learnings from Action Button reviews: how to review a thing (1 of 2)
for normal reasons, I rewatched every single one of Tim Rogers's reviews for Action Button to study how to structure a review
A different ReadOnly than usual, in which, in (debatable) preparation for a new side gig as a reviews editor of poetry books for an online journal, I decided to rewatch all of Tim Rogers’s video game reviews for Action Button. Was this a good use of my time? Especially since 1) these are all somewhere between a half and full working day in length, and 2) video essays about video games may not be that applicable to <1000 words of text reviewing collections of poetry? Maybe. (Probably not that applicable.) (But also let’s find out.)
These are, basically, the outlines for how each of Tim Rogers’s reviews are structured. The section headers from the videos themselves aren’t provided here, because even in the instances where Rogers has provided some, which range from the literal (“Why Remake Final Fantasy VII” or “How Remake Final Fantasy VII”) to the abstracted (“The Trinket Ultimatum” or “Season of Trash”), the goal of this exercise is to rephrase these for universality and as learnings for applicability elsewhere.
This first newsletter is going to cover the first four of the (currently) seven of them. As previously mentioned, christ, these are long.
Final Fantasy VII Remake
Introduction (Intriguingly, for this first review, Rogers outlined his intended review process for all of these videos. Very useful for me, a person making strange decisions about how to study what makes reviews good.)
Historical context (w/ some specific overview of the text, as applicable)
Analysis of a few specific qualities of the text in comparison to the original, adapted text
Analysis of narrative structure, pacing, and “game flavors”
In-depth analysis of the combat, gamefeel, leveling systems (in-game and compared against other games)
The Point (kind of the closest this gets to a specific thread of analysis that becomes the thesis, although it’s more so a thesis for video games at large rather than the specific text)
Who is this game for
Close analysis of the ending
The Bottom Line
A bit of an oddball because the game in question is so deeply metatextual that the review has quite a lot of work to do specific to what type of game this is (3 and 7 above, primarily), but otherwise it plays all the hits. A little history lesson! An in-depth analysis of what things work or don’t work! A discussion of who this is for! You could be reviewing pretty much anything (such as… poetry???), and these pieces will get you there.
One of the conversations I had that kicked off this research (sort of) project regarding book reviews mused on those that drift towards synopsis. Another point that came up: the notion that reviews are not advertisements; even if you do like a thing you’re writing about, what are you trying to say about it beyond “yeah, spend your time/money on it, like me”. My working thesis going into these is that a “good” review is analysis crossed with recommendation, where a reader can both get a sense of whether they would agree with your overall opinion of it and also gain a different perspective on it than they might have on their own. It’s interesting seeing that some synopsis is in Rogers’s review, once we get to point 4 above, mostly because it’s hard to analyze this game in a vacuum, which then becomes the lens through which point 7 is explored. (Although it’s also way less synopsis than other reviews he does later, in next week’s part two of this research.)
The Last of Us
Introduction
Context of the release (around here, the video picks out a framework for analysis [in this case, why did TLOU win so many GOTY awards, aka an exploration of what is video game Oscar bait])
“Begin with The Bottom Line”
Why’d Rogers pick this game to review (a continuation of 1a above, basically)
Structure-function analysis (how the narrative and the game work together)
Discussion of game flavors
Who is this for
The point (a sort of extension of the structure-funtion analysis into a broader applicability beyond the text itself)
The bottom line
This one turns out to be structured in a way that basically anyone who went to high school in the US would be familiar with: it’s a three-point thesis/5 paragraph essay. The introduction is way longer than a high school paper’s (it’s longer than each of the main paragraphs and where the bulk of the research exists), and – possibly because a 3-hour video needs a bit more meat on its bones than a high school paper – the point and the bottom line are sort of dual thesis statements (which is generally interesting, but probably not super useful for my *checks notes* <1000-word poetry reviews).
Doom
Introduction
Context of the release
“Begin with the bottom line”
What does a review of this text require?
Personal anecdote (used to suggest the value of the text as a cultural signifier, the context of its time, its legacy)
Analysis of various lenses that could be used to review the text
A close reading of the text (including a vertical slice and analysis of the game flavors)
The text as a lens for broader applicability (eg, sociopolitical power structures, what does violence do in art)
A critique of a contemporary criticism of the text (generally circling back to the text’s legacy)
The bottom line
This is kind of the first Action Button review that really feels like what makes latter reviews feel so special, which was hugely surprising to me since I have never really noticed huge stylistic differences over the course of these videos until now. The Final Fantasy VII Remake review still has that blend of personal anecdote and analysis, but the tone in the Doom review is where Tim first feels like he’s having any fun with it, like a band that’s been playing their hit song live for so long that the performance has a lived-in looseness to it, where the song now invites you to hang out with the band in it. None of this is useful for My Purposes, but I thought it was interesting.
Some notable things about the structure here. First, the personal anecdotes do a lot more analytical heavy lifting than previous videos (Rogers is a hell of a storyteller, talking about young men he knew in college for like 20 minutes and never once not making it feel important to understanding Doom). Second, this is the first one that doesn’t really incorporate any “who is this for?”, partly because the analysis suggests this game is of such cultural significance that if you haven’t already played it, many of the games you have played have certainly been influenced by it, which is neat. And not useful for reviewing a book of poetry that came out recently but hey it’s neat to see what the criteria are for a review NOT discussing who the audience of a thing would be.
Pac-Man
Introduction
A little short film kinda thing!
The bottom line
Outline of the research process
Context
Personal anecdote (used to frame the following)
Attempts to define “good”
Design
Close reading of the text at an action level (describes the play)
Close reading of the text on a structural level (describes how the difficulty ramps, how it progresses, then also muses on what is perfection)
Discussion of the text’s legacy
History of the franchise, original creator’s involvement (or lack thereof)
Why there isn’t/can’t be a “Pac-Man 2”
The bottom line
Embarassingly, this is roughly when I figured out these have a fair amount of documentary in their DNA, in addition to simply being “reviews” (maybe partly because how exactly do you talk about Pac-Man for 3+ hours). There’s actually a pretty clear (imo) parallel between how the review analyses Pac-Man and what needs to be covered in a (for instance) poetry collection review: analyses of the poems themselves (the “game flavors”, the verbs, describing the action of Pac-Man being chased around by ghosts and how) as well as what they’re all doing in the collection as a whole (how these verbs fit into the overall difficulty curve, the memory error that results in the “end” of Pac-Man after finishing level 256 and entering a surreal glitched world that never ends, and the conditions of perfection, which are posited by the reviewer to be “stupider than a child imagines”).
I think what’s less clear but most interesting to me is the way that Rogers makes these personal anecdotes feel essential to the act of reviewing an individual game. I suppose this obviously wouldn’t work for literally any review, would really only be earned by a game that’s really worth thinking about. Thus far they frame the analyis – be it the toxicity of the typical male video game audience that frames the Doom review around media and violence in culture or the youthful grappling with good and bad video games that frames the Pac-Man review around its legacy (or weird lack of legacy in contrast to other video game franchises).
As mentioned, this is all (obliquely) towards something; I’ve joined the team at Kissing Dynamite as a Book Reviews Editor! I’ll be writing reviews of small press/self-published poetry books (the first one is now live), but I’ll also be editing other writers’ reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write!
And next week covers the other three live Action Button reviews, so subscribe if you haven’t. How else are you gonna learn how to read poetry?