The Job of the Critic

Films have critics, computer games have reviewers, but what do virtual worlds have? Virtual worlds have rant sites.

That’s not entirely fair; the main listings sites for textual worlds do carry player-written reviews that are often thoughtful and insightful (and not necessarily written by people with a vested interest in making prospective players either play or fail to play the world in question). For graphical worlds, though, with their much bigger player bases, rant sites rule.

When it comes down to it, virtual worlds are places. In the real world, if you want to go on vacation somewhere you buy an up-to-date guidebook before you go. The guidebook tells you all you want to know, using language you can understand, in a reasonably unbiased manner. Virtual worlds do have guidebooks that you can buy, but as I mentioned earlier these are usually just extensions of the manual (and they’re not necessarily up-to-date). If you have a real-world guidebook for Egypt, you may on the strength of reading it want to go there even more; if you have a guidebook for a virtual world, it’s because you’ve already been there but couldn’t get to grips with

it. Unfortunately, if you scan through the articles on a rant site for either Egypt or for a virtual world, you’re only ever going to come away with misgivings.

Rant sites are almost non-stop interpretation and criticism. Sometimes the criticism is constructive ¹, often it is justified, but always it is biting. To paraphrase Mr. Burns in The Simpsons, rant sites “know what they hate.”

Much of the criticism that rant sites direct at virtual worlds is non-comparative. You have to decide which virtual world you want to try on the basis of whichever attracts the fewest complaints on subjects that matter to you. Occasionally, they do describe virtual worlds in terms of one another, but this is normally to petition for the inclusion or removal of a feature on the grounds that some other virtual world has or doesn’t have it. Normally, though, the comments are prescriptive and fairly self-centered: This is what the virtual world should be like so that people like me will enjoy it. Nevertheless, individual writers do have consistent opinions, and if you find one whose views agree with yours on something you know about, it makes eminent sense to consult them when it comes to something you don’t know about.

The problem that a critic/reviewer of virtual worlds has is that these take a lot of time to get to know. Food critics only have to eat in a restaurant once to be able to fill half a page of newsprint with colorful invective; film critics can watch five movies a day. Even computer game reviewers diligent enough to play something all the way through will rarely have to spend more

than a week at it ². Virtual world reviewers can only do a good job if they take months—and then, having invested so much of themselves in the world, they have the problem (common to ethnographers) of disconnecting from their subject matter enough to write about it objectively.

When reviewers manage to do this, they are capable of writing excellent critiques. It can be very difficult making these accessible to non-players, though. It’s like reading the blurb of book six in a Fantasy series that you haven’t read books one through five of: “After the fall of Khanex, Modorph’s future looks secure. But now the Jeek-riders of Xethen threaten the southern borders and Wachel roam the Dillith Marches. Can Luth and his Darok blade, Shaash, ever ….” So it is with virtual worlds: To explain what is truly wrong or right with one, it’s often only possible to do so with reference to things that people may only understand having experienced them.

There are exceptions, of course. Back in Chapter 1, I described the ways by which virtual worlds are readily categorized from a newbie-friendly historical perspective; such information is often sufficient to put off people trying one or cause them to look at it in more detail. This hardly amounts to criticism, though. Another technique, favored mainly by researchers rather than reviewers, is to play a virtual world for a few evenings to get a sense of its look and feel, then interview players to form a picture of what life is like after six months. This can be useful, and the critic’s ability to collate and summarize opinion comes to the fore. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy obtaining a representative sample of players: A higher proportion of the ones you bump into or who respond to interview requests seem

to have a chip on their shoulder than is statistically correct. Nevertheless, an experienced reviewer can account for this, knowing it will happen. This is one of many reasons why I am very excited by the (as I write this) impending re-launch of the print magazine Massive Online Gaming ³, the first issue of which (before it hit publisher problems) was hugely impressive.

The role of the rant-site critic in virtual worlds is large in terms of forming player opinion, but small in terms of relevance to prospective new players. If you’ve grown disenchanted with one world and want to try a different one, or if you’re a total newbie looking for somewhere to start out, a rant site won’t help ⁴. Intelligent reviewers can be invaluable guides, but ultimately you need a means to assess virtual worlds yourself. This must be both accessible and supportive of a Theory of Virtual Worlds to which you give allegiance. The theory gives the ideal; the experience gives the reality; the critical aesthetic connects the two.

Perhaps one day virtual worlds will have travel guides, written by independent correspondents whose job it is to report on them. Until then, however, players are essentially on their own.