terrified of fucking up their revenue streams.”, he says, and offers mildly — but still — interesting examples.

CHAPTER 7: ME

I guess this was an attempt to tell certain “truths” about the industry through the recollection of personal experiences. I’m not sure what these “truths” are, though. But hey, at least a book titled “WTF Is Wrong with Video Games?” made me learn so much about Phil Owen!

It’s also the chapter full of gold like:

As that sort of company operating with a network of sites, the purpose Break had for building up editorial content on FileFront was not to do journalism, really. It wasn’t about serving the public good or pushing a political agenda; it was about hitting the gaming demo by aping existing successful game websites and channeling Mark’s SEO wizardry.

Or:

The next day, Mark fired me. I could not possibly tell you if my disparaging remarks about TMNT had anything to do with that, but I suspect it was just the last straw, given how long he and I had been in conflict over GameFront’s editorial direction. Plus, I had done exactly the thing he was afraid I would do: piss off the shitlord audience we were trying to cater to. In case it wasn’t super obvious, I’m still bitter about this.

CHAPTER 8: ACCESSIBILITY

Phil Owen describes how he cheats in games to avoid filler and grind, which I can totally get behind. Then he talks about games being long despite the fact that most people do not finish them, which is a mystery I am also intrigued by. It’s a nice little chapter with a pretty puzzling ending:

All the industry talk of mass appeal and how games are bigger than movies is a smokescreen. Games are only bigger than movies in terms of revenue; it’s certainly not the number of people who would actually call themselves gamers. Earning a billion dollars in movie ticket sales involves a whole hell of a lot more people than earning a billion dollars in sales of a game. And what the games industry calls mass appeal usually only counts within the context of the existing core, rather than, like, the actual population of Earth. And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

They …who? Is it industry who does not want more people to play video games? Or is it gamers who occupy GameStop shops and threaten to beat up anyone who does not have a gamer id with them?

If it’s the former, why? If it’s the latter, and, as Phil Owen concludes, the “small core” is nothing compared to the potential customers who are the “vast majority of the world’s population that isn’t part of that [core] group” — why does the industry keep catering to them? What does Phil Owen know that tens of thousands of industry people do not?

CHAPTER 9: MASS EFFECT

Phil Owen discusses Mass Effect, a game he believes represents “just about every issue I have with the games industry, media and community”. The analysis offers such gems as the gameplay being “kind of bad” because of “graphical problems like texture pop-in”, or:

And that supposed requirement — fulfilling the player’s power fantasies — has been the real tragedy of video games as an art form thus far.

This is typical for Owen. He smells there’s something potentially wrong with some games, then he extends the issue to all games and incorrectly identifies the culprit.

For example, nearly every detective fiction is also a power fantasy in a way, as it’s about outsmarting the criminal and bringing them to justice. And yet there’s an incredible amount of depth to the trope, if you know your craft. I don’t see Dashiell Hammett being the real tragedy of literature.

More importantly, once again Owen proves he is years behind and oblivious to any developments in game design. The tragic journey of John Marston (Red Dead Redemption) or the helplessness of Geralt of Rivia (The Witcher 3’s Red Baron quest) show that at least some game developers do understand the power of disturbing the player’s comfort zone.

And the players love it. One of the themes dominating modern games is no longer the power fantasy, but a struggle and survival, be it choice-based experiences like Telltale’s The Walking Dead, or survival games like DayZ. The reward is that you barely survive to live another day. You do not become the king of the universe.

But as it’s the case with anything design-related that Phil Owen discusses in his booklet, he’s not wrong all the time.

For example, he notices the problem of the conflict between the main story’s push for action and some of the side quests. This was an issue for me even in the greatness called The Witcher 3, where on one hand I was to chase after Ciri before certain evil entities get to her first, and on the other I was invited to participate in a myriad of time-consuming side quests just for fun.

And it’s not an unsolvable problem, as Far Cry 4 proves.

POST-SCRIPT

Phil Owen decides to dedicate yet another section of the booklet to himself. It’s quite amusing. This is how this self-anointed messiah sees his role in the world of video games:

The video game business, I’ve found, is ripe for my brand of weaponized negativity. […]. There is a very vocal contingent of the so-called social justice types who are fighting the good fight in regards to representation (both in the industry and games themselves) and stereotypical depictions of marginalized folks, but even they aren’t more broadly dissatisfied with the overall concept of video games as it exist today. They still seem to want to be part of the club, for the most part.

It seems like the social activism’s attempt to colonize video games is not enough for Phil Owen. He is interested in a reset, a reboot, a revolution. The “concept of video games as it exists today” must die.

What is the replacement?

Whatever it is, you will not learn about it from the booklet. Owen complains about many things, but it still seems to be like simply “doing better” would fix all of his issues. I see no paradigm change, and not a scent of an original idea.