Razzing a Moving Target
When NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Streets ended after seven seasons and too few viewers, it chose an amazing way to end: it took arguably the show’s central character, Bayliss (Kyle Secor), and gave him an arc. The arc began in the pilot, when Tim Bayliss shows up on his first day as a fresh-faced murder police who’s quickly overwhelmed by the emotional and moral demands of the job. Throughout the show’s life, we see Bayliss get hardened, get indecisive, and get pummeled by his job, mostly because of a failure of imagination: he has trouble getting into the mind of a killer, and as his longtime partner Frank Pembleton tells him, if he can’t do that, he can’t solve a murder. Then, at the very end of the show, he finally takes the next step. A (very cheesy) killer has gotten off on a technicality. Bayliss can’t stand it – so he kills the guy himself. He covers his tracks. He gets away with it. And he quits his job, picking up the crap off his desk and walking out the same way he walked in seven years earlier.
See? It’s a perfect story arc. At least for that character. And it raises your opinion of the whole series. But if you were, say, a TV critic, you wouldn’t know until that final episode that the show was that great. Maybe you’d be impressed by everything else about it along the way, but the fact that it adds up to a complete story doesn’t reveal itself until the end.
Serial narratives don’t always wrap up neatly. Characters in comics, TV shows or increasingly, video games are supposed to wander around and keep themselves busy in case something comes along that’ll nudge them along their arc, if they have an arc. And if you treat one of these things as a complete work, you can’t review it – because it’s still unfolding. Many people have complained that there are no great game critics. But how about TV? It’s decades older but I can’t name a single must-read TV critic. Even the TV reviews in The New Yorker are the weak link in the chain – weaker sometimes than the poetry. The people who do it best are the folks at Television Without Pity – but they review a show episode by episode, and they’re as much in suspense about whether a show is going uphill or down as the rest of us.
At the same time, we can agree that TV is in its true golden age, and nothing – not music, not games, and definitely not movies – can touch the best television on the air right now. Everyone has their own top 10 list of amazing shows, and they don’t always overlap very much! But not many critics are keeping up – they talk about how great these shows are, but not in a way that you’d really care to read. I’ll read an interview with The Wire’s (and Homicide’s) David Simon, but I can’t remember many reviews really slapping me in the face.
So there’s that. But let’s also bring up gaming. This topic’s on my mind because I’m filing my review of Lord of the Rings Online next week, and of course that’s a moving target – it could change in three months, it could get much better, it could make some mistakes, the community could be really good, the community could vanish. Sure, I can deliver 400 words with a lot of caveats, but those’ll be big caveats – levels are capped at 15 (out of 50), and even this new “monster play” feature isn’t running at full steam right now.
So here’s my question: I know that we don’t have a “Lester Bangs of video game crit.” But it seems like we really need a Television Without Pity of game crit, or at least mmog crit. There are tons of World of Warcraft podcasts, but they seem about as dull as swapping golf tips. Aside from Somethingawful, who’s blogging about an online game in a serious, engaging way that I, a busy adult with a gnat-like attention span, would actually want to read?
