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Bias. It’s a scary word, huh? We all have biases, but never as many as other people. Or is that also a bias?
Surprising nobody, reviewing a hundred-something board games a year leads to regular accusations of bias. “Oh, you only liked this game because you’re so handsome,” they’ll say. “Oh, you only liked this game because all the ladies write romance novels in which you’re plainly the author-insert character’s love interest. But you’re so coy. You play with your food. Not because you’re emotionally neglectful, oh no. Because of your dark past. Because you were mistreated and thus mistreat others. She can fix you. She will fix you. Anticipation shudders down the novel’s spine.”
Yes, it’s a difficult life I lead. But I bear the burden gladly. So let’s talk frankly about bias. What it is, why it is, and how it impacts every review, mine included.
The easiest way to introduce the concept of bias is by talking about Arcs, the soon-to-release highly anticipated board game by Cole Wehrle.
Two years ago, I wrote a pair of previews for Arcs, one negative and one positive. There’s plenty to dissect there, but the particulars aren’t what’s important. Those two previews generated a minor firestorm. It was no secret that some of the folks at Leder Games were irritated with what I’d written, as such a negative preview could affect their crowdfunding pledges and therefore their livelihoods. When the articles were shared on r/boardgames, Wehrle jumped into the discussion. One reader reached out to inquire whether I’d burned a bridge, or perhaps even a friendship. To this day, the preview — only the negative one, not the positive follow-up — remains my most-linked article from Reddit. To my dismay, I still receive hundreds of pings for it every month.
Back in November, I attended SDHistCon 2023, where I had the pleasure to test a wide array of in-development titles. I also played a finished version of Arcs. In writing about the experience, I summed it up briefly: “Arcs is good now.” Later, my review was also effusive.
Naturally, despite having highlighted a diverse spread of board games, that line was the main takeaway from the piece. It soon sparked a brief discussion that I want to highlight here.
“I wonder how objective Dan is about Cole’s games,” wrote one Redditor. “They seem to know each other intimately and this read feel[s]… almost apologetic. It all is starting to read like a commercial instead of a review, same as all those other YouTube kickstarter reviewers.”
Not long afterward, another commenter responded: “You could easily say the same thing about whenever Thurot reviews Amabel Holland’s work, or John Clowdus’, but I’m not sure that’s accurate. He has notably criticised all of their games when they’re not up to snuff, and he doesn’t shy away from doing so when it could arguably have the most financial effect. Thurot doesn’t take money to review games, which puts him leagues ahead of most YouTubers.”
To be clear: I’m not writing this to drag the person who’s wary of my perspective or to elevate the person who came to my defense. Rather, they’re both right. Or at least I hope they are.
Oh, there are things I might adjust about either statement. When we say “objective,” half of the time we mean “impartial.” And I do take money to review games — just not from publishers, designers, or distributors. Running a reader-funded Patreon and writing for board game magazines results in some income, even if it’s rather paltry. (Plz subscribe to my Patreon, my children are starving.)
But! Both statements speak to certain expectations that are worth digging into. There are at least three overt forms of bias that come up whenever we discuss the impartiality of reviewers in this hobby, whether spoken or unspoken. Let’s break them down.
Nepotism occurs whenever a CEO elevates their ignoramus son to a position of authority. But while that’s the principal form of nepotism in our corporate-driven world, it’s hardly the only one. Nepotistic bias occurs whenever we show undue favor to somebody in a professional setting. Everybody has favorites; that’s not the issue. As we’ll see, “bias” arises when our preferences threaten to color our professional judgment. It’s entirely normal and healthy to become friends with one’s colleagues. It only becomes a problem when those relationships intrude into places where they don’t belong. Such as, say, hiring the right person for a job or informing your audience that a prototype kinda sucks.
Dependency arises whenever one relies upon an outside person or source. Again, this is wholly natural. We have all been dependents, even if only as children. But even as adults, most people understandably favor their career (“No task is more crucial to the proper functioning of a society than that of a medical doctor!”), their household position (“Being a stay-at-home parent is like twenty jobs rolled into one!”), or their culture (“USA! USA!”). The trouble arises when our natural dependencies collide with our desire for impartiality. Because it’s wholly natural to show partiality to the person, institution, or company that provides one’s daily bread, it’s necessary for trusted voices to be cautious around the issue of dependency, whether we’re talking about watchmen, judges, historians, educators, rodeo clowns, or board game writers. That last one is, obviously, the most important of the bunch. Crucial to the proper functioning of society and all that.
Access is a specter that lingers in the subtext of many of these conversations. In most cases, it’s discussed as review copies, although that’s only one of its many forms. This is related to but distinct from dependency because it’s not so much a question of survival as it is one of professionalism. In order to perform any specialized task, we require varying degrees of access that aren’t readily available to the public. Whether it’s a patient’s medical history, a student’s grades, a convalescent’s body, or a patent clerk’s drawers of blueprints, specialized access is both necessary and open to misuse.
Here’s the thing: every one of these biases are present in my work. They’re present in every critic’s work. The question isn’t whether they exist. It’s whether they’re consciously and openly handled.
Which is why I say I hope both of those statements are right. Sure as heck the first one is. Ideally, so is the one defending my honor. Because I do know Cole Wehrle personally. I am dependent on my readers to keep my site running. I do require the access provided by at least some publishers, designers, and distributors. But I also believe that I am a trustworthy source of board game reviews.
Why? Probably another form of bias.
You undoubtedly know about the blind spot in your vision. Eyeballs work thanks to light-sensitive cells that receive and message your brain about incoming images. But there’s a problem. The cable connecting eyeball to brain is near the center of the whole array. This is your optic nerve, and it’s devoid of these photon-gathering cells.
There’s an experiment you can do to “see” your blind spot. Look at the image below, with your nose centered in between the plus and the dot. Cover your left eye and look at the plus. Then, very slowly, shift your gaze toward the dot. Partway there, maybe a third of the way, the dot will disappear. As you hold your gaze in place, the dot’s absence will be obvious. It’s a fun trick. You can do it with pretty much anything, provided the spacing and distance are right. As kids, we used to do it with pencil erasers.
Most of the time, you’re entirely unaware of the glaring empty zone in your vision. Your brain fills in the gaps. The same thing happens whenever you saccade your eyes. As your vision “swings,” you’re technically not seeing anything at all. Everything is a brief wall of black. The motion you see is an illusion produced by your gray matter to give a comprehensible shape to the world around you.
Our brains fill in the blanks in more ways than one. The same thing happens when research studies test people on their biases. Invariably, participants excel at noticing the biases of other people. We can point out each other’s deficiencies all day long. But when it comes to identifying our own blind spots, our brains smooth over the gaps. We call this the bias blind spot, and it’s one of the biggest hurdles facing… well, all of humanity, pretty much.
When training incoming history graduates, one of the first courses we teach is about overcoming blind spots. Not that we call it that. The syllabus usually names it something like “Surveying Methods of Historiography.” Anything kinder than “This Class Is a Crash Course in How to Not Be a Terrible Historian.” It walks students through a bunch of subfields: great man history, archaeology, anthropology, critical text theory, social history, cultural history, “big” history, Marxist history, gender history, queer history, imperial history, post-imperial history, diplomatic history, economic history, environmental history, originalist history, reception history… and I’m probably misplacing a few. Basically, it’s the poster child for conservative whining about how students are indoctrinated into believing that pandas are better than Julius Caesar or whatever.
But the purpose of these courses isn’t to indoctrinate. It’s to ensure that every would-be historian understands that there’s a whole lot of stuff they don’t know. Stuff they can’t know. It’s to get students thinking about those blank spots in their historical vision. In a sense, it’s counter-indoctrination. Because we’re such effective subjective beings, with brains that are optimized to make us believe we see things when we don’t and believe we don’t have biases even though we see them all around us, our baseline assumption is that what we know about any given topic is all there is to know. These courses open a series of windows, however brief, onto the many ways one can examine history, and in the process encourage students to think beyond their own scope as often as possible.
Okay, back to board games.
Review copies are a good thing.
Woah woah woah. What’s this? At best, maybe we can agree that review copies are a necessary evil. Because review copies are a publisher’s marketing line, an entanglement, a form of access bias, all of which can be difficult for a critic to surmount. What would happen if I gave a negative review to an Asmodee product? I’m pretty sure the Embracer Group could legally have me executed on the spot. The safest course of action, then, is to write glowing reviews of everything Asmodee shovels out the hatch, keeping the access sphincter open and the review copies coming.
(I’m kidding. The Embracer Group is better known for keeping its victims alive as long as torture permits.)
To be sure, the prospective bias that arrives with a review copy isn’t inconsiderable. It’s entirely plausible that a critic will put on velvet gloves when reviewing that game in order to retain their access. A few years back, a certain reviewer (whom I will not name) got in trouble when it was revealed that they were accepting duplicate review copies, writing marketing-speak “reviews,” and then reselling the unopened games. Still, I mean what I said. On the whole, review copies are a good thing.
Let’s put it out there. Without review copies, most of the critics currently making videos or articles about board games wouldn’t be able to keep it up. Because board games are expensive, weigh a bunch, and take up a lot of room, the only people who could consistently review board games would either be (1) the wealthy, or (2) enthusiastic amateurs. There’s nothing wrong with having a disposable income or being an amateur, but for a diverse, thriving, and informed critical apparatus, there’s no current replacement for review copies. They lower the barrier to entry, making it possible for a wider range of reviews. They broaden tastes, letting critics sample games they otherwise wouldn’t have purchased on their own. They even attract attention to those who might otherwise get overlooked in the digital sea.
In other words, this particular expression of access bias is also helpful for fostering impartiality — or it can be, provided the critic is upfront and conscious about the entanglement.
Review copies and industry relationships come up a lot because they’re visible. You see a disclosure about a review copy or that I went to Ryan Laukat’s house for dinner two weeks before I slammed one of his games, and your mind immediately registers it as an entanglement. Good! That’s the whole reason we do disclosures! That’s a sign that the system is working as intended!
But while the “Big Three” entanglements are usually easy to suss out, they’re hardly the only forms of bias that both critics and audiences should be aware of. Here are a few others off the top of my head:
- Selection Bias. For the most part, people select board games based on their tastes, whether aesthetic, mechanical, genre, play mode, time requirement, or anything else that strikes their fancy. In a critical environment defined largely by amateurs — the current board gaming hobby, for example — this naturally produces boosterism. And not because of some big conspiracy. It’s just that everyone is self-selecting the stuff they expect to enjoy. This doesn’t facilitate broad tastes or critique. Every voice tends to be fans of a thing telling you why the thing they like is great.
- Favoritism Bias. Ever wondered why everybody seems to like Vital Lacerda? Me too.
- Obscure Incentives Bias. Ever groaned when a bunch of brand-new accounts rated a newly announced game highly? Me too. But maybe they’re real fans of the game and I’m a jaded old man who no longer feels excitement at the countdown to Christmas.
- Sensationalist Bias. Hype. Contrarianism. Bandwagons. Cult of the new. Cult of the old. Novelty. There are countless ways that one’s expectations or enthusiasm can color their impressions. While these aren’t always wrong or misguiding, they can be.
- Exclusivity Bias. Hard-to-acquire or niche games are not inherently better than popular games.
- Inclusivity Bias. Popular games are not inherently better than hard-to-acquire or niche games.
- Size Bias. Big games are not inherently better than small games. Short games are not inherently better than long games. Tall games are inherently better than stumpy games, but that’s a whole ‘nother topic.
- Complexity Bias. This is a surprisingly common one. We’re all afraid of looking dumb. When it comes to media of all stripes, people are more likely to make strong statements if they feel outpaced by something, whether it’s a book, film, game, or anything else. So we’ll say, “Oh, John Crowley’s Little, Big tries too hard to use obscure vocabulary.” Or the inverse, “Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is genius; that’s why the final battle is a bunch of guys shooting at empty buildings.” It’s common to deflect our feelings of inadequacy by either elevating or diminishing anything that challenges us. Or baffles us.
- Audience Appeasement Bias. Publishers and designers aren’t the only relationships that can prove entangling. A blacklist from Asmodee could be interpreted as a mark of honor. Alienating your readers because you think Vital Lacerda has done lasting injury to the concept of the Eurogame could be significantly more fraught. You know. Hypothetically.
- Confirmation Bias.
Ah. Confirmation Bias. That’s a big one. Maybe the biggest of them all. And it warrants an example.
A while back, I wrote a negative review of Martin Wallace’s Bloodstones. It was a difficult game to review. Or perhaps more accurately, it was a difficult opinion to form. I have an abiding appreciation for games with jagged edges, and some of the first hitches I had with the design seemed like they could be exactly that. In addition, Martin Wallace is a storied designer. He’s designed more than one of my favorite games, including some that didn’t click right away.
So I suffered through Bloodstones again. And again. And again.
At this point, a whole range of biases were mixing together, none of them having to do with the Big Three we listed up front. Bias in favor of a designer I appreciate. Bias against panning a game that was receiving a warm welcome. Bias because one of our sessions included a friend who was grumpy that night and I was trying to parcel out whether the play felt bad because of the game or because of him. Bias for games with cool components and novel systems. Bias because I’d paid for the dang thing.
That last part is critical. How often have we seen somebody defend a purchase? It happens all the time. The more expensive, the harder it is to acknowledge that you’ve dropped too much cash on a stinker. In the case of Bloodstones, I couldn’t procure a review copy. So I purchased one. On the aftermarket. During peak hype. For quite a few nickels. At the time, it occurred to me that it might be a bad idea. But everybody was liking the game! It was designed by Martin Wallace! And just look at those clickety-clackety dominoes! Surely I wouldn’t come to regret the decision.
Confirmation bias is when we ignore any evidence that doesn’t fit with the conclusion we’re hoping to reach. Usually we talk about it in terms of beliefs and worldviews, but it also applies to how we engage with media. And in the case of Bloodstones, I wanted to like the game so badly that it took a lot of effort to break through to the other side. Some people felt the review was too harsh. It’s entirely plausible that the review, had I not been wrestling with that precise mixture of biases, might have resulted in something more even-keeled. Maybe. Maybe not. There’s really no telling.
My point isn’t that review copies, one type of dependency over another, or carefully managed access are always inherently good, although I believe each of them is more nuanced than we often give them credit for. Rather, it’s that these forms of bias, despite being highly visible and therefore easy to talk about when they’re abused by bad actors, are only one small part of an ecosystem of competing interests. More than that, one bias may well alleviate certain other biases. It is, to use the philosophical term, complicated.
Either way, assessing biases is both difficult and deeply personal. To be a useful critic is to constantly examine the reasons behind one’s reception for something. It isn’t enough to say “I liked this.” One must strive to understand why you liked it. And there are multiple factors behind any such assessment. Experience, sure. An understanding of the thing being critiqued. But also a willingness to grapple with your gut instincts, your entanglements, your relationships.
Nothing about this process is easy. It shouldn’t be easy. That’s the whole point. When we talk about bias, we aren’t really talking about bias. There are too many biases to count. We’re talking about compromising bias. We’re talking about whether we have a good reason to trust the information that’s being provided to us.
That’s why I appreciate both of those comments. Because there’s always room for a critic to reevaluate whether they’re operating in good faith. When we cut through everything else, I’m less interested in whether I agree with all of a critic’s perspectives than with whether they’re being honest and transparent with me. But even things like disclosure can only go so far. It’s also useful to understand that bias is hardly limited to the Big Three issues we tend to emphasize. Hopefully this will crack open a window or two.
As for whether I can honestly assess Arcs… I suppose we’ve already crossed that bridge.
This article was only possible thanks to the generous donations of my Patreon supporters. My next installment of Talking About Games focuses on the reasons why I might decline to write about a board game. Supporters can read it right now.
