Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The sort of thing I’d normally put in the Sunday Papers, but when I saw Soren Johnson twitter it this morning I think it’s worth linking by itself, especially because it deals with a lot of topics which have been floating around the RPS comments threads (and the inside of my head) recently. It’s Greg Costikyan notes from his presentation at GDC Austin, splendidly entitled Randomness: Blight Or Bane. This is the sort of thing I love seeing Costikyan do – a large, sweeping, cultural history of the topic which grasps and tackles the seeming paradox that we’re dismissive of randomness yet it’s persisted and thrived in gaming culture. One of Costikyan’s many strengths here is examining that innocuous “we”.

PC Gamer’s Tim Edwards, a top-chum and occasional employer of the RPS hivemind, wasn’t terribly happy about Greg Costikyan’s controversial assertion that a game review is a different, lesser beast to game criticism – a nobler species Costikyan claims barely exists. So he’s posted a riposte on the PC Gamer blog.

It includes stuff like this:

Greg’s is a purely semantic argument based around trying to define what reviews and criticism should be, that doesn’t take into account what reviewers and critics are already doing. Games criticism doesn’t /have to be anything/. There are no rules of what reviews can and cannot include – the only question for writers should be: what will the reader gain from the review?

There may be blood. There already is in the Gamer blog’s comments threads, in fact – but you lot will, I’m sure, keep it civilized over here.

Which side of the argument am I on? Well, personally I feel that – oh! Look over there! It’s a badger, with a gun! Yoink!
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