In 13th-century Japan, Zen Master Dōgen taught his disciples that commitment to a task should never be contingent on its perceived quality or status – a combination of the three concepts of Daishin, Rōshin, and Kishin. Whether you are doing a mundane chore or a massive project, you give it your absolute best. Around this same time, Dōgen also adapted a core philosophy that had emerged from Chan Buddhism called “wuxin”. This concept, adapted to the Japanese concept of Mushin, means “no-mind” – the state of being completely free from ego, hesitation, and fear of failure. These two concepts combined guide me in my daily life, and I work hard to also bring it to my work. When applied to GamingTrend, it means I do my level best to assign people to work where they have an aptitude, an interest, or at the very least, an ability to judge it accordingly. Let me explain more plainly.
Let’s suppose you’re like me and don’t play or watch football. You haven’t played Madden, but your friends all think it’s a game you’d like. Can you review the game? Of course you can! The review perspective of somebody discovering the incredible work EA Sports puts into Madden each and every year is a very valid perspective. You’ll see things that ongoing fans might miss because it blends in with every other improvement they’ve seen across the years. That said, you won’t have a frame of reference for what has changed from the last year, or any concept of the series history. Your opinion, however, still matters. Others will also be taking their first steps onto the field, and they’ll want to know how easy it was to learn, if the controls were intuitive to a complete newcomer, and if you found the wealth of gameplay modes exciting or intimidating.
On the other side of the coin, you have players like our own reviewer for Madden, Lyra Moreno. She’s been playing the Madden series for years (decades?), and knows the product inside and out. She’s going to know about the features, big and small, that have gotten incrementally better or have been swapped out entirely. She can tell you about the subtle improvements to the tackling game, the small foot positioning animations, and much more that superfans reading that review will appreciate. Her review is valid because it speaks to that audience. That said, it’s no more or less valid than that of a newcomer.
This is where we get back to Zen Master Dōgen. There is one person whose work is invalidated by their own hand – somebody who can’t bring Mushin to their work. If you are somebody who writes article after article talking about how Madden is a failed franchise, should be dismantled, exploits the players, or that you refused to play Madden until you were forced to by your job to review it, you are exhibiting neither Mushin, nor the three concepts of Dōgen’s philosophies. You are also failing one of the core tenets I ask of my own people – “review the product in front of you, not the one you wish it was”. Worst, you’re failing at one of the core tenets of your job – approaching it with integrity.
I know we aren’t curing cancer around here – we review videogames, comics, movies, and tech, but doing so honestly means you have to judge it dispassionately. It means approaching the product without bias, or as much as that’s possible. Using a different example, it means separating the hard work of Portkey Games and their incredible game Hogwart’s Legacy from the vile and transphobic language of the author of the Harry Potter series. It means recognizing when Daikatana’s studio head John Romero’s game would “make us its bitch”, you still have to disregard that statement and judge the game for what it was – an unfinished low-poly mess. It also means you have to review a game like JFK Reloaded, a game where you play as Lee Harvey Oswald, and judge it accordingly. Hypothetically (I wasn’t tasked with reviewing this) it means you score the section around story and concept for the fact that developer Traffic Games had a slavish devotion to ensuring every single detail nailed down to an absurd degree, but you probably dock them points on this “docu-game” for allowing players to turn up the physics to an absurd level, turning it into a mockery of its purpose. Once more – you review the game in front of you, not what you wish it could be. That brings me to the center of this maze – James Bond.
PC Gamer Editor Joshua Wolens recently submitted a review for 007 First Light that scored the game a 6 out of 10. I don’t honestly care about the score – every review is an encapsulation of that reviewer’s experience. No, the thing that sticks in my craw was the preceding articles where the author of that review decried that James Bond “shouldn’t even be in video games” and revealing that he hadn’t even watched the last five Bond movies – arguably a modern golden age of Bond with Daniel Craig as the titular agent. If you clearly have predetermined that this game “shouldn’t even exist” and purposely avoided the last batch of modern movies out of a self-guided boycott. How valid of a position could you possibly and honestly take? It's a little like picking somebody who hates loud music and crowds to review Rock Band 4 – that's be insane, right?
It’s a failure of leadership on behalf of Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage, or the leadership above him. If not them, then the common sense of the team that peer-edited Mr. Wolen’s work – somebody should have raised their hand. Somewhere, SOMEBODY at PC Gamer is either derelict in their duty to you the reader to deliver honest and unbiased reviews, or worse, they have a specific axe to grind against IOI, Amazon MGM, Eon Productions or some other entity and have decided to spend their own credibility to exercise it, you deserve better.
If you’re an Editor reading this – find your way to Dogen’s Attitude. If you’re a reader – demand it.
Ron Burke
Editor-in-Chief, GamingTrend.com
