Tom Chick’s most recent column for Crispy Gamer gives a compelling defence of Ubisoft’s divisive voice-controlled Real Time Strategy game, EndWar. He identifies ten different design choices made by the game’s designers and explains why these choices work in the game’s favour.

What’s interesting about Chick’s column is that, at the end of his rallying defence, he illustrates how each one of his positive observations could quite reasonably also be considered a negative one.

For example, Chick considers that the small number of unit types in the game narrow its focus in a pleasing way, moving the play-style towards chess and away from traditional RTS army-building. But viewed negatively, this same design decision could be used as evidence that the game has little variety, a criticism often leveled at it by detractors.

The point that Chick illustrates here has wider application outside of his EndWar example. Games are defined just as much by what they don’t do as by what they do, and very often the choices designers make in that regard aren’t inherently good or bad ones.

For example, taken in isolation, the decision to give Alucard a double jump in Castlevania is a purely neutral one, just as the decision to limit 2D Mario to a single leap could not be described as a positive or negative decision without reference to a host of other design decisions within the game world. How high are the ledges he must scale? How much horizontal aftertouch can the player exert on him mid-jump? Without asking these questions it’s impossible to say whether the limitation is a good or bad thing for the game.

Sometimes a design decision remains a neutral one even when set against those other in-game factors. In these cases, value judgments become based upon other factors, many of which are removed from the game world.

For example, a player who derives pleasure from seeing a game that subverts genre convention will look on an unusual mechanic more generously than a player who prefers their games to submit to convention. Likewise, some players prefer their games to have narrow boundaries and deep depths while others prefer a gigantic but superficial range of interactive systems. In this way design decisions are accorded value by their player, often in ways that are distanced from the in-game experience.

Reviewers are subject to these influences just as often as consumers. Indeed, by virtue of the fact game reviewers have to play a great many games in a short space of time, these external factors can exert a far greater pressure on a reviewer’s opinion. How many writers fell for Portal, almost unconditionally, in part because it was a digestible 5-hour experience that lends itself well to concentrated play, nose pressed against a deadline? And how many reviewers dismiss wholesale Koei’s Dynasty Warriors-style output because they haven’t the time to distinguish the subtle differences, strengths and weaknesses between each execution?

In time it becomes possible to take a game product and write a damning review alongside a stirringly favourable one without threatening one’s integrity. You simply extract the facts of the game’s design decisions and then paint them as strengths or weaknesses, just as Chick has done here with EndWar and Kieron Gillen did with his three-reviews-in-one take on Boiling Point, a game which he scored variously 3, 8 and 9 out of 10.

I asked Kieron if he could give this three review treatment (one positive view, one negative view and another that balances the two), while maintaining a clear conscience, to any game.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “There are always good facts and bad facts in any game but no review contains everything. You have a generalised impression and then you match the ratio of facts you wish to present to your feeling of the game.”

Perhaps part of the issue is that facts don’t offer a value judgment, I suggest. A reviewer’s job is to look at the design facts and say whether they are good facts or bad facts.

“Yes. The question all gamers ask first is “Do I like it?”. The “Why?” always comes later,” says Gillen. “Design decisions can often be taken as good ones or bad ones, depending on how a player wants to justify their general feelings towards a game or a reviewer wants to construct a sustained argument. There’s nothing dishonest in that. I could write a 6-page feature on everything that’s wrong in Deus Ex. But my overall impression of the game is immensely favourable, so any review I write of it emphasises those elements that I love.”

Perhaps the most useful practice for a reviewer to learn, from a reader’s perspective, is to be consistent in approach and honest with their bias: to paint the blacks black and the whites white and to never to swap the brushes. Or, to stretch the analogy to breaking point, better still to use one brush and paint in shades of grey.