Matching Passion with Preordination, Examples from Gamers
The post came to mind after listening to the latest ANNCast, with guests Adam Sheehan and Lance Heiskell from Funimation.
I sort of knocked Funimation a bit last year when I compared their online streaming stuff with Crunchyroll, but that’s probably something I didn’t intended to do at first. The thought came to and it was kind of fun to run with it, you know? Partly because it’s true that their approach to “new media” (in quotes as the term of art) is along the lines of what we see from the more entrenched players of the publishing industry, no matter how much better Funi is compared to most of the others that we know. That particular subject matter deserves its own post, anyways. Like this.
The thing is, I think Funimation’s marketing team is doing a very good job overall at least on their web-facing arm of the department. I think guys like Adam, Lance and Rojas all are doing it right. At the same time, it’s no fun when Funimation may be the only US-based anime company that not only can benefit greatly from that sort of marketing, but also they’re the only ones who have the resources to hire people to do that full time among these anime publishers here.
After listening to ANNCast (I somewhat skipped the movie talk bits, since I don’t really care), it occurred to me that while the two ANN hosts are trying to entertain their audience in their own ways, they come off as unprofessional. This was because compared to the two Funimation guests, who are both professionals and as sufficiently genuine as a PR gig can be, Zac and Justin come off like clowns who hate their jobs and the shows they have to watch. I guess it is forgivable in the sense that Zac and Justin were trying to make it entertaining, but uh, I wouldn’t invite Lance to a podcast if I want it to be entertaining. That’s worse than inviting Holo to be your anime’s co-lead, to use an economics in-in-joke.
Well, I’m sure both Zac and Justin are working in a field in which they like. I mean who would otherwise put up with the things they put up with? At the same time, I look at Chris Beveridge’s twitter, and I’m like, man, that’s kind of a nice job. But then again he is the guy who can watch all of One Piece and enjoy it, and the next moment review the torrential outpouring of crappy hentai anime that he reviews out of some notion of journalistic and artistic integrity. In fact, because he’s seen so many crappy anime, I think he’s got it: He knows how to reconcile with Sturgeon’s Law.
Let it be known that if you do want to write reviews for a living, you will end up fighting Sturgeon’s Law, that’s for sure. For a good example of what not to do, just read ANN’s reviews! Joking aside, it’s also possible that some may wander into the deep end, so the editorial and review policies of a thing like the ANN is not easy to balance. I knock ANN, because they have this big bull’s eye on their backs, since they are ambitious enough to take up their crosses and nobody else has (or could). Not because they suck (which could be true) and should go away (hah). Well, it’s probably unfair to criticize the whole organization for the failing of a few, and the problem I am talking about in this post is universal (as I see it on Jtor all the time).
So what’s the best way to approach this problem?
What I want to share is what has already been said, many times, by the video game folks online. The video game “web 2.0 press” industry has had a much bigger head start on blogging and reviewing that they’re past this phase already. Instead of reinventing the wheel I’ll I quote from Penny Arcade’s less eloquent half. After all, if the gamer world is the Matrix, Gabe and Tycho are like The Oracle. Except instead of cookies they make charities, cons and comics:
I think the biggest complaint I saw [in Assassin’s Creed] was that the missions become repetitive and boring. I actually didn’t understand this complaint at all until just the other day. I had gotten an early copy of the game just like everyone else in the media but I was just playing it for fun. I’d cracked into it over the weekend and when I got into the office on Monday I started seeing these negative reviews. When I saw the low scores I was actually really upset and I wanted to talk about the game here on the site. I wanted to tell everyone that these guys were full of shit. However, since so many of the complaints were based on the ending I wanted to beat it first so I was sure I wasn’t missing anything. I attacked the game again but this time with the goal of beating it as fast as I could. I was determined to get a post up on Tuesday and I was pushing through the game as fast as I could. I went from finding every high perch in a district to only getting the ones I needed to advance the story. I stopped saving every citizen and avoided any unnecessary confrontations. The informer missions that I had really enjoyed before, I now avoided because I knew they took too long to complete. I did the bare minimum of missions to progress the story and anything that “hindered” my progress was frustrating. Monday night after skipping over another combat (something I used to really enjoy) I stopped myself. What the fuck was I doing? I wasn’t playing the game because I wanted to I was playing it because I had a deadline and I needed to beat it. I stopped immediately and decided I’d write about the game whenever I got around to beating it. I spent another day and a half with it and during that time I hunted for hidden flags and explored the cities again. I came in this morning and finally did beat it but I did it at my own pace and I enjoyed every part of it.
Imagine what an open ended sandbox title must look like to a reviewer especially right now. How many games do they have piling up on their desks? A game like Assassins [C]reed isn’t meant to be played under a deadline. You shouldn’t be trying to beat it as fast as you can so you can move on to Mass Effect or Mario Galaxy. As soon as I gave myself a deadline all of a sudden I understood all their complaints. It was like a fucking Escher painting. I had put myself in their shoes and suddenly the landscape flipped and I could see games from their perspective. In the end I wasn’t angry at them for their bad reviews. I actually just felt bad for them.
If you’re not sure what Gabe is saying, go hit up the link and read the whole story, hopefully it makes a lot more sense. And yeah, I do feel bad about some of the reviewers out there, having to cram down crap moe shows they hate because that’s what they’re paid to do. In the end it tortures themselves, their organization, and their readers, all just for some traffic spikes. And it isn’t that they can’t or shouldn’t review moe crap or whatever, but they are incapable of handling it.
It’s worse because I know how some of you out there “work.” I am too an infinitesimal part of this nefarious cloud of individuals who can actually write a review in the disguise of press, and this is not a labor to be done without joy. If you are doing this web journalism thing for real, as a career, as your calling in life, please do not discredit your and your colleagues’ reputation by putting out reviews of things that aren’t labor of love. Because in truth, the whole Web 2.0-way of reviews is to connect, not to arbitrate. We look at reviews as just a data point to make a purchase decision. It’s YOU be the judge, not our REVIEWS. To cite the more eloquent half of Penny Arcade:
If I had to state the difference between our approach and others, it’s that we seem to understand that we are simply expressing an opinion. The age of the psychic reviewer shaman is over. You should never allow a meaningless, arbitrary integer promulgated by an arbitrary voice who came to power arbitrarily make decisions for you. That’s essentially what Gabriel was trying to say, but he said it in a Gabriel way and it may be that the signal was lost.
You can also read what I think about a large portion of the “pro” reviews out there for anime, because Gabe sums it up. It’s a very relevant tangent, but I won’t go into it here.
The ability to overcome this hurdle is what makes a real pro, well, a pro. It’s what makes you credible. The cold, harsh economics of it all is something you want to deal with as a pro, and not something you can put off to your readers just because “no publicity is bad publicity.” It is not a good community-building approach. It doesn’t mean a reviewer can’t express his opinion, but any idiot online can express his opinion, what makes yours earn your pay? A professional critic’s opinion is valuable in of itself, and not just because he has a title that is a professional critic. It is not couched in personalized contexts but truths that connects with the audience. Heck, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do troll reviews–again, any idiot online can troll. If I’m going to pay a troll, that troll better be a good troll, if not an excellent one.
I suppose, thankfully, that anime reviews have not reach the levels of seriousness in business that game reviews have. This mixed blessing both curses us to a sea of mediocre reviews being created merely on the merit of traffic, with better reviews gaining no clout on them; and it blesses us with a “yukkuri” attitude that, in the end of the day, reviews are just yet another pile of pies in the sea of opinion in which we exist.
I’m kind of used to Zac spewing out garbage this, garbage that all over the place, nothing new really. But this episode I felt something akin to second-hand embarrassment when the two guests were like “but Ikkitousen is our #1 show on xbox” and he’s making an ass of himself with digs at the demographic associated. I was like dude, it’s OK to keep your mouth shut every now and then. It sounds like such a cliche complaint, but seriously that’s not gonna fly in today’s web where connections are more important than content.
Quite frankly, it boils down not to “Do you have tha skillz to pay tha billz?” but rather “Have you paid tha cost to be tha boss?” I really noticed this when Ebert started blogging and would respond to commenters or write posts in response to comments. The best example of this sort of thing is when people complain about like a bad movie from a debased genre like action or horror or whatever by slinging ad homs like “This is just supposed to be the kind of movie where you turn off your brain and have fun”, to which he can then rattle off a dozen movies that are similar to the one being reviewed but are strictly superior in basically every way. When I see a review like that ANN one for Nanoha, I have little belief in my head that the reviewer could do something similar.
Like from watching series after (often terrible) series and then forcing myself to write at least something eventually after some arbitrary point it just started to come pretty easily. It’s that reconciling of Sturgeon’s Law finally somehow clicking. There’s the moment of clarity when you realize that the anime that most people would probably call shit are really just “normal”. And there’s also the reverse of that, when you find something that’s actually truly extraordinary (and you can actually say why!)
So! If you’re going to write a review and use a phrase like “moe crap”, you’d better be able to define both “moe” and “crap” on demand (no Potter Stewart definitions allowed either!), and then be able to list a bunch of “moe” titles off the top of your head that are not crap.
I looked up the word “preordination” and I’m still not sure what the title of this post means ;;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_%28manga%29
People review anime somewhere?
Perhaps anime needs an HL Mencken.
I’m only half-facetious: I visit ANN often, often for news, often for the Encyclopedia (thankyou, ANN!) but never read their reviews (with the exception of skimming Shelf Life and Right Turn Only, but there I just look to see in what way my tastes differ from their reviewers).
This is not to knock their reviews and reviewers, it’s just not a medium I’m interested in. But, generalizing from a sample of one, I wonder how much life remains in the movie- and tv-review business, actually, in this age of internet-mediated word-of-mouth (word-of-keyboard?). My kids have a British film-critic they like, but there it’s mostly because of the fellow’s writing style (nasty, British, and short). The review as entertainment. I suppose he’s what you’d call “a good troll”.
As to the ANN podcasts — I like them, tons, once it gets past the Zac/Justin chatter to the industry representatives.
Justin, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, but Zac, eh, he’s a load of crock.
Obviously you haven’t seen the old Answerman, when Zac was helming it. Oh, and how he treated Hinano that one time.
He’s a load of crock through and through.
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