Rowan wrote a very clear reasoning why negative reviews are out of bounds for the new series Dungeon Deep Cuts, and it made me think I should articulate why I’ve decided to do the opposite with Bathtub Reviews. This is a challenging little thing to write, actually, because it’s personal.

The constant refrain echoing about the elfgame community over the past few years is “where is the criticism?”. I know where it went. Regularly, a new game or module gets a negative or mixed review, and there is outrage that the critic is accused of toxic negativity, accused of not caring about the indies, accused of not supporting new creators. It’s not the game, they say. It’s the critic. I don’t want to be the mean girl of module reviews. I don’t love conflict. I want people to like me. It would be easy to decide not to write anything negative and so preserve the appearance of kindness and positivity, and avoid creating any conflict in our insular elfgame community.

I know game design is hard, and vulnerable. I write myself. I tend to write experimental things that people don’t like. I’m sinking money I can’t spare into my upcoming book, Bridewell, which is likely to bounce right off the major critics in the hobby. It’s painful to receive criticism, because as artists we’re putting our hearts on display for people to spit on.

My stated audience is my table, my design journey. It is not my place to provide unsolicited feedback to game designers. Aiming to identifying what makes a module worth playing for me, and hence what makes a module worth emulating when I write, is limits my responsibility some. I don’t know what you like or would enjoy. But I can comment on what I’d like and enjoy. It’s important to say “y’know what, this is incredibly useable but the vibes are off for me” or “the module is poorly put together but the vibes are immaculate”, because I’m more likely to play the latter than the former, but the latter will receive more criticism no doubt.

I wrestle with the criticism in my reviews. It takes self-awareness to understand why you don’t like a text, or why you have trouble engaging with it. They are art, not mechanics. I don’t believe it’s contributing what I want to contribute at all to publish something that declares This Is Bad And I Don’t Know Why. It’s valid for me to dislike something without grounds, but that is a cruel and negative approach to reviewing that I don’t allow myself the luxury of performing. It’s important I wrestle with my feelings about my why I feel critically.

I try to mitigate potential damage. I’m flexible around publishing dates if the a review is close to launch or to awards. I’m concerned about negatively effecting sales because I’m conscious about presenting honest, nuanced reviews. In a world that doesn’t make it easy to get by, and certainly one that makes it near impossible to make a living in elfgames, a negative review might be a meal not on someone’s table. “But game design is hard, the authors and artists have put their blood, sweat and tears into the game”, and yes, that is true. But a review of my game is not for me, as much as I wish it was. It’s for players, who deserve to know whether the game is worth their time and attention. It’s for other designers, to know what they should be learning from. If you want glowing praise, seek an endorsement. Endorsements are brief. If I were reviewing on Tik Tok, my reviews would be more glowing. But my reviews are typically long; over a thousand words. My spending that amount of time interrogating a text means I think it’s strong; but also, it’s difficult for a long review not to become a discussion of strengths and weaknesses. It’s very difficult to write a long review that is all praise. Pointing out a game isn’t perfect is not saying it shouldn’t have been made.

I believe there’s a place for criticism that isn’t a beige unboxing video, uninformed criticism based on vibes, or unabashed cheerleading. I’m writing criticism to try to be an antidote to that. I’m not writing advertising copy, although I’m very happy to bring more money into the hobby. My reviews, in attempting to be honest and nuanced, feel more critical than pretty much anything out there. I feel it invalidates my opinion if I were to publish only positive reviews, or if I favoured friends or colleagues, or if I were to not review something that I had read with the intent of reviewing it, because my experience were negative. If I only were to publish negative reviews, it would also invalidate my opinion. I need to review in an honest, nuanced way for the work to have meaning.

This hasn’t exactly been a structured essay, so I’m not sure how to finish. Its a complex issue in a small hobby, and I’ve put considerable thought into publishing nuanced, balanced reviews for modules that I don’t feel positive towards overall. I certainly feel a responsibility to the creators as well as to whoever reads these reviews, and that responsibility is foremost in my mind whenever I’m writing criticism, whether the module is one of the best I’ve ever read, or not one of those. And hopefully, that is enough.

22nd July, 2023

Idle Cartulary