Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree came out this week and with it came the latest in a long line of incidents in which Gamers™ prove they have no reading comprehension. This isn’t a new occurrence, it’s just the first time since I started a Substack. I know asking Gamers™ to learn how to read properly is a lot but most of these people are above the age of 12 so they really should have this skill.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since this is a group of people who took almost two decades to come up with a better insult than “I fucked your mom noob” but I am disappointed. After all, I consider myself a gamer so it’s embarrassing when so many Gamers™ make all of us seem stupid.

So what kicked off the latest wave of Gamers™ publicly showing off their lack of reading comprehension? A Soulsborne game of course. Eurogamer gave Shadow of the Erdtree a 3/5 which is a good score. It’s not a great score but it’s a good one and shows that the review had an overall positive experience view of the expansion. It’s a well-written review that I encourage you to read. (after you’re done reading this of course)

You see, a lot of Gamers™ took umbrage with that review and it’s clear that they either didn’t really read or simply cannot read. I’d love to give gamers the benefit of the doubt but you should never give Gamers™ the benefit of the doubt. They don’t deserve it.

The Gamers™ have taken umbrage with the fact that a portion of the review seems to indicate that the expansion is too difficult to be enjoyable. To them, this is a sacrilege offense, a clear sign that the reviewer is both bad at games and bad at writing reviews. But you could only possibly believe those things if you don’t have proper reading skills. To make matters more disappointing, a lot of the people outing themselves are big voices in the gaming community. When creators with huge reach show they have poor reading skills it not only instills into their followers that poor reading skills are okay but it reflects on all gamers, even the ones like you and me who can in fact read properly.

Here’s a large creator claiming that it’s unjust for a critic to critique game difficulty just because the game is intended to be difficult. That somehow just because Souls games aren’t for everyone that makes them immune to criticism This shows a severe lack of understanding of how criticism operates.

Difficulty is a tool used by game designers to evoke a certain feeling in the players. It’s a part of the vision of the game. The purpose of criticism is to judge how effectively a critic thinks that vision is executed and whether the desired response is achieved successfully. Saying that a game cannot be critiqued for its difficulty just because the difficulty is the point is like saying you can’t critique a horror movie for its scares or an action movie for its explosions. Of course you can.

A horror movie that’s filled with jump scares can still be bad but would you say “It’s unjust to critique a movie for jump scares when that’s the intention”. It doesn't matter what the intention is, what matters is the execution. “Zack Snyder movies aren’t for everyone and that’s perfectly acceptable” Yeah sure they don’t have to be for everyone but they should still be good executions of what they’re going for and Rebel Moon isn’t a good execution of anything.

Statements like the one above aren’t making any point other than “I don’t know what reviews are”.

Here’s another big gaming creator saying that reviews should specifically state “In my opinion” otherwise it means the reviewer is stating objective facts. This is a grown man by the way. A grown man said this. A grown adult man doesn’t know that all reviews are written with “In my opinion” as the implied subtext. Now I live in Canada so maybe in America they just skip reading comprehension but I started learning it in the first grade and didn’t stop until I graduated high school.

Has this man ever read a review of anything before? Did he think they were all stating objective facts? Does he even know there is no such thing as objectivity in art? So many questions.

What’s more concerning is the amount of people who agreed with this line of thinking. There are countless Gamers™ out there as we speak who think reviews need to specify that it’s opinion. That’s concerning. No one above the age of 10 (and even that’s a little too old honestly) should need explicit specification that every review is the opinion of one individual. But Gamers™ do apparently.

Here’s the kicker, a Souls Youtuber with 134k subscribers and almost 20k Twitter followers outright stating that the reason this review was 3/5 is because the expansion is too difficult. They helpfully included a picture with a highlighted blurb that shows the reviewer saying the game is too hard and therefore not good. This is meant to be a gotcha but the only thing being exposed here is this person’s lack of reading skills.

Here’s the highlighted blurb.

Now a person who knows how to read properly will look at this blurb and see what it is. An articulation of the reviewer’s feeling that the difficulty in the expansion is not tuned well, that it doesn't add anything meaningful to the experience, and that it is super difficult for the sake of being super difficult. That is a valid critique of a game whose intended design is to offer players a meaningful challenge that fills them with accomplishment to preserve and overcome. In the reviewer’s eyes, the developer’s intention is not being executed well, the feeling meant to be evoked in the player is not being evoked and the prevailing feeling not being accomplishment but frustration and exhaustion.

A person who doesn't know how to read properly will look at that blurb and see what it isn’t. The reviewer saying the game is too hard and therefore only a 3/5. When you don’t have reading comprehension, you can’t read between the lines, you can’t gather the author's intention and you can’t see anything more than a very basic surface. So when Gamers™ see this blurb and call it out for simply being “Game too hard 3/5” all it does is prove once again that they can’t read. Add it to the list of things they can’t do, right below touching grass and just above socializing normally.

Is there a chance that this Elden Ring-centric YouTuber actually can read but has some sort of bias towards the game that would make them lash out against a less-than-stellar review? I mean I guess it’s possible but that doesn't excuse all the people who liked that tweet, commented or quote tweeted their agreement. It also doesn’t account for all the tweets I didn’t include here that all said similar things.

It does strike me that pretty much anytime Gamers™ in mass decide to out their poor reading abilities, it’s in the name of defending a game they like from honest criticism. Why is that?

We live in an era defined by people tying their identity to the media they like. Everyone must be in a fandom and if you are in a fandom you must defend that thing with your life. So maybe Gamers™ can read properly and what’s actually happening is that something they’ve tied part of themselves to has been criticized so they must find ways to tarnish that criticism even if it make them seem stupid. Or maybe the notion that something they like is being criticized just fills them with such rage that it impairs their reading ability.

Perhaps it’s even a combination. They have poor reading skills and they must do whatever it takes to defend the games they like which further lowers their reading ability. Maybe the reason they feel the need to defend a video game from criticism in the first place is born from a lack of reading comprehension. I mean if I thought all reviews that didn’t specify they were opinions were objective fact I would also be a little miffed when they say something I like is only just good instead of great.

All I know is that there are too many Gamers™ and they can’t read and it makes gamers and it fills me with rage. If you’re going to go to bat for something at least make sure you understand the thing you’re defending against. So if you know a Gamer™ consider getting them a book, I recommend The Hungry Caterpillar so it’s something at their current reading level, and then work your way up.