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I'll never forget the first time I saw The Sixth Sense. Not because I enjoyed the movie, not because something about it made me squirm in my seat, but because of the time I punched my friend Billy in the stomach. The press was all over the movie. It had been in theaters for about two weeks, and apparently I was the only person on the planet that hadn't seen it. So my buddy Billy said he'd be willing to see it again just so he could see my reaction to it in person. That sounds good, I thought. So I'm at the theater, and what does Billy do? No more than 20 minutes into the movie, Billy leans over and says, "Oh, by the way, Bruce Willis is..."
Those who've seen the flick can fill in the blank. Like I said, Billy got the ol' knuckle sandwich a few minutes later once I realized what he'd done. Ever since, I've held a particular hatred for spoilers in any medium.
But what exactly is a spoiler? Do exact details have to be given to actually spoil something for someone? Essentially, a spoiler prematurely reveals to someone a crucial detail of a story. Here at RPGamer, we make a lot of efforts to help prevent both the intentional and the accidental revealing of spoilers. A recent incident, however, made me wonder whether or not we are doing enough.
While thumbing through some reviews of games at RPGamer in an attempt to decide which games among a few that I would buy, I came across a detail about one of the games. The review claimed that (game name) was amazing by virtue of a completely unexpected "twist" in the game's story. Well, it turns out that I bought that game, and as a result of reading the review, I became hyper-aware of all details in the game's plot, trying to figure out the upcoming twist. As it turned out, a few of my predictions about what the game's twist would reveal came pretty close to what the actual twist was, and the twist became less surprising to me as it was probably intended to be. Was I cheated? Did the review spoil the game for me?
Since what I read didn't reveal anything too specific, it's probably a stretch to qualify what was revealed to me as a "spoiler," but what I experienced brings about an interesting question about how we communicate games' stories. Does simple knowledge of the existence of a twist that is going to be in a story decrease the dramatic impact of that twist? The primary purpose of a twist is to blindside people and catch them by surprise; wouldn't preexisting knowledge about the existence of a twist thwart this purpose?
Knowledge about the existence of a twist certainly doesn't have as substantial an impact as a blatant spoiler does, but it does decrease the amount of surprise one experiences when the twist is encountered. In this way, even simple description of a game as having a great story because of its surprising twists can be obnoxious insofar as it somewhat spoils the surprise.
But how to prevent this? Most people probably don't even mind knowing if a game's story has a twist. If that's true, then wouldn't censoring any document that reveals such information be extreme and unfair? But then again, how can people who just want to find out a little basic info about games not have their potential experiences ruined by the knowledge of the existence of a twist? The least extreme thing to do would be to mark any details about any game's story with spoiler tags, but then spoiler tags would cover almost EVERYTHING. So, reading reviews will probably simply have to remain a slightly risky endeavor for the gamer. The only sensible thing to be done is to make sure readers know the effects of what they read. Hopefully I've helped do that in some regard.
Wow, I just almost cited a few games in which twists occur in storylines that I didn't expect. Then I realized just how counterintuitive to my editorial that'd be. Guess I'll just have to end here. Reviewers, try to dodge around revealing too much about a game's story if you can manage it. Readers, read reviews with caution; know that anything you accidentally uncover is the result of a risk that comes with reading about things on the Internet.
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