The Game Reviewer Who Hates Games (The Jimquisition)

Ha. Hahaha. Oh, great graphics. Hello everyone, James Stephanie Sterling here. Today I’d like to talk about what makes a REAL gamer. It’s often been said that I’m not one of those, that I’m not a proper gamer. In fact, it has been increasingly said that I HATE video games. Well, let me ask you, would someone who hates video games have the following items? Because, everybody knows, REAL gamers consume! Right?! I have this bag, right, that, that belonged to Satsuma from the Telltale’s Wolf of Wallstreet game, and I’ve got this lollipop from that game about the girl

with the chainsaw. Uhhhh… Chainsaw Lollipop, I think it was called. So, there! There’s your fake gamer. Do you reckon this is still alright?! Absolutely NOT! Me: *criticizes a game* Them: “You just hate videogames.” Me: *points at the games I like* Them: “Not those videogames.” That’s something I tweeted t’other day based on an interaction I’d had that could only be described as fucking hilarious. Well, it could also be described as exhausting bollocksing tripe, but my therapist says I should put a more positive spin on things, so let’s go with hilarious. T’other day? Yeah. T’OTHER DAY? Yeah!

Now I know I’m gonna make that fucker’s day because they’ll think their rhetorical bilge got under my skin, and on some level it did, I’ll admit that. Not because they

said anything correct, but because through all their condescending smugness and psychoanalytical pontification, they didn’t realize how wrong they were, or that what they were saying with such self-satisfied coincidence had been pulled from the same well of intellectual dishonesty that people who whine about videogame reviews have been slurping out of for close to two decades now. Basically, I was accused of hating videogames. Again. It’s funny because

I have been procrastinating on this video all week, to play through the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters. I love them so much that I’ve been capturing footage from them to put in this video about how I hate video games, so that I could keep playing them but justify playing them by calling playing them work. It’s a hard job, but somebody’s gotta do it! This was all in response to a recently published review of Dead Island 2, a beleaguered game that finally came out to the surprise of everyone and the interest of presumably someone. I gave it

a 6.5 after describing a game that was perfectly adequate. It’s a one-note zombie slasher with tedious exploration and very little to say for itself, but it’s got impeccable gore effects and the combat, while completely befeft of highs or lows, is fun until it drains you of mental investment. It’s a game that never gets better, but conversely it never gets worse. It’s fine. Sufficient. It’s alright. “I dunno if I like video game reviews anymore,” lamented one commenter. “It’s always tarred with negativity.” When I pointed out that literally the last two reviews I wrote before this one,

Dredge and Boneraiser Minions, were completely positive affairs, they just kind of… ignored me? They ignored me to go one of many, many long essays about how much I hate games. In these manifestos, the commenter pretty much ran the gamut of complaints about negative reviews that I’ve had to sit and read, over and over again, since fuckin’ 2006. Every time Sterling comes out with a review of a new game, it’s always written as this part is good, but this part is terrible. Every single review is “Video games are trash now, but at least it looks pretty”.

That’s… that’s you… That’s right! I AM pretty trash! I mean, I’m trash that’s pretty. I mean, I’m also pretty trash. You gonna put that lollipop down? Never a game apart from, oh, let’s say Disco Elysium, gets the Ten out of Ten treatment. No issues, great gameplay, great story, no hiccups at all from them, and it’s always the pretentious games such as Disco that get it. Sterling, you can like mainstream games. It’s not against the law… But then it becomes a question, is it the game’s fault for your negativity. If a game is inherently bad, does

reporting on said badness pass the torch to you as the reviewer? Do you then by proxy become the voice of negativity for the game? That’s VERY philosophical. Was it philosophy? Or was it almost a breakthrough? That’s true… It does ask the question “Is it your fault if the game is bad?” which, I would answer, no. You must admit, you enjoy a bit of kicking the devs around, no? You’re not one to go easy on them for a poor design choice. All I’m saying is you could take a page from ACG, and to a lesser extent

Jake Bald Emo. Their reviews are neutral, scientific, and spec based, with a final point of day one, wait for sale, deep sale, never touch. Don’t believe me?! Don’t believe me? Show me your 100% save game file for Dead Island 2 Jim Sterling! Show me the Platinum trophy or the Xbox Steam equivalent. Show us your max level character and all the side quests completed before passing judgement! Do it! Do it, go on. NO! It’s too monotonous to even complete? But not monotonous enough to character assassinate a game that’s been in dev hell for ten years! I

don’t know how that’s my responsibility… I just feel the score is wrong, and the review is biased. That word… Based off of bad previous experiences with these Techland Dead Island zombie games. I liked the first Dead Island… Like, this is where we get into that, like, armchair psychology. The bias, again with the word, is showing more than ever, and I’m sorry, but I believe criticism is needed sometimes when someone truly sees an issue forming. So do I, it’s why I write game reviews. And then the final bit, which I had to include, which is just

solid gold… You are the only voice that matters in this regard. Video games are bigger than Jim Stephanie Sterling. Ha. Hahahaha. No they’re not… You’ll note that none of those excerpts entertained consideration for the possibility that I just didn’t happen to like the computer game as much as they liked the computer game. I know I joke about hating videogames and everybody who has ever made a videogame, played a videogame, sold a videogame, thought about a videogame, or been so much as photographed near a videogame, but I like to think it was understood by the vast

majority of folks that it was, quite obviously, a joke, despite the fact it’s completely true. Unfortunately, the scream-flavored slurryscape that is videogame discourse doesn’t have much time for nuance, even if such nuance carries all the subtlety of a clown eating foreskins with a firework fork. Stephanie Sterling hates videogames. It’s an argument as long and tired as Mitch McConnel’s massive sleepy dick. I’ll grant you, at times, it can be hard to tell. My video work of 2021 especially focused on the game industry’s darkly depressing underbelly to such a degree that my contempt for the business overshadowed

any regard I might have had for the medium itself. I think, back then, you could make a believable case, but this is rarely what the charges of videogame hatred are actually about. No, it’s about something that has, ironically, been key to reigniting my interest in good old fashioned gaming discussions rather than miserable diatribes about how something something capitalism bad. Returning to written game reviews after years away has been a huge part of me actually liking talking about games again in general, because critically examining them is literally my favorite way to engage with the medium. But

if certain commenters are to be believed, my reviews are proof positive that I really don’t like videogames. This was a common response to my review of the Dead Space Remake. Now, I realize it was controversial, but I was a harsh judge of that particular product. I didn’t appreciate EA remaking a game whose original series it vandalised and original studio it drove to literal destruction. I didn’t care for its padding content and I just wasn’t that impressed by it. In the aftermath, I got to read many self-assured, or rather self-reassuring, comments saying that I shouldn’t review

games anymore because I clearly don’t like them. And it seems to be a thing now, an increasingly common response whenever I write a review that disagrees with the majority opinion, that goes against the community-wide mandate of what games we should all like. Really, when has my critique *ever* marched in lockstep with what the wider gamer community thinks? If you believe not giving obligatory 9/10s to “AAA” games is proof that I started hating games, son, you ain’t been reading my reviews very long. While it’s coming up way more often, the argument itself is about as old

as my career. The first time I remember seeing someone try to invalidate a review of mine by speculating on my likes and dislikes was Final Fantasy XIII. My low score and critical evisceration certainly rattled some cages at the time – though let’s face it, history vindicated me there – and many people scrabbled for the usual petty excuses to discredit my writing. They’re bad at games, they’re doing it for clicks, they didn’t play it, and, the one comment that stood out to me for being a complete asspull, “Sterling just doesn’t like JRPGs”. Doesn’t like JRPGs. The

critic whose love of Lost Odyssey saw them push back against the game reviewers who, at that time, were literally hating on traditional RPG gameplay, didn’t like Final Fantasy XIII, of all bastardised genre-fucking action games, because they don’t like RPGs from Japan. It wasn’t just a statement made without evidence, it was made in the *face* of evidence, it was made with anti-evidence. But it sounded good, to them at least it sounded plausible. And, most crucially, it sounded like a great way to deny the existence of a conflicting opinion. Like I said about the weird Dead Island

simpery earlier, this argument, like every argument against outlier reviews, refuses to touch the simple and straightforward notion that maybe the reviewer just didn’t like the same computer game as them. It’s what it all comes down to, always. They can’t comprehend, they can’t *cope* with the idea that someone doesn’t agree with them, so they come up with excuses, ulterior motives, increasingly wild speculations to explain away what they consider an outright anomaly. This is where *all* the classic excuses come from – they’re bad at games, they’re playing it wrong, they’re doing it for attention, they don’t know

the genre, they’re biased, they’re being paid off, they don’t like games, etc. It all comes from a mindset that knows it can’t accept the existence of a conflicting opinion, because otherwise these people would have to admit that their own opinion isn’t a universal truth. Earlier, I called these excuses intellectual dishonesty, but at this very moment I’ve started to believe it might actually be worse than that. In their own twisted, perverse way, these religeous fandamentalists might actually be completely, 100% honest. There are few things more powerfully deceptive than the truth of the deluded. For no matter

how wrong a true believer may be, the strength of their conviction can topple whole mountains of evidence. It’s quite philosophical that. I just made it up. The capital “G” gamers have tied their scarily zealous love of an entertainment product so heavily to their identities and egos that a conflicting take on said product is a disturbing glitch in their Matrix. In their minds, it’s such an undeniable truth that, say, Breath of the Wild is literally perfect, that even so much as saying it’s merely good instead of flawless is grounds for a harassment campaign, that publishing anything

less than unwavering praise is a crime so vile as to prove eternally unforgivable to the point that, years later, they continue to curse the critic’s name and and scream about Zelda’s precious Metacritic score being damaged by that loathsome 7/10. Really looking forward to Tears of the Kingdom by the way. This is why you see so many of these people demand that reviews be “objective” despite the idea being a ludicrous fucking notion to anybody who understands how personal opinions work. I very famously parodied the concept of the objective review, but I’ve never really sat and talked

about what they’re really asking for. They don’t demand objective reviews because they *actually* want objectivity in the purest sense of the word, it’s because they truly, deep down, believe that their opinions really are facts. I used to say that these people just want game reviews to agree with them, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that isn’t quite what’s going on. They don’t want reviews to agree with *them*, oh no – they want game reviews to agree with their *reality*. None of them ever explain exactly what they mean when they say

a review needs to be more objective, or more fair, and it’s because from their point of view, they don’t need to. They start from the position that the quality of a videogame is already an evidenced, provable, scientifically immutable fact and they work from there. It would be like arguing that the Sun isn’t hot, or that Alien ant Farm’s Smooth Criminal isn’t superior to the original. Of course, sometimes their attempts to redefine reality according to their perception of it is incongruous with, well, reality. So it is that, when they decide to go with the excuse that

a reviewer like me “just hates videogames,” they’re faced with a bit of a dilemma when it’s pointed out that, no, there’s *plenty* of videogames they like, they just didn’t happen to enjoy the same ones. And that brings us back to the kind of interaction I described at the beginning of the video – “they hate videogames… no, not those ones”. When faced with the very clear truth that I obviously love plenty of videogames, they’ll quickly move the goalposts if they don’t outright ignore it – oh, well, no, they only like games I haven’t heard of, they

only like weird, indie, little shit. They only like games that don’t count. Games that aren’t proper. As our inspiring commenter from earlier smarmily smarmed – “Sterling, you can like mainstream games, it’s not against the law.” Now, ignoring the fact that there are also plenty of examples of *mainstream* games I liked, such as the enjoyable 7/10 classic Breath of the Wild, I think that comment makes it quite clear what these people actually mean when they say I don’t like videogames – they mean I don’t like the *right* videogames. I don’t like the chosen ones, the mandated

ones, the ones we all have to universally agree are good if we don’t want to face social ostracization. This is why I can give a fucking 10/10 to Boneraiser Minions, easily *the* best fucking game of the year so far, and still be called a cynical bitch who no longer loves games and should stop writing reviews because my hatred of the medium has destroyed my ability to write an objective critique. Because I don’t like the *right ones*. I don’t like what *they* like, and since we already determined that they believe their opinions to be inalienable facets

of objective reality, it stands to reason that the games they like are the only games they consider to be real ones. Hell, if you wanna do it to yourself, go online and look up arguments over what is and isn’t a *real* videogame. It was a huge debate in the 2010s, alongside the classic “what is an art game” argument. You’ll find the attitude I’ve described in action, as hardcore Gamers(™) love saying that games they dislike – usually indie shit often made by marginalized creators – aren’t “real” videogames. And that brings us to the darker side of

this whole subject. See, while we’ve focused on game reviews specifically, the argument that I “just hate videogames now”, as I mentioned earlier, is a general complaint that’s been thrown at me whenever I say *anything* that certain online communities disagree with, and it’s being thrown around more and more. It was actually my husband who pointed this bit out to me – what people are doing when they say this is exactly what they do when they say certain videogames aren’t “real” videogames. They’re not just invalidating an opinion they don’t like, they’re invalidating the very presence of a

person in their space. It’s a very clear form of “othering”, essentially saying “they’re not one of us,” and excluding them to such a degree they don’t *ever* have to be listened to. As a way of denying the legitimacy of a videogame critic, it’s about as aggressive as it gets – if your job is to review games, and it’s been established that you don’t even like games, they’ve put the job of discrediting your work on Easy Mode, which is funny considering how many Gamers(™) fucking hate playing on easy. Earlier, I mentioned that people who say I

don’t like videogames commonly preface that assessment by saying they reckon I should stop writing reviews, and that’s a perfect betrayal of the motive behind said assessment. If I hate videogames, I should stop reviewing them. That’s actually what they want. Indeed, whether it’s a review or not, they don’t want me to talk about games. And, of course I should stop, I hate them after all. Whether I actually like or dislike them doesn’t matter. I’m not saying things they want to hear, so they’ll arrive at any conclusion that suggests I shouldn’t be speaking. Arguing that I’m not

fit for purpose as a critic, well, that saves them having to engage with a single thing I could ever have to say. Instant invalidity, just add water, and given how much these fuckers cry over anything less than a 9/10, there’s plenty of water to go around. What struck me when I tweeted about not liking the “right” kind of games were responses from people who said they’d experienced this not just in videogames but in other media discussions as well. It’s not uncommon, and it’s not just me – it’s what fans do. Fandom in general loves insulating

itself in comfort, it loves an echo chamber, and to one degree it’s understandable – a fandom is formed out of a shared love of something. That love is a mutual belief, a unifying factor, a shared truth, so on some level I appreciate there being some expectation of conformity, agreement, and echoed sentiment. Of course, material reality doesn’t quite work the way *their* reality does, human beings are not a hive mind even at their most united, and many fanbases can have a real problem processing that conflict – it’s why we’ve seen way too many fan communities harass

minorities, violently resist even the slightest changes to their favorite media, and utterly lose their shit over criticism that comes from anybody they perceive to not be their own, or indeed why they will claim somebody in their group *isn’t* one of them if they rock the boat too much. It’s all deeply weird. I’ve done this job for nigh on 15 years and it’s never *not* been fucking strange to see just how fans will break their own brains to substitute reality with their own version of the comfortable truth. Even as the same circular arguments about objectivity and

opinions have bored me to fucking death, my sheer bafflement at the seriousness with which fans take game reviews has always been as fresh as the first ever time I saw people flip their fucking shit when I said I didn’t think Patapon was particularly brilliant. I think, though, that coming into it this time with the fresh take that it’s all about the very perception of reality itself, has helped me understand things in a way I never quite could before. I think I get it now. Yeah, I get it now. And you know what? It’s still fucking

stupid. If I gave it just a little lick though? Just a little lick… Just for a taste of it? Just, just for the flavours, for the nutrients? We have Candyfloss Grapes in the kitchen. Why eat that and be upset and confused when we could eat those and be upset and confused. Candyfloss Grapes are VERY confusing. Anyway, OW, it’s time to wrap up today’s video. As I was preparing to do the last bit of filming, it did strike me that the whole “You hate video games” and how I wrapped that up as part of the in

and the out crowd goes all the way back to some of the earlier sort of gatekeeping in the games community. The idea of people like, fake… fake geek girls, do ya remember that? Well, I’m sure it still happens a lot. Like, the idea that fake gamer girls are out there, all these women pretending to like games for attention, as if the attention of hardcore gamers is something anybody would actually want. It’s just all part of that, this whole “you hate games, you’re not a real gamer”, as if, as if that’s laudable, like, a badge of

honour. It’s not. You consume products, and that’s fine, we all do. It doesn’t make you special. It doesn’t make you brilliant. It doesn’t make you James Stephanie Sterling, who’s bigger than video games, who’s bigger than you, who will be a bit bigger once they’ve finished this lollipop. Thank god for me.

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