I feel like there are many critics who will complain when a game doesn't 'have something to say' but a lot of the examples I see of something 'having something to say' is usually very clear, on the nose messaging.

like when people think they have a gotcha when they're interviewing an artist and the artist is like "no I'm not making political fiction," it's like... I see a lot of "ahh they're denying they're making political works" but like, what is your... ideal? What SHOULD it do?

I feel like a lot of people talk about how art isn't living up to some ideal but I rarely see people establish a criteria for what specific elements failed and how the idealized version might look without it.

like, if I write "doom eternal has flattened the experience by requiring you to engage with every mechanic in every fight," I previously establish that good shooter is _varied shooting_ and explain what that means in great detail.

so just saying "this game doesn't have anything to say" is invalid criticism, it's meaningless, it needs to establish how the work avoids saying anything and identify opportunities for where it could.

I feel like a lot of people respond to being unhappy with a work by just kinda waffling around not saying anything, where good criticism is like "here's the thing, here's what it's trying to do, here's why it has failed to accomplish that goal."

Or even "it's trying to accomplish a goal I find reprehensible, and here's why that goal is reprehensible." There's a clarity a lot of stuff lacks, pushing towards this very "I'm unhappy." Okay... but if your criticism isn't educational in some way, then it isn't valid.

If you have a take on a work--if you think it failed in some way--then you must, absolutely must, educate your audience on how the work succeeds or fails. Simply stating that it has failed isn't enough.

I wrote a game once and I made it all about putting the audience in the shoes of poverty; the goal was to go "this is what that fear feels like. It isn't pleasant. This is powerlessness." The intent was empathy generation.

One of my least favorite critics in games wrote about it

her take was very much what she does in the bulk of her critical writing, and why I dislike her work, which is "you might like it, you might not." She didn't have anything to say from the get go. But one specific thing she said was "it doesn't say anything."

Yeah.

I'm not.

Sure, you could say he's saying "this is what poverty is like," but if it was an essay, I'd be writing a descriptive essay--it's not argumentative, it's not expository. I'm not here to persuade you of anything. I'm here to describe a moment in time.

So there's an example.

this brought to you by me working on the pitches for what game we make after we ship Adios, and wanting to set a game in Strangereal, and laying out _why_ I want to set it in strangereal, which is to deal w/ human feelings and not make an argumentative point.

like my goal in this tentative project would be about dealing with grief, soldiering on despite it all, sort of um, like... explaining to people what it's like to be me? answering the question "how did you make it through that?" conveying this _feeling_ behind it all, maybe?

I think a good example of "this is fucked up, politically," is when people went "Modern Warfare rewrites history to say that Russia did something America did, and that's genuinely fucked up, it's teaching people to ignore history." I think that was how you ought to do things.