Before Crispy Gamer crumbles, Tom Bissell has a final think On Gaming’s Unhealthy Obsession With Spoilers.

Reviews and blog posts about games -- and, tellingly, a lot of genre films -- are often strewn with SPOILERS AHEAD warnings, as though the reader who truly wishes to avoid the premature disclosure of certain aspects of a game's story or other elements is an automaton with a non-functioning "stop reading" button. I have come to believe that the general obsession with spoilers among gamers is a pox that must be eradicated. 

Yes! Finally, someone worth listening to is speaking out!

During my extremely pleasant visit to Epic's studio in Cary, N.C., five months before the game's release, I accidentally learned, long before any other journalist, that the game would include a mortar. Wow, I thought. That's pretty neat. The good people of Epic, however, accustomed to the invasive tendencies of traditional videogame journalism, were greatly concerned by my having learned of this mortar. I assured them that their secret was safe with me and they warily accepted this.

From where I sit inside the game industry, I can sympathize with the concern. As game creators, we’re supported by intellectual property (the ownership and sale of our ideas). In theory, if a customer is already exposed to many (or, in the extreme case, all) ideas contained within a game, then our value proposition has been hurt. Holding our cards close to the chest helps build pre-release anticipation and can make a huge splash when our hand is revealed to everyone at once (see: Portal’s Companion Cube, escape sequence, and Still Alive) instead of a rumor mill trickle.

After a game’s release, however, I completely agree with Tom’s assertions:

I responded by saying that I really could not care less, since it is rarely the what that affects me when I am playing a game. To me, what happens during the ending of a game is not that interesting. What is interesting is the manner in which the ending of a game is framed and the constellation of detail that accumulates around an ending. As a gamer, I am most affected by the how. 

And because of gaming’s interactive nature, knowing what happens isn’t as valuable as your experience when it happens to you (or when you make it happen). For example, writing this paragraph was so revealing to me that only now do I realize that Tom already wrote the exact same thing in a much smarter way:

To interact with any creative work, whether a videogame, an album, a book or a film, is, in a very real sense, to be its co-creator, to pull from its core your own personal meaning and significance. To worry about spoilers is to cede this co-creative power; it is to make oneself a bystander in an active imaginative process. With videogames, we have nothing less than one of the most involving and potentially powerful forms of art in the whole history of the world -- a form of art whose interactivity has everything to do with the how rather than the what.

Quite. Us brainiacs need a forehead bump equivalent of the manly fist bump.

One final thought to take away from Tom’s article is a key reason I created this site. As gamers, we need a place to fully discuss and learn about games without spoiler hostility. I haven’t put enough effort into making this place what I had hoped, but if the spoiler pox is ever cured I won't need to.

If you disagree with this, you might profitably ask yourself why music criticism, literary criticism and film criticism are largely absent of hand-wringing worries about spoilers. I suspect this is the case because most of the people who pay enough attention to music, literature and film to want to read intelligent criticism about it do not think of themselves as hapless consumers at the spoiler's loose-lipped mercy.