And my day gets better.

This is the game that featured these two moments of dialogue, that I’ve written about so many times:

Clearly RPS is a site where such rules can be dismissed, and the oafs who make comments including the word “objective” are to be ignored. I adore the idiocy of the idea that a review could ever be objective, but am dismayed by the results of those who believe this is how it should be, producing abortive confusions of impersonal descriptive writing and score categories including gibberish words like “gameplay”. There is, of course, a large audience for this, people reading through opinion and critique only thinking, “but how good is the sound out of ten?” But I’m very lucky to write for no such publications, and extremely fortunate that those places that do employ me allow me to use the word “me” as I write. Because I am telling the story of my experiences playing a game, and the idea of leaving me out of that tale seems folly. Not that I think I’m particularly interesting, nor that I think my story is more important than expressing the nature of the game. But simply because the reader, much like me, is a person, and when they play the game the experience will be as a person playing a game.

I understand people’s impatience with “I” reviews. When I buy a new novel my heart always sinks if I see it is written in the first person. It bobs back to the surface again soon after if the book is well written, but it does mean sacrificing the narrator, that detached voice who can provide me not only with extra details and information the characters might not know, but also provide me another perspective, and perhaps let me understand a situation more – dare I say it – objectively? Without the third person voice I am never sure if what I am being told is true, or simply the narrator’s skewed understanding. Having a third-person author is like having God with you as you read, able to assure you of solid facts, and inform you when someone’s lying. And it’s always nice to have God alongside.

But a review isn’t an impartial account of some events. (Although I’m tempted to write one that is, now I think about it. A review with a detached third person author describing the events of the reviewer’s reviewing. ) A review, apart from my parenthetical fantasy review, is one person’s report. They are, by their nature, the novel told by the character. To leave out the “me” and the “I” I think is an act of dishonesty.

It has to be done well. A review that begins, “When I first sat down to play the game I had reservations, having had a bad experience with a similar game only months before,” would likely be terrible. The reader didn’t have that bad experience, and will not be approaching the game with such preconditioning. And who cares – tell me about this game. But if, when playing, you felt disappointment, or elation, that’s surely vital to report? Sure, someone else may not have similar emotional experiences, but saying, “The game is capable of eliciting an emotional response in those predicated toward such matters,” isn’t very helpful. Saying, “It made me laugh until snot came out of my nose,” I contend, is.

There’s also no room for the compromise: “We”. It’s ridiculous. Unless it is genuinely a consensus opinion held by the staff of a magazine or website, which is unlikely in a review written by one person, there is no place for “we” in games writing. It’s not something you see outside, either. A newspaper doesn’t have a reviewer write, “We went to see the latest production of Becket’s…” It would be ludicrous. You end up with phrases like, “It made us laugh until snot came out of our nose.” This muddle of singular and plural voice makes it impossible for me to follow. Your collective nose? And you all reacted the same way? Are you a staff of cloned robots?

Clearly there are two audiences for game reviews. There are those who wish to have the game described to them by a game describing machine, which then rates strange made up categories like “gameplay”, whatever on Earth that might be, out of 10. And thankfully there are those who wish to read one person’s reaction to the game, written in such a way that allows them to discern what their own reaction might be, via the remarkable human abilities to empathise and sympathise.

So is it appropriate for me to write a news story for RPS as a personal account of my own neuroses? This discussion hasn’t helped, nor indeed even addressed, this subject. I’m quite sure it’s not. I’m sure it’s indulgent and distracting. I think it’s very likely what I’ll do.