Being Objective Is Impossible: From History to Videogame Reviews

I rarely write that many focused pieces here that aren't videogame reviews since when it comes to saying something of substance I do like to be able to back up what I am saying up to a certain extent. This obviously increases the credibility of what I am writing and it allows people to go and have a look at the matter themselves. I don't really find it as easy as other people to just write a rant or an impromptu piece. To that end what I'm writing here today is a bit of re-purposing of some work I did back when I was an undergrad and so this was easier for me to write.

Me whining about my first world problems aside, this piece is about a belief I have that objectivity outside of the hard sciences is in practice and concept a fallacy and a waste of time to both attempt to achieve in your own work and to actually expect from others. I'll demonstrate this using the field of history, a subject that I am familiar with, and a subject that has, since its inception, been regarded as one whose active role it is to define a single, unbiased and true rendering of human progress across time. 

The Mission

Now, before you turn into an asshole and spit out platitudes like "History is written by the victors”, let me just stop you right there, because we actually have a number of historical work from losing sides in conflicts pretty much running for the entirety of history. But that isn't the point, the point is that I've picked history – a field obsessed with bias and truth – to show that if it’s impossible there, then it’s pretty much impossible everywhere else.

Just to save time, I'm going to stick to modern historiography so we won't be starting at the beginning of time. We are instead starting in the late 1700s, when Leopold Von Ranke, the father of modern history, was born. Ranke literally took history from the realm of hobbies that nobles undertook and actually turned it into the professional field that it is today. He gave historians the purpose to write history "as it has actually occurred", he gave them a classification of sources that is still the manner in which all historians define any and all of the sources they use, and he gave them a code of ethics to rally around.

This form of history saw widespread adoption all across the world. Its lasting effect can even be seen nearly a century later through this statement: “Contributors will understand that… our Waterloo must satisfy French and English, German and Dutch alike; that nobody can tell, without examination of the list of authors, where the Bishop of Oxford [Stubbs] laid down his pen, and whether Fairbairn or Gasquet [a Catholic Cardinal], Libermann or Harrison took it up.” This statement made by Lord Acton in 1902 truly demonstrated how, even a century later, Historian would always on guard to maintain and advocate a history where the reader could not tell the origin of the author or which side they were on and, that bias was not only controllable but also capable of being eliminated. 

The Impossible

If Rankean history was perfect, though, the field would have stopped evolving there. But it wasn’t; aside from its racist undertones, Rankean history had a focus on actions taken by the state and held the underlying assumption that, as time moved on, humanity became better. This ended up spawning two more formal historical schools: the Marxist school that used economics and class as their main focus to study history, and the Annales school that used culture and interdisciplinary mixing to expand what history covered. These schools at their core weren't really that different from Rankean history and only lasted around a century each before the explosion of historical thought in the last fifty years that saw them supplanted by other schools.

In the modern and post-modern period that we currently live in, history has branched out in a massive number of ways and continues to do some at a fairly rapid rate. Some of the more established lines of thought include revisionist history and microhistory, but there are even newer schools gaining ground currently, such as big history and environmental history. Furthermore, there are dozens of smaller, more fringe schools and lines of thought in history that claim history is not a study of the past but a study of the period that work was written in and the historian themselves. Yet others claim the irrelevance of the field due to the fact that each reader of history will not interpret it in a uniform manner, much the same way any work of literature is received. This is besides the mess that the "linguistic turn" has caused in history, shattering a number of truths the field held dearly.

Beyond History and Into Videogames

Now that I've bored and lost you with all of this historical mumbo jumbo, I want to state that the whole point of this was to just simply show you that, even in a field obsessed with finding and conveying truth, the whole mission has met with failure. Why? Because bias can never be eliminated and will never be eliminated, and we all simply need to accept that.

With that in mind, I don't mean accept it in that stupid pedantic "we will agree to disagree" bullshit; I mean that because there is no objective truth, we won't find the objective truth and its better that we stop trying to find it. But, I'm not saying that because there is no objective truth, we should automatically give up on trying to exchange opinions. The exchange of opinions can help you gain a wider perspective and grow as a person on a number of levels. All it means is that we need to be better at understanding our own biases and wearing these biases more clearly so people aren't surprised, and to become more observant of others who attempt to hide their biases. 

A great place to start and something a bit more modern and relevant to my experience are - videogame reviews. I personally enjoy Ben "Yatzhee" Crowshaw, one of the most popular reviewers out there and the man behind ZeroPunctuation. Not only does Yatzhee clearly state that he hates specific genres of games and as a result will never play them, but he actively doesn't hide that if he finds a game boring, he won't see it through to the end. This very clear statement of his own biases and process, as well as the generally good humorous writing, is the reason he is one of the most popular videogame reviewers currently working.

Not all reviewers can be Yatzhee, not that he is alone in being a reviewer who displayed his bias; he is simply the most high-profile example I could name. There are still tons of videogame reviewers and "journalists" who pretend to not have any bias, though, so we have to get better at being able to spot that bias and from there, attempt to understand the reviewer to get some useful information for ourselves. 

Let us take reviews from IGN or Gamespot as an example here – they essentially rate any big, triple-A publisher’s game as near perfect regardless of the actual quality or originality of the game. These companies are usually used as public relations avenues and will on occasion spend time covering talking points like improved graphics, sound or something else that might not entirely be there as well as using a large number of undeserved adjectives or adverbs without actually saying anything useful about the game. Knowing that, you can now look at their reviews knowing that there is material that you need to sift through before you actually get some useful information out of the “review”. If you feel these statements are unfair, I suggest you go read my piece regarding the state of ethics in videogame journalism and reviews. It is filled with examples of not just bias hiding but straight up corruption and entitlement.

Lets bring it down a notch though, because I'm not saying that the lack of objectively is solely caused by corruption, its not. Its our very existence as people means that we are unable to truly be objective as we have different preferences and tastes and the earlier examples are just a heightened example of it. Coming back to videogames specifically just looking at the different tastes of the reviewers on this blog you can see really divergent opinions about the same game and all circumstances all these opinions are true since they represent that individuals truth. Like my truth being that Dynasty Warriors is one of the best game franchises to ever come into existence. It is this very nature of us as individuals that really makes objectivity impossible, because we all have preferences, we all have taste and we all varied inclinations. The very nature of the videogame industry really does serve to illustrate that point as well with all of these micro-communities coming into existence around specific games genres and sometimes individual games despite wide spread hate from the rest of the videogame community. They are a manifestation of the philosophical impossibility of any attempt at being objective by a human being.

Lessons Learned

My acceptance of the fact that there is no such thing as an objective truth is the reason I don't score the games I review on my blog. I guess it is also the reason I don't pay attention to videogame review scores from anyone else, let alone get all worked up over them. 

It’s also the reason I don't really value "professional" reviews over normal consumer reviews; I've actually almost entirely stopped going to most videogame news portals and instead get almost all my reviews off a game's Steam page or metacritic’s consumer review section. Not that its any easier trying to find a quality review there, its still like trying to find a piece of hay in a stack of needles.

At the end, what I want to leave you with is the basic fact that you shouldn't be taking whatever anyone is writing or saying too seriously not just in videogame reviews, but on every topic under the sun, and it’s definitely worth exploring the person that wrote the piece before coming to any conclusion from it.

Just remember: abandon all hope, there is no truth.