The Beginner Bias in Game Critique. When was the last time you saw a game get serious push back from critics for being too easy? How often do you find game critics defending against simplification? How often does IGN take bold stances against popular consensus on the basis of game design (not politics or whatever)? The answer to all these questions is very rarely or almost never. As of late I've found in a number of my reviews, both positive and negative, actually, that my thoughts and conclusions rarely line up with popular consensus. Perhaps I am merely an outlier, but I believe a huge part of this phenomenon is the heavy overwhelming bias in game critique towards beginner players.

Sure expert players have opinions and critiques that they share on discord and on forums that are remote islands, but in terms of the general public conversation every single force right now is pushing relentlessly towards beginner oriented design. Part of this is natural as the gaming audience grows and expands and that is cool but the problem gaming has in terms of it critical landscape is that the space that should be reserved for expert players is being held hostage by a bunch of casual scrubs. What we have right now is an unholy fusion of the mass of beginner players and a league of beginner critics telling new players exactly what they want to hear. It is an unbalanced relationship because both of these forces are now teaming up and pushing devs to make their games more simple and basic. There is no opposing incentive right now even in terms of review scores towards making games and easy and pandering as possible.

Then add to that this new moralistic sledgehammer of devs being told that removing difficulty is supposedly required for "accessibility" (I talk about real accessibility in the video) and you have the results that everyone is making video essays about right now most mainstream games now are boring and basic. None of these video essayists then take the next step of actually applying the critiques to individual games, but that's a subject for another video ha.

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00:00 Games Can No Longer Afford to be Challenging (Literally)
02:30 Youtubers Critique General Industry but Softball Individual Games
04:45 Game Critique Only Flows in One Direction Towards Simplification
07:30 Critics are Beginners and Beginners are Critics (The Unholy Fusion)
09:50 Gatekeeping WILL HAPPEN Naturally, So Might As Well Do it Right
12:21 We Keep IGNORING Legacy Skill in Game Design
16:03 Accessibility: Difficulty IS Artistic Content
20:27 True Accessibility is Accessing Difficulty, Not Removing It.
23:10 The Exception to Beginner Bias is First Person Shooters

#cozygaming, #ign, #darksouls