Bad, bad, bad criticism. So bad.

I recently came across a website. It is now in my "Places of Hate" links to the right. Hardcore Christian Gamers Association is a place run by one Drew Koehler, and the fact that he has developed a rag tag gang of ardent followers makes me fear for the intelligence of western civilization, and possibly the entire free-thinking world. Where do I begin? I guess the name is a good start.

Hardcore
This refers to term "hardcore gamer." I'm going by the modern (wrong) connotation. Not a pretty sight.

Christian
People who feel the need to "genre-ify" their faith are stupid and probably not very faithful at all. Their products suck, anyway. See: Christian Rock.

Gamers
Shouldn't that be possessive... Gamers'? Ahh, never mind.

Association
I shudder to think there's actual organization and structure behind this. On one hand it's impressive, given the minds in question, but on the other... I'll just point out that on the tabs in my browser, it reads "Hardcore Christian Gamers Ass..."


Now we'll move on to the big stuff. I read three articles, all written by Drew Koehler, all shitty. The first was a review of the movie Legion. On top of being a bad review in general (synopsis is not analysis!), the fact that it is a Christian review kills any objective judgment that may have been. Let me clarify. Christian review and review by a Christian are impossibly different, incompatible, and non-interchangable. The former is an advertisement or brand name, the latter a triviality. I personally don't think the movie looks very good, but his opinion of it is so inappropriately defined and clouded by his faith, that I can't help but jump to the movie's defense. He doesn't seem to understand that this is a fantasy. The filmmakers obviously didn't care about properly representing any aspects of the Bible or Christianity at all, so why should you care? Quit bitching, take your Prozac, and get back in the tollbooth. The funny part is that he complains about some baby in the movie being portrain as a savior, and that the baby is not Jesus. Really? You'd think he'd have a problem with the whole "angels exterminating the human race" plot of the movie, but whatever. Not to mention his attempt to convert readers in the final paragraph. If I wanted a message, I'd check my answering machine.

The second article I read was a review of the video game Dante's Inferno. Not much worth mentioning here, it's still objectively unobjective criticism thanks to the religious slant, but Koehler never once mentions the source material, Dante's Divine Comedy. He's probably never even heard of it, which is almost hypocritical of him, but the real high point of the review is his obsessive dismissal of nudity. He claims to have played through The Godfather II video game to its entirety, and reasons he shouldn't have since the game was full of nudity, and that doesn't sit well with his perception of women... or something. Then towards the end of his Dante's Inferno review (after listing some examples of nudity in that particular game) he exclaims:

"I don’t want to see the devil’s package (yes at the end he’s naked)."

At the end. He played through the whole damn game, even after his Godfather II episode. What a tool! Do you think the game companies care whether or not you're a Christian, or are offended by nudity when you've already spent money on their product? Yeah, probably not.

The third article is below any form of discussion, but there is one really hilarious sentence:

"Bare in mind that this game doesn’t come off as being tactical at all."

Bare? Maybe he doesn't like bears, but more likely, the hypocrite's got nudies on the mind. Oh, God.


PLAGIARISM DISCLAIMER: I may have stolen certain phrases from this guy on YouTube. I apologize. His videos are so funny and brilliant that my rhetoric is forever changed.

Words > Numbers

i have seen the literification of hate. and it is clicky

the evil: Metacritic is a website that chronicles all of the numbers and ratings and letters and charts and graphs that make up Internet criticism and aggregates them into a collective "metascore," one each representing an individual work. The Godfather is 100 (i searched for Citizen Kane but the site only deals with recent releases. alarmingly, The Dark Knight was a result). Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE is 97 (the highest ranked music album on the site. it actually ties with Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose, an album i do rather enjoy, and How The West Was Won, a Led Zeppelin live album. i guess the ordering is alphabetical). Grey's Anatomy the Video Game is 65 (seems kind of high). there are also named tiers, appropriately color-coded relative to their... awesomeness i suppose. 80 and above is green. the categories here are "Universal Acclaim" - because if there is any one universal truth, it's Metacritic - and "Generally Positive Reviews." yellow is the color of mediocrity, or "Mixed or Average Reviews." red; the color of fire, spark, passion... and "Generally Negative Reviews"

the problem: numbers aren't representative or even indicative of opinions. in my earlier post concerning Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars' port to the PSP, i touched on the destructively hyperbolic effect that Metacritic and sites like it are having on quality and its perception. what follows is a(nother) prime example of violence inherent in the system


in 2001 Michael Jackson released what would become his final studio album, Invincible. its reception was less than stellar, as is its metascore: 51. one listed review in particular caught my eye, the second selection from Village Voice (the first being Xgau himself, who notably thought highly of the album, and actually mentions the article in question). Kogan's review is a good one. titled "The Man In The Distance," its insight into the work is schizophrenic, giving an appropriately analogous account of the album's seemingly self-aware duality. Kogan never recommends, and he never condemns, and his reactions are never, ever "mixed or average." he has enough class not to slap some arbitrary digital representation of his thoughts into a conclusion

but guess who didn't

Apt

to live up to the blog's title im starting a series of "Good Criticism, Bad Criticism," because so many people who get paid to tell me what is good or bad are apparently either monkeys, three year-olds, or a combination of both

so here's to them

Bad Criticism

video games have it especially bad, its "critics" a generation of socially challenged nerds who find shooting things a deeply profound experience. really, people diagnosed with incommunicable disease are paid to write. have a look at Mr. Matt Casamassina's many opuses (opusii?) when youre craving some suicide

but for every million or so of these wordless, rambling descriptions (IGN calls them reviews), we get something along the lines of this:

Good Criticism

Mr. Ryan Stancl of Game Career Guide has critiqued the Katamari Damacy series, and it's a great read. his approach is noticeably blunt, but this is easily forgiven because he is quite literally trailblazing. Stancl ventures through several different schools of criticism, enlightening us to not only the brilliance of the game, but the complete idiocy of modern game journalism

the critique is in three parts: part 1, part 2, part 3


while we're on the subject, Yū Miyake is probably a genius. i say probably because i'm not quite sure what a genius is

but his music sure is great

one day i will write my own piece on Katamari Damacy, because i am finding it harder and harder to contain the exponentially increasing amounts of praise i have for this staggering work of... thing. seriously. if space aliens visited earth and i had to show them something that encapsulates our entire culture, humanity in a nutshell, if you will, i'd show them Katamari Damacy