Writing about play

There is a great deal of writing about games and rather little description in it. The standard piece states a verdict early, supports it with adjectives, and gestures at mechanics only far enough to justify the verdict. It is readable and almost entirely unusable by anyone trying to work out what the thing is.

The alternative is not neutrality. It is doing the description first, properly, and letting the judgement arrive where it belongs: at the end, and out of the material.

Describe the machine, not the impression

“Combat feels weighty” is an impression. What produces it can be described: the wind-up is long enough to be committed to, the recovery cannot be cancelled, the hit stops for a few frames, the camera shifts a little and the sound has low frequencies in it. Anyone can check that description against the game. Nobody can check “weighty”.

The habit to build is to catch yourself writing an adjective and then write the sentence underneath it. You do not have to keep both. But the adjective written on top of the mechanism is worth more than one written on top of nothing.

Say what you did

Game writing is about an experience the reader has not had and cannot verify, produced by their playing rather than yours. This is a real epistemic problem and the standard solution — writing as though the game did things to a generic player — is the worst available one.

Say what you did. How long you played, what you chose, what you skipped, whether you finished, which difficulty, who else was in the room. This is not confessional; it is method. A reader who knows you played sixteen hours on the easiest setting and did not finish can use every sentence you write. A reader who does not know is being asked to trust a summary of unknown provenance.

Structure follows the object

A slow, systemic game does not want a review shaped like a chronology, because the interesting thing about it is not the order in which parts arrived. A game whose whole character is its first two hours does want a chronology and should get one. A game built out of a single repeated action might best be written about by describing that action for eight hundred words.

The default piece — intro, story, graphics, gameplay, verdict — fits almost nothing and is used because it requires no decision. Choosing the shape is most of the work and shows in the result.

Judgement, when it comes

Say what you think plainly and once. Hedged evaluation is a courtesy to nobody: it reads as caution and leaves no position to argue with. If the game did not work for you, say so, and then say what would have to be different, which is the sentence that separates criticism from complaint.

Avoid the score if you can, not because numbers are dishonest but because a number displaces the reasoning and is the only part anyone quotes. If a number is required, put it after the argument and do not let it be the headline.

The plain reason to bother

Description is portable. A good description of how a mechanism works remains useful in ten years, to a designer, to a historian, to someone who never plays the game at all. A verdict is useful for about a fortnight, to people deciding what to buy.

Both are legitimate. But only one of them is in short supply, and it is the one that takes longer to write.