That highlighted part is what I think both articles are undermphasizing. Each over-inflates the presumed inaccessibility of video games to the novice by arguing that the "informed" quality is more important than persistence of goals. The first author does this to explain away her failure at grasping the mechanics, claiming that gamers must be vacant weirdos for pursuing the medium to the point of being good at it. The second author wants to spin that claim into a back-patting session, congratulating himself and others for being so darned special for getting enjoyment out of this stuff. Both are motivated by their biases while mistakenly thinking they're motivated by questions of skill (or lack thereof).Ivo wrote:There is a very important difference in that even though SOME movies and literature and other forms of art require information to be enjoyed / appreciated, basically ALL games, with few exceptions, can only be appreciated by someone who is informed or puts some non-trivial effort to learn.
Take the second author's comparison of the "thousands of hours of reading and studying [you need] to have a proper understanding of Proust or Derrida" to the time spent mastering DOTA 2 or Dwarf Fortress gameplay. These things are not even close to being equal, because a video game is designed to teach you what you need to know to succeed at it. It can't risk betting on your being a genius, so even if it's a challenging title, the keys to accomplishment are still built right in there. One's understanding of Proust and Derrida, by contrast, will be largely helped by reading works other than the source material, especially analytic works. Beating your head against a particular book is not going to lead you to sudden enlightenment in the same way that beating your head against a particular video game is.
I think gaming is more comparable to a skilled craft, like carpentry or metalworking. If you're observant, smart, and willing to experiment by trial-and-error, you will gain command of your tools and techniques in order accomplish something. A video game says, "Build a shelf," and then supplies you with all the machinery, raw materials, and tutorial projects you need to eventually get there. Not all finished shelves will be of similar quality, but so long as you dedicate yourself to the work, you'll finish the project in your own way.
I mean, I agree that more comprehensive and useful reviews are going to be written by seasoned gamers. But I'd also say that if it's hypothetically impossible for a substantial review to be written on a particular title by an persistent, open-minded non-gamer, then that title failed at its job. Non-gamers are more crippled by the "unproductivity" connotation that JT brought up in his excellent post than by their supposed innate ineptitude, in my opinion. I particularly wish that they themselves would stop buying into that myth.
