Let People Be Bad at Games

This is a feature excerpt from Unwinnable Monthly #178. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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I see this kind of sentiment all over the videogame sphere – particularly among The Gamers (derogatory). “LOL N00B,” “get gud,” “easy modes ruin the creators’ original vision,” that kind of nonsense. It’s tiring and frustrating to see at face value because, let’s face it, nobody likes to be insulted or talked down to. But that’s not the only problem with this mentality. It also has a tendency to lead to ideas like being bad at games makes a person bad (akin to “poor people are bad because they’re poor and being poor is a moral failing”), or that only people who are good at games are “qualified” to talk about – let alone critique – videogames in the first place.

Well, here’s the thing: You don’t have to be good at games to enjoy them. You don’t have to enjoy games to talk about them. And you don’t have to be good at them to talk about them, either.

At this point there are 100-percent going to be at least a few people demanding to know my gaming credentials, because as I mentioned, skill is often conflated with viability. Obviously, I don’t need to indulge those demands since that’s the whole point of this rant, but just for fun I’ll play along.

I’ve been playing videogames for 35+ years, across just about every major platform you can think of (minus outliers like the Atari Jaguar or Panasonic’s 3DO). I’ve beaten some difficult NES, SNES and Genesis games and I’ve given up on plenty that frustrated me, too. I used to speed run the original Resident Evil on the original PlayStation for fun, even after unlocking the infinite ammo rocket launcher. I’ve beaten the original Dead Space on the hardest difficulty while simultaneously earning the One Gun achievement (i.e.: only use the Plasma Cutter for the whole game). I beat the original PlayStation 3 release of Demon’s Souls, but I also gave up on Dark Souls because I got sick of it wasting my time. And so on and so forth.

But again, none of that matters. Whether or not I’ve beaten New Game+ 7 on Elden Ring means nothing when I’m talking about how poorly its introduction to leveling up your character is handled. Heck I’d argue that “being good” (or at least decent) at games like it made the problem worse, because my lack of needing to actually rest before getting to the first real boss is what resulted in me accidentally skipping past the invisible “unlock character leveling” trigger.

Before we get too much farther into all this, I want to acknowledge that there are a handful of very specific situations where expertise and skill do come into play when critiquing videogames. Stripping down a particular gameplay system or analyzing intricate mechanics (say, for instance, fighting game minutiae or RPG number crunching) does carry more weight when the person has thorough knowledge of what they’re talking about. But again, these are very specific cases and it’s not common for someone who isn’t fairly familiar with such details to attempt a deep dive.

The same goes for the idea that someone needs to have played through an entire series before being able to talk about the latest entry. So, so many people often jump into a given franchise at a point other than the very beginning, and that’s completely fine and normal. It’s also an opportunity for long-time fans of A Thing to get a fresh perspective – provided their minds are open to such scandalous things. If anything, it’s usually a good perspective to pay attention to, because when a game (or movie, or show, or whatever) relies too heavily on someone already knowing the extended lore, important information usually falls through the cracks. I’m not talking about homages or nods but important character and plot points. For big revelations and other significant elements to have the intended impact, it’s usually best to pepper in at least a little rehashed information for the sake of potential (and highly likely) series newcomers.

This is not to say that it’s bad to have more extensive knowledge of a series or its mechanics. It’s just as valid and important a perspective to have, honestly. But people need to realize that a lot of the time the angle of someone’s perspective doesn’t matter so much as what they have to say in the first place.

Now is the part where I talk about that one Cuphead video. You know the one. The internet was practically salivating over it for months because it “validated” the idea that game journalists were bad at games and didn’t know what they were talking about. Despite the fact that 1) it was one person, 2) he’s a tech journalist, not a games journalist, 3) he wasn’t super familiar with games like it, so much of the tropes people often assume are in place were lost on him, and 4) he liked the game and recommended it anyway. This was not a review. It was one person trying out a game that was being previewed (emphasis on previewed) at an event. I know the answer to this but ignore the pedantry for a moment: Who really fucking cares if he’s “not good” at the game in this scenario? Outside of people with a hate-boner for games journalism – as though the vast majority of people who do this underpaid, overworked, and universally hated job are doing it because they themselves also really like videogames – it’s completely nonsensical.

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Rob Rich is a guy who’s loved nerdy stuff since the 80s, from videogames to anime to Godzilla to Power Rangers toys to Transformers, and has had the good fortune of being able to write about them all. He’s also editor for the Games section of Exploits! You can still find him on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon.