The Weight of Credibility

I found Ben Dutka’s “Edge Killzone 2 Review: A Disservice To Game Consumers” to be an incredibly entertaining piece, if only because of several of the devices that Dutka uses to sway his audience and establish his opinion as a dominant one. Logic, ethical considerations, and a lack of bias seem to have been almost intentionally purged from this explorative work; Dutka’s primary argument seems to continuously return to emotive and deeply personal ideas and reasons, but he manages to use these in such a way that they seem to be authoritative, definitive statements. He’s a sophist in the most negative use of the word, not seeming to be concerned with getting at any sort of truth as much as he is about propagating his own perspective as truth.

Dutka’s first mechanism concerns his establishment of himself as a non-authoritative voice in the field, spending almost 20% of his total word count explaining that no review can be “right” and that a breadth of opinions is required for a healthy critical field and for the consumer. Charmingly, this has the effect of actually lending credibility to Dutka; clearly, this is a writer that has some grasp of the purpose and structuring of a videogame review. We should then, therefore, take him seriously when he closes his introduction with his opening guns: “This being the case, we advise all of you to ignore the desperate-for-attention, we're-going-to-prove-our-elite-status so-called "review" from Edge that has the entire Internet talking.”

The assault on Edge’s review, at least in this sentence, manages two things: first, it makes the first of what will be many of the same argument that the Edge review of Killzone 2 is more or less garbage. It also demonstrates how different PSXextreme’s review was different by suggesting that it is all of those things which the Edge version is not; not-desperate-for-attention and not-seeking-of-elite-status. Dutka then further amplifies the reduction of credibility from Edge by “not linking to it” because “it doesn’t deserve to be linked to.” Generally speaking, there are only two reasons to refuse to provide a source to the original material, and Dutka seems to want ti invoke both of them; either its so offensive and corruptive or any other number of troubling things that it would almost be a crime to show it to your audience, or because you fear that allowing for a gateway to the original work will help to establish its legitimacy.

While Dutka returns to similar devices throughout the four paragraphs, he failed to make a genuinely compelling argument - at least, to anybody that understands how to see a fallacious argument. His early attempts to establish himself as a reasonable, rational critic are undermined by his logical fallacy of suggesting that he is an authority simply because he knows what a good review consists of - but he doesn’t actually demonstrate that his review, or his capacity as a writer, makes him a good critic. Dutka continues along this path; “...if you're scoring on a scale of 1 - 10, there's no way on earth KZ2 gets a 7 in direct comparison to the other products on store shelves. I'm sorry, it just doesn't.” I’m not sure that anyone capable of thought would consider “it just doesn’t” to be a valid argument for anything. Dutka also continuously strikes at this idea that the Edge writers are out to attain a sort of “elite cred,” which, from reading Dutka’s piece, seems to be achieved by deceiving consumers and arbitrarily placing low scores on excellent games. However, although he’s quite clear in positing his view of this cred, he never quite manages to demonstrate that they’re actually doing this - it’s great that he feels this way, but close-reading his work only demonstrates that he’s frothing at the mouth and barely creating coherent thoughts.

He even seems to succumb to this weird, shadowy temptation of all videogame critics to lie to their readers; “If it's your job to be faithful to your readers, you are not allowed to do things like this. You are not allowed to indulge your massive ego in an underhanded attempt at getting attention.” Given the nature of his prose and the suggestions he’s making, Dutka sounds to have a much more sinister and dominating hidden agenda than that of any critic. It hardly seems a service to fans to me to defend a beloved game without actually saying why the game should be praised.

Not that the Edge review shouldn’t have been criticized - it definitely should have. The writing was unclear and winded along uncertain paths, and seemed to assume that the reader had a familiarity with the Killzone world. (The irony there being that one of their complaints about the game itself was that it assumed a familiarity with Killzone.) It had many, many aspects that could have been attacked, and probably effectively - but Dutka didn’t bother to look into these, instead contenting himself with establishing him as a definitive authority (“Video game journalists aren't exactly treated with a ton of respect by other entertainment journalists (I know, I was one)”, and then using that authority alone to paint the Edge review as wrong.

edit: forgot to mention this - it's awesome that his almost fanatic, right-wing fundamentalist-style attacks were on a website called PSXextreme. I'm sure they don't mean it that way, but come on ..