评论家讨厌为他们所用的方法论辩解，他们丝毫未曾顾及游戏的艺术性。我从未见过有哪个评论员热忱地接受对其作品的批评意见。

他们处理问题的方法就像某人站前电视之前或在个人领域中徘徊，这些状态下的典型情感包括在反应中。玩家的关注点会被迅速抹去，这样他们才可能马上忘记这种观点曾经存在过。他们重新将你引向“XXX好在哪里？”的话题，而这成为了讨论主题的结语。但我们想要的不是对主题的总结，而是完全改变讨论的主题。

现在他们重新将你引向以“是否有趣”开端的话题，居然还重点强调“这些人难道还记得我们未注意到的让事情越发复杂的简单事情吗？”，这种感觉令人作呕。（游戏邦注：此处作者不是想说娱乐性无关紧要。）由于娱乐性是你评论的主要准则，因而为求简便而轻视你正在评论的事物不是明智的做法。在评论家眼中，游戏的娱乐性和艺术性似乎无法兼容。娱乐性成了你真正关注的焦点，而艺术只成了玩具。

最终幻想7

之所以会下如此定义，因为我也是游戏评论员。诚然，会提出“是否好玩”问题的人们知道这些很难理解，而只有被迫为他们并非完全相信的事物摆出姿态的人才会以这种方式标榜游戏的娱乐性。如果你采用了这种做法，那么与游戏的娱乐性毫无相干。

当你回想起一生中最动人的观点和最令你印象深刻的餐饮时，可能你不会认为那仅仅属于有趣的范畴，更多的是一种体验。正是这些使你的生活富有价值，值得为保卫国家献身。娱乐性固然很重要，但我们并非如此需要，只关注娱乐性的游戏内容十分贫乏。“富含艺术的游戏”给人以美学体验，也可称作互动文学。但即便使用“互动文学”这样的词也无法总结我所要表达的内容，因为“互动”只是这些体验如此有意义的部分原因。

《最终幻想7》是互动文学，如果它是电影、小说或FPS游戏都可能失败。然而其成功点在于游戏以第三人称视角来表述，而且用户也认可这种形式。通过游戏中的经历，你汇集了各种身份的元素，包括来自你生活中的细节和本不属于你的事物。你被迫去考虑当公司全盘控制小城镇时会发生什么事，即便是在无意识的情况下。你被迫与个人主义者Ubermensch开战。让这款游戏充满艺术性并最终变成我想要去玩的游戏正是这些因素，而不是Materia系统。

《银河游侠3》是互动文学，评述它的评论员关注的是它的战斗系统、乏味的剧情、蓝头发的RPG游戏主角以及其与《黑客帝国》的相似性。但这些都与其要点毫无相关，而且显得过于单调。将你与世界连接起来本身就显得过于单调，而且一旦这种连接显得沉重，你就不得不去思考如何在整个银河的范围内运转人际关系。

龙战士3

《黑客帝国》式的剧情并非完全复制其观点，而是描绘一幅画面刻画在那种范围内“1万人死亡”意味着什么，当你知道“所有自己了解的事情都是错误的”后所得出的结论。顷刻间，你重新考虑身边的每个细节，也正是这种重新构思的过程使得《银河游侠3》体现出自己的价值。这种观点只能通过游戏来表达出来，而不是电视剧、电影或是小说。

《龙战士3》给人以美学体验，评论家关注的重点是其缺乏创新并动用所有词语来批判游戏，这就是所有的评论内容。但《龙战士3》的做法同后现代建筑作品类似，它采用的是你所熟知的剧情，在其中构建新的内涵。造就它的是游戏的配乐。如果你未曾玩过这款游戏，听过其中的音乐，就无法体验到将熟悉的RPG题材游戏与爵士乐结合起来的感觉。

如果游戏属艺术作品，那么我们就需要以此来评论游戏，如互动文学和美学体验。你可以仍然以“娱乐高于一切”的观点来评论，但这两者是完全不同的事物。我听有些人说观点清晰的优秀评论员会将这些因素涵盖在评论中，但我不这么认为。大部分评论员评述游戏时用的是“游戏就是玩具”的方法论，他们从未以完全不同的“跨娱乐性”前提来编写评述。但如果某些游戏极具艺术性，那么我们就需要写出真正打动玩家的事物，以全新的模式来进行评述。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Games Are Not Toys: review models and artistic merit in game evaluation

Reviewers hate justifying their methodology. The subject matter is irrelevant — it can be food or it can be movies. I have never seen a critic accept criticism of their work graciously.

When prompted, they treat a question about their methods like someone is standing in front of their television or hovering over their bubble of personal space, emotions typical of those situations included in the reaction. Your concern is something to be swatted away so they can immediately forget that such a concern exists. They snarkily redirect you to their page of “What makes [x] good?” and that’s the final word on the subject. But we don’t need a final word on the subject. We need the subject to change fundamentally.

Right now, the page they redirect you to begins with “is it fun?”, obnoxiously italicized in the “hey guys remember this simple thing we’re losing sight of by making things so complicated?” way you’ve seen enough times to vomit from overconsumption. (No, I am not about to say that fun is irrelevant, so keep your hands off the keyboard for a few more minutes.) By making fun the commander-in-chief of your review criteria, you trivialize the thing you’re reviewing in your appeal to simplicity. You cannot have Fun Is Ultimate and Games Are Art in the same room. Fun is what you have with a laser pointer, or bubble wrap, or your friend’s facebook status after a few drinks. Art is post- and trans- toy.

I’m doing this definitional dance just so we’re on the same page. Truly, the people who would ask “is it fun?” know that they’re being opaque, and only someone who has been forced into taking positions they only half-believed would glorify the word ‘fun’ in that way. When you are moved, it is beyond fun.

When you reflect on your life’s most passionate sex, or most moving concert, or most memorable meal, you are hopefully not thinking “that was fun.” It’s more than that. It’s an experience. It’s what makes your life worth living and your country worth protecting. So yeah, fun matters, but only because it’s a mild version of what we really want: to be changed for the better. The games that do this are games that couldn’t have been anything else. An “art game” is an aesthetic experience, or interactive literature. But even using the tired label “interactive literature” demeans what I’m saying, because the ‘interactive’ part only half-reveals why these experiences are meaningful.

Final Fantasy VII was interactive literature. It fails as a movie. It would fail as a novel, too. Hell, it would fail as an FPS. The fact that the game is in third-person and that there is another person to identify with matters. The fact that this person is vacuous at the start matters. Through your progress in the game, you piece together various elements of your identity from having the details of your life and origins excluded from you. You are forced to think about, even if on an unconscious level, what happens when a corporation is able to have so much dominance over a small town, a la Union Carbide. You are forced to wage war against an individualist Ubermensch. What makes it art and consequently a game I would want to play is these elements — not the goddamned Materia system.

Star Ocean III was interactive literature. The critics who reviewed it harped on its battle system, or its tediousness, or the presence of the Blue Haired RPG Protagonist, or even the similarity of its twist to The Matrix. All of that is missing the point. It should be tedious. By being tedious you develop a connection to the world around you, and once that connection is severed you’re forced to think about how interpersonal relations would work on a galactic scale.

The Matrix-like twist serves not to copy the concepts of the Matrix, but to paint a picture of what “10,000 people dead” really means in terms of scale and what really entails from “everything you’ve known is false.” Suddenly, you re-think every detail around you, and that re-thinking is what makes Star Ocean III great. This is a concept that could only have been done by a game. Not a TV series, not a movie, and not a novel.

Breath of Fire III was an aesthetic experience. Critics thrust their knives into its “lack of innovation” or whatever other buzzphrase they could muster to fit their deadlines, and that was the end of it. But what Breath of Fire III did was the same as a work of postmodern architecture: it took contexts that you’ve grown familiar with and built new associations upon them. “Sound” was just a 1-5 scale, but it was what made the game. If you had never played it and heard some of the compositions from its soundtrack, you’d have thought of the Full House intro. You’d have never associated the emotions you’ve felt from familiar RPG territory with contemporary jazz.

If games are art (and they are) we need to look at games this way — as interactive literature and aesthetic experiences — and review accordingly. You can still review using gamesarefunandnothingelse-ism, but that’s something else entirely. I’ve heard someone say that the idealized Good Critic can pick up on these factors and consider them in the review, but I don’t think so. The vast majority of critics writing about games do so under the Games Are Toys methodology. They are simply not trained to write using a fundamentally different, ‘trans-fun’ premise. But since games are art, we need to write about what moves us and to adopt a trans-fun model of reviewing. (Source: Gamasutra)