[...] won’t mention all of them (for the sake of anti-spoiler goons knocking down my door), but there were some great character deaths in the stories of some of [...]

[...] almost nothing is purely one kind of narrative or another. Anything that could be considered a spoiler is almost certainly embedded; cut-scenes, for example, are purely embedded narrative (unless you [...]

[...] almost nothing is purely one kind of narrative or another. Anything that could be considered a spoiler is almost certainly embedded; cut-scenes, for example, are purely embedded narrative (unless you [...]

On a separate point, you haven’t supported the claim that spoilers are a larger issue in games criticism than they are in criticism of other media. Romeo and Juliet is far, far from a representative example of spoiler potential in other media. (Try something contemporary.) I’m one of those people that’s paranoid about spoilers, but I’m equally paranoid about games, movies, TV, and books.

@Christopher Hyde, who wrote “I think it’s perhaps reasonable to ask why these people [those who hate spoilers] read about games they’ve decided they want this experience of”

When you know you want to play Game X and you don’t want it to be spoiled for you, it’s reasonable to ask why you’re reading articles about Game X.

When you think you might want to play Game X, and you need more information, then you are in the perilous position of finding reviews that will give you the information you need without spoilers.

When you know you want to play Game X, are carefully avoiding articles about Game X, yet when reading an article that’s completely unrelated to Game X the author pops in a spoiler for Game X without warning, then you are rightfully upset.

I’m constantly amazed whenever I hear people talk of that film who apparently did not see the pattern to how the story is laid out.

That film does NOT invite you to guess the sequence of events. It’s not in a random order or anything.

I think some of the emotive reactions come from the time investment involved – spoiling a minor point in a 90 minute movie isn’t that cutting, largely because there isn’t any real personal investment in watching the movie. However, spoiling the whole movie (a la The Crying Game), invalidates the point of the experience entirely, understandably making people rather unhappy.

The investment is so much higher for a game that I think people become far more sensitive to spoilers; when you’re playing something that has a 40 hour story, those twists and reveals are often the only thing that can keep you going!

Sure, knowing that you lose your weapons at some point may not ruin the game or the overarching story, but it might very well ruin that three hour lull that you’ve been desperately fighting your way through …

The perfect analogue is a joke. Being told a joke you’ve already heard is less likely to make you laugh, but it becomes easier to spot how the humour is constructed the second time around.

From an analytical standpoint, then, the second viewing is far more useful. As someone who often enjoys the analysis more than the spectacle of the initial experience, that makes the first experience the least enjoyable.

I guess this is debating which side of a hammer is more useful–depends on if you’re trying to hammer a nail in or pull it out.

Knowing that Romeo and Juliet are goners does allow us to analyse the play in a conscious way, which can reveal a lot about how Shakespeare uses foreshadowing, irony, tragedy and so on. But I think it makes it less enjoyable to watch, for the same reason: it makes the audience think about the plot structure, rather than live in the moment.

Some movies benefit from a second viewing. Usually, the first viewing gives you the most immersive, emotionally involving experience. On the second viewing, you are more detached and observant of small details – that’s when you get the satisfaction of noticing how the director set up viewers’ expectations with certain lines of dialogue or cinematic sleight-of-hand, or how a crucial late plot point was set up early in the film.

If you already know major plot points the first time you watch a film, you automatically slip into that second-viewing mode. You think about how the plot will get from where it is now to where it is then, rather than allowing it to carry you along. You may try to predict the outcome as you go along – indeed, a lot of films invite the player to unravel the threads as they watch – but not knowing the right answer is what makes that fun, like not knowing the outcome of a football game. Memento is a perhaps the ultimate example of a film that forces the audience to guess the sequence of events, but is enjoyable precisely because it withholds information.

Of course, games (& books & plays &c.*) are not films. But despite what the Clint Hockings of the game design world imply, traditional narrative techniques are not irrelevant to games. That’s a whole other topic, but I think it’s fair to say the fun of playing a game and the fun of watching a story unfold are not mutually exclusive. I would argue that they amplify each other, even if they constrain each other as well.

I tend to agree that avoiding spoilers can hamper critical discussion of games. Any attempt to seriously analyse the content of a game should probably be exempted from spoiler warnings, if only because a close reading of a game is written for people who have already played it. Forming impressions of a game from reading a close reading, without having played it yourself, is just a more intellectual version of criticising a review score for a game before the release date. Ideally, critical discussion shouldn’t need spoiler warnings because only those who have experience with the game can make a fair contribution. (For supporting evidence, see Michael Atkinson’s games collection.)

In contrast, any writing directed at people who have not yet played the game does its readers no favours by revealing details rather than leaving them to be discovered. It’s not necessary: good movie reviewers are able to discuss and describe films without providing many details beyond the initial premise. A review by Margaret and David generally leaves you with a sense of what the movie is like, but little knowledge of the plot beyond what you could learn from a preview.

To someone who has not yet played a game, spoilers serve only to dilute the impact of the experience of playing. That can apply to game mechanics as well as plot points, despite the argument made by Clint Hocking that Ben mentioned above. Let’s take an example from one of the classics:

There is a moment in Half-Life when the player abruptly has all their weapons taken away. (Oh, apologies to the one guy in the world who still hasn’t played Half-Life.) Up until that point, the player has (probably) been carefully conserving ammunition, reserving their more powerful weapons, working out how to take down enemies with the pistol or the crowbar. They might have built up a mighty collection of firepower this way – until abruptly, it’s all taken away. That’s infuriating, right? Well, no. The satisfaction of the game is derived from what you do, not what you have, so all that hard work has not been invalidated as long as it was fun at the time. (If it wasn’t fun, that’s a game design problem.) If the player knew in advance when and where they were going to lose all their kit, they could burn through their ammunition stocks just in time to arrive at the kidnapping scene with no bullets left – and thus completely remove the gameplay effect of the scene and lose the engaging tension of conserving ammunition that is a central part of the gameplay.

Granted, Tristan, you’re arguing against minor spoilers rather than major plot twists like the Half-Life example above. I think they all fall on a sliding scale, though: it is easiest to describe how large, twisty plot surprises affect the experience of the game, but smaller plot points provide the same kinds of enjoyment, just to a lesser degree. For example, knowing what one pokemon looks like before you find it in the game won’t change your experience much, but knowing what they all look like will, cumulatively, take a lot of the fun out of discovering them.

tl;dr: spoilers make games less fun; game mechanics can be spoiled too; I need an editor.

P.S. My girlfriend has the t-shirt with that movie-spoilers graphic on it, and is also the most spoiler-phobic person I know. It must be a face-your-fears thing.

*Is there a good, concise term that means “all kinds of narrative media objects, like games, books, films and so on”? The only ones I can think of are ambiguous: “narrative experiences” is my best effort so far, but it’s not clear enough to use outside an academic essay. There should be a term for this that prevents us from needing to say “games, books, films, plays and stories (and maybe sometimes songs and other stuff)”.

Once I’ve decided I want to play a particular game, I don’t read anything about it and I don’t participate in discussions about it. If people are twittering about it I’ll unfollow them because this is how I like to experience a work. I treat books and film the same way because the experience of finding things out on my own is important to me. If people who don’t care about that want to engage in clearly marked spoiler discussions about works then so be it–but I’m not joining in, and I think it’s a bit absurd to belittle the way I want to experience a work in the way that this piece does.