Gametunnel Review Weirdness…

Posted by oddbob on August 27, 2008 · Lovingly Filed Under Articles 
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[update: the "offending" (Christ, I hate that phrase) text has been adjusted since this post. Carry on about your business, people.]

Whilst I’ll happily confess I’m not the biggest fan of Game Tunnel, this struck me as really odd. In the review of Ben There! Dan That! (read my previous review here) Russ Carroll drifts into a bizarre meandering about how “killing a handicapped dude after mocking him is just low-brow”. Now, I can’t possibly disagree with that statement, it’s a given that it would be a pretty low blow to include such a thing in a game. Utterly, totally bad form, I’d say.

One small issue though. No such thing actually happens in the game.

(caution: spoilers ahead so turn away now if you don’t want to know anything about the game)

After reading the review, I began to wrack my aching brain as to what scene he could possibly be referring to. Was it the small zombie boy who you glue up? Was it the vicar who you bash to bits? After all, handicapped dude refers to - well, I don’t know what you assume but I assume it means a man. Well, no dear readers, it appears not. A quick tinker over to the Indiegamer thread on the August round up and enter Dan Marshall, one of the brains behind the game:

“there’s a bit where you accidentally kill a dinosaur who’s pretending to have a disability to get out of doing any work, as part of a running gag throughout the game… is that the bit you mean?”

It’s a fucking dinosaur. A T-Rex to be precise who has short arms and uses this as an excuse not to do some coding. Not in any way shape or form could, last time I checked anyway, a dinosaur be mistaken for a dude. Especially a T-Rex. If it can, I really don’t want to know what kind of folks Mr Carroll works with because they’re obviously very strange “dudes”.

Russ defends his statement with the reasoning that it’s how the scene felt to him. I played it through and as regular readers will know, I’m a full time carer *and* push for accessibility in gaming so I’m a little bit sensitive on these matters myself but not at any point did the scene appear to me like it was mocking disabled people given there’s no mention of a disability per se, just a joke about short arms on a dinosaur noted for having, well, short fucking arms.

If the dinosaur had lost the use of its legs in a car accident or something, I could possibly understand reading the scene that way. If it was a bloke in a wheelchair who you then stab to death after laughing about him being a cripple, I could understand it. But not in a million years when it’s a dinosaur with short arms joking about having short arms shortly (fuck off - Ed) before being zapped with a Deathstar.

That’s just incredibly strange.

There was an article published on Game Set Watch last week which touched upon the issue of reviewers responsibilities. The article itself was based upon the Destructoid review of Luc Bernard’s frankly shambolic Eternity’s Child which as any internet denizen will already be aware could politely be described as “followed by heated debate” with both the Destructoid community and Luc Bernard baying for each others blood. Only the community didn’t flounce off in a huff after the whole thing died down. Unlike Luc Bernard, obviously.

I have my own views on the whole matter, mainly involving being careful who you court for publicity in the first place and being careful what you say when you open your gob and be prepared for the consequences if you say something totally daft arse, but that’s by the by.

The main thrust of the article was that bloggers and reviewers (and I don’t doubt bloggers who review) should maintain a certain level of dignity and not stoop to the level of the hateful. I don’t entirely agree with this, I think people who make bad games should be called out for making bad games and I’ve called many a company or individual cunts in the past. I reserve the right to call a shit game a shit game.

What I do agree with though is that we do have a responsibility to our readers and ourselves when writing a review, and right at the core of that for me is to represent the game accurately. If I’m going to call someone on something, I’d want to be damn sure that it’s not me hallucinating something (or if it possibly is me hallucinating something to stress that I could possibly be hallucinating something) and not ever make a statement like Mr Carroll’s without being 100% sure I could back it up with more than “well, that’s how it felt to me” closely followed by the internet equivalent of a “so nerr”.

I also believe that we should, wherever possible, restrict our criticism to the game itself (joking about the designers being hateful cunts who put game mechanics in to spite me aside - it’s quite obvious that such an event is unlikely to occur, so to me it’s fair game) and not project my views onto the developer as his explicit intention.

And that’s why the review leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. There’s an event in a game which takes a massive leap of never inferred logic to connect the dots to mocking and killing the disabled and an accusation that the author a) has an axe to grind and b) has taken the illogical leap in logic in the first place then reported as fact in the review.

Surely, we as bloggers, reviewers etc… should clarify such a conclusion in the review text that it is entirely our opinion and not necessarily true?

I guess it really does come down to a combination of honesty, clarity and framing stuff in the appropriate context its meant to be taken. If I hadn’t read the accompanying Indiegamer thread, I’d have no idea that this was the reviewers perception of events and not the actual events that occur in game. I believe it’s the reporters duty to ensure these three things are present in any review, if only so that no-one can possibly misinterpret what you’re writing about.

I kinda thought that was a given, but I guess Mr Carroll disagrees.

[I'll also confess at this final junction that I've likely been guilty of not playing by the above rules in the past. I am, after all, only human and constantly learning about this life thing still...]

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