What Spoils a Game For You? 214
MTV's Multiplayer Blog is running an interesting piece about what constitutes a spoiler in video games. The interactivity of a video games, argues the author, often makes it necessary to spoil or reveal at least general characteristics of a game during a review or other informative article. He says, "I believe that writing about games is overly careful. I believe that game scripts, game plots and game endings have been given a pass because critics tend to avoid them or address them with the most ginger touch. I'd at least like the discussion about spoilers to cease being so binary. There is room between avoiding mentioning a plot event and reporting its main details. There is value to addressing anything and everything that is most interesting in a game, and value in doing it with words that express meaning rather than those designed to mask it." So, what do you consider a spoiler for a video game, and how do they affect your enjoyment of the game?
Easy. (Score:4, Insightful)
Reporting about plot twists (Score:4, Insightful)
Does it for me.
A Different type of spoiler (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
I won't even buy it if it is infected with DRM.
Boss levels (Score:2, Insightful)
"Boss" levels. Games are supposed to be fun. If you make them too difficult then they cease being fun.
Hold it to the same standard as movies.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What really gets my goat? (Score:2, Insightful)
The worst part about people spoiling a game for you is them telling you that Aeris dies.
Dude, that game is 12 years old now. If you don't know that she dies, I have some bad news for you: The ship sinks at the end of Titanic.
What really spoils a game for me? (Score:4, Insightful)
To be honest, what really spoils a game for me, is when every single publication and media outlet for video game reviews praises a game beyond belief for the most trivial of aspects but fails to mention the overarching and incredibly frustrating and ubiquitous downsides and shortcomings of a game.
Obviously spoiling plot twists, game endings, or surprise moments and easter eggs, is a major fau paux. But game reviewers rarely ever engage in writing those revelations and leave them for the reader (or player) to discover.
Video game reviews have been going on since video games have been around. The fact that one reviewer received one single complaint saying that the MTV.com writer spoiled Killzone 2 requires an entire discussion around it is a tad bit reactionary and absurd.
The real way that game reviews spoil a game for me is when they review a game for being 'perfect' or 'near perfect' but when I get my copy of said game it's filled with bugs, glitches, bad writing, plot holes, lackluster story, bad endings, overpriced DLC, archaic or intrusive or disruptive DRM, the game costs more than its worth as you can beat it in two days making renting it a better option, or that the game is all around terrible but somehow managed a score in the eightieth to ninetieth percentile (with some even scoring perfect scores.
Oddly I've yet to see a game score a perfect with the review mentioning only positives, there is always one negative. Wouldn't that negative imply a flaw hence negating the perfection that a game allegedly has?
Yes spoiling plot elements or easter eggs is a terribly thing for reviewers to do, but they've been doing far worse things in the industry for years.
Re:A Different type of spoiler (Score:3, Insightful)
yep, ditto. LittleBigPlanet was like that...I just wanted to get in and start making COOL STUFF! but no. Play through the levels we made, then you have to play through the tutorials for every. Single. Item.
I've used a paint program before, so perhaps its not necessary for me to watch a tutorial on how to use one in the game?
Or hey, devs, here's a better idea. Unlock everything, without forcing tutorials, and let players figure things out for themselves - maybe the players will make things out of your stuff that you never heard of!
IMHO it's more complex (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO it's more complex than "don't write about plot twists", and as the summary notes, some games have gotten a free pass with some really bad ones just so the reviewer doesn't spoil it. Basically I'd propose the following distinction, and IMHO it's a major one:
A) Telling me _what_ the plot twist is. Bad.
B) Telling me about the quality of plot twists and their implementation. Good.
Basically I don't want to know stuff like "it turns out you're the feared Sith Lord", but I do want to know if, say, the plot twists are cliches that you can see coming a whole disk before they actually happen.
Also, I don't really mind examples if:
A) They happen in the first half an hour of the game anyway, so it's not like it's such a major loss. The rest of a game _should_ still be enjoyable even if I know what happens in the tutorial. Or,
B) Even the most cursory read of the manual would reveal the same information. I mean, seriously, e.g., in Persona 2 Eternal Punishment you only needed to have played the previous game or read the manual to know what's with Maia or the mysterious boy. But in game for your characters that comes very very late. So basically the manual itself spoils a major element of the plot. Obviously the designers didn't mind you knowing that.
Should a reviewer really avoid it for those who can't be bothered to read the first 3 pages of the manual? (Then again, I doubt that _some_ people can read more than a paragraph;)
no native linux/openbsd (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus, of course, nearly all of the DRM out there.
I'll buy native games, as I have done in the past, and NOT buy games because they don't play on it.
Re:What really gets my goat? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the Christmas special was the only *real* Star Wars film.
Re:A Different type of spoiler (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
At least you can keep those patches. I cached the patch the Bioshock installer downloaded and tried everything I could think of to force the installer to use it instead of redownloading it, but it wouldn't have it.
BTW, ten megabytes is NOT trivial when downloaded at 6KB/s, which is what happens to a lot of Australian ADSL customers' connections when the monthly quota is exceeded.
Re:A Different type of spoiler (Score:5, Insightful)
From another angle, that's a 'spoiler' I'd like the game reviewers to give me. For example:
"In Singstar, all songs are unlocked and playable from the start, and even if one doesn't sing, the song will always complete."
"In Brain Age, while the initial few games are fun, you won't get to play the more enticing games until you've ... which takes about ... days of playing."
Re:IMHO it's more complex (Score:5, Insightful)
On other hand, even knowing that there *is* a major twist can completely change how you watch something.
SPOILER WARNING (sortof)
Before I watched Fight Club, someone had given me vague ideas that the twist was good, so I was watching the whole movie for the twist, and figured it out about a half hour before anyone else in the room did, and long before the movie actually presents it to you. Whereas when I watched the Sixth Sense, I knew nothing about the movie going in, and the twist caught me completely by surprise. You watch clues in a movie very differently when you know you should be looking for them.
There's a scene in FEAR where the lights go out in an elevator, and suddenly the antagonist is standing right next to you in it, with nowhere to go and nothing you can do to save yourself. Some of my (admittedly, younger) friends literally fell out of their chairs during that scene, then talked about it incessantly for weeks. By the time I played the game and got there, my only reaction was "hey, this is that elevator scene they were talking about. Yeah, I can see this being a little creepy."
What I'm saying is that little innocuous bits of knowledge can completely change how you approach something, because the way you have a good twist or surprise in a movie/video game is by leading up to it with other innocuous bits of information that you aren't supposed to know that you need to pay attention to. That way when it happens, everything "clicks" in your head, and the twist makes sense, but you don't come to the proper conclusion more than a couple seconds or minutes before it is revealed. Just knowing that you need to be paying attention to those details makes it a completely different experience.
Depends on your definition of "spoil." (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, revealing spoilers about the plot or telling me how to solve puzzles "spoils" the game for me. But that's not a patch on what MMOG asshattery does to my game experience. The 13-year-olds don't just spoil the game, they rape it with a baseball bat, beat it unconscious, and leave bleeding to death.
You want to REALLY ruin somebody's game? Make them play with arrogant, ignorant, sexist, homophobic, bigoted, inarticulate, semi-literate, foul-mouthed little punks.
Re:What really gets my goat? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Reporting about plot twists (Score:3, Insightful)
Another pet peeve which comes under spoilers is when something like a trailer or a video review shows you how to do a puzzle in a game where puzzles are part of the fun (Zelda, Braid, Prince of Persia etc) or showing a bosses weakness.