At his Cut Scene blog, Variety’s Ben Fritz has responded to ‘Coming Home,’ my much-trafficked, post-Homecoming rant here at SVGL. You could say I wrote it because I was touchy about being the one of the only reviewers to like the game (that did make me feel weird)[*], but what I was touchy about is how highly arbitrary the strikes critics levied against it were. Some reviews complained there are too many health packs and the game was too easy; others said there weren’t enough health packs and the game was too hard.

For the record, I think there were just the right amount of health packs, and survival horror fans know how to pace themselves. Noobs soon learn, and people who prefer plentiful supplies probably should not play survival horror or any game in the Silent Hill franchise.

But that’s neither here nor there! The health pack thing is just an example, albeit a slightly off-point one. Anyway, largely, I was expressing some exasperation at the tendency of reviewers (not excluding myself) to be arbitrarily nitpicky — and what Ben seems to suggest in his response post is that reviewers are actually more inclined to be overly positive than overly negative:

I didn’t see many critics deliberately searching for things to dislike in “Grand Theft Auto IV” or “Halo 3″ or “Mass Effect” or “Super Mario Galaxy” or “Super Smash Bros. Brawl.” On the contrary, these AAA, heavily marketed franchises (mostly sequels) with gameplay very similar to what the hardcore audience has seen and loved before got overwhelmingly positive reviews. Sure, many admitted, the story in “Halo 3″ was inpenetrable and the the combat in “Mass Effect” was wonky and “Brawl” is barely an advance over the last installment and has major problems with online play, but those were largely brushed aside as minor considerations.

I felt the same way about Brawl, actually, and wrote an entire column about how we were sold on it before we even played it because of positive associations with the characters. I agree with Ben on the over-positivity thing in general, which is part of why I was frustrated when I felt many Homecoming reviews elected to miss the big picture and focus on the details, or fault it heavily for things that are a matter of taste without recognizing that there’s an entire swath of the audience who doesn’t have the same taste — when they’d been so willing to wave other franchise titles through with 9′s and without similar close scrutiny.

Ben wrote:

Basically, I think another way of saying what Leigh’s getting at is that many game critics, particularly those who write for avid fans, can obsess over controls or menu design problems in titles that are doing something innovative in tone or theme, but downplay the same types of faults in games that are essentially improvements on the ones they already love.

Thanks, Ben — that’s exactly what I was getting at, actually. I neglected to present the flip side of the coin with an example like Grand Theft Auto IV — as Ben says, now that we’re several months out from its release, we can raise a bit more of a skeptical brow at review quotes like “Oscar-caliber drama”(IGN) than we did when we were still in the afterglow of positive feelings around its release and the fact that our expectations — and desires — for it were so, so high.

And maybe this also helps explain the puzzling “four-month bell curve” that I’ve written about before, wherein titles are considered to be near-perfection at the time of their launch and then suffer a fall from grace — sometimes an out-and-out backlash, as in BioShock‘s case — about four months later.

Now, on one hand it makes sense that games with familiar formulas get better reviews than titles that really try to do something odd. There’s a reason the formula’s being repeated — because we’re familiar with it and it works well. To some extent, games have a laundry list of “things not to do in design,” and often when design avoids those line items, the result is largely similar to other things that have been successful.

That’s just logic; it’s just smart evolution. When a title attempts to explore uncharted areas, it risks stumbling into areas that have been neglected for a good reason — because they don’t work as well. But when we fault them for trying, without recognizing that the game might have done a few new things well, or when we treat creativity or an attempt at inventiveness as a design flaw, we’re sending the industry some problematic mixed messages. We demand innovation and invention, and then we crucify any attempts in that direction.

Ben also said something to the same effect:

The result is that we don’t value innovation or attempts to do something big and new, like make a funny game that’s thematically consistent with an all-time great TV show or create psychological impact through artful storytelling integrated with gameplay, because we obsess on the mechanical problems or the length of the cutscenes. Not that those things don’t matter. But they don’t matter that much, especially for an artistically immature medium in desperate need of innovation and freshness.

The nature of game design suggests that there probably won’t be any overwhelming overnight overhauls. Iteration happens gradually over time, and it probably is a wise strategy — both in terms of design logic and sales numbers — to try and make subtle evolutions on the familiar rather than try something totally new. Very few games go way out to left field and do well unless they are both very skilled and very fortunate — think Portal, Braid, Katamari Damacy.

But the funny thing was, Silent Hill: Homecoming was far from totally new. In fact, it was a subtle iteration on a formula — a formula Double Helix aped quite admirably for not having originated it. It was about as different from prior Silent Hill games as any of them are from each other, and fans will probably disagree widely on whether or not it worked. Fans have always had subtle Silent Hill disagreements — which one’s “the best” and why, for example.

The fact that I read so many forums and comments and get so much email is actually probably a problem as well for me as a reviewer — and for others. All of the reviews I’ve been citing thus far are online. I and my colleagues serve an internet audience. When our readers have expectations, preconceptions or hopes for a title’s outcome, they’re looking to our review to either affirm or deny. Often, our reviews end up being an extension of their feelings — after all, we’re responsible for addressing their concerns and fears as we’ve perceived them, or at least we feel like we are.

Moreover, we’re part of the community, too, perhaps to an unusual extent. I wrote about groupthink and the hype cycle yesterday — if there’s a tidal wave of buzz, we’re riding along on it, too. Interestingly, reviews tend to be the most inconsistent when “the internet” had no preconception or prevailing opinion ahead of the release. Do reviewers feel like they’re “supposed to” like a title just because their readers or colleagues are excited about it, or “supposed to” be extra critical just because there are tons of early warnings? I wonder.

I’m always a little surprised at what the world is like when I shut the computer off — no lie. Even when I go to GameStop, where you’d expect that most of the shoppers would be something “like us.” I end up chatting with other customers and am always disoriented — believe it or not, people shopping at GameStop usually haven’t heard of Kotaku. They haven’t heard that the game they’re in line to buy was delayed twice or is made by the wrong studio.

Then, when those people start to talk to me about what they’ve been playing lately, I’m always surprised to learn that they enjoyed, say, Kane and Lynch. They didn’t notice the problems reviewers did. They never heard of Gerstmann-Gate. They don’t know who he is, and they certainly don’t know who I am. They thought The Darkness was the best game they played last year. They like Geometry Wars but not Braid. They love Madden and don’t even know that “we” snub it.

In other words, they’re normal consumers, and their opinion is different than ours. They have a kind of distance on the industry that we just don’t. I should try talking to these people more often.

I’ve digressed all over the place, but anyway, Ben’s whole response to my post is very thought-provoking and worth reading.

[*]Oh, addendum: Aside from UGO, whom I noted, Destructoid also liked it.