It’s a question I’ve been asking myself of late. Am I too concerned by spoilers? Speaking from the perspective of being the recipient of spoilers I don’t think so. I’m fairly relaxed about the information I receive. I still happily watch movie and game trailers. I don’t mind discussing gameplay experiences with people further along than I am.
There are limits of course. I don’t mind knowing that a certain type of thing happens, but I most assuredly don’t want to know how it turns out or what further implications it may carry.
It can be difficult to articulate where that line lies, so perhaps by way of example… Let’s say in a book, the protagonist and his party are attacked by trolls on their journey. I’m OK being told that. But I don’t want to know either when it happens or what the outcome of this event is.
I briefly entertained the idea of going in completely blind to Elden Ring but that only lasted until the Network Test rolled around and content creators started milking the opening small section of the game for all it was worth. Then my resolve fell to the wayside and I watched all of it. Alllll of it. That aside, I have been avoiding walkthroughs or lets plays to experience as much of the rest of the game for the first time by my own hands as possible.
Though all that isn’t at all the shape of my question.
The question in full is: Am I being too conservative in my approach to ‘spoilers’ when it comes to the likes of game and book discussion?
I tend to err on the side of respecting perhaps the most extreme end of the spoiler-sensitivity spectrum. But I admit I do find this… quite restrictive. Sometimes, as I did with Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward, I’ll go to the lengths of a non-spoiler post one day and a no holds barred post the next. Whenever spoilers are involved, warnings galore. That goes without saying.
But particularly when it comes to book reviews I find this self-imposed limitation of not talking about the content at all to be very limiting. It is typically considered to be a core part of any good book review to include a concise synopsis of the content and reflecting on the reviews I wrote in the years gone by (e.g., Review of The Black Prism (Lightbringer #1) by Brent Weeks) it seems I was a little more open on this.
I believe catering to the extreme sensitivity to spoiler end of the spectrum is resulting in weaker reviews (and sometimes, posts) — so I suppose to return to my opening question: Am I being overly concerned by spoilers?
While acknowledging it will sometimes be different from ‘thing’ to ‘thing’, where generally do your personal lines lie? Are you on a similar page as me where spoilers are concerned, or somewhere else entirely?
I’m extremely hard-line on spoilers but I think the responsibility lies with the consumer not the reviewer. Reviewers should be completely free to discuss anything they consider relevant. They should, of course, flag the nature of the review at the start, but after that they can say whatever they want.
The viewer/reader/player is the one who needs to take full control of the information flow.If you don’t want spoilers DON’T FRICKIN’ READ REVIEWS!! How hard is that? I switched Map chat off on day one in GW2 because people chatter about the story there and spoilers abound. I don’t balme other people for that, I balme the people who complain about it for having the map chat on in the first place.
You have to be rigorous to protect yourself from spoilers because they’re intrinsic to the process. They’re even in the marketing and promotion materials. Never watch movie trailers for movies you want to see. Never read the blurb on the back cover until after you’ve finished the novel. The people who make and write those do not care what carefully developed narative structures they reveal. They are marketeers, not creatives. I don’t read a single word of a review of anything I know I’m going to read or watch until after I’ve read or watched it. Reviews, to me, exist to compare your experience with other people’s, after the fact, not to give you information to base a buying decision on or whet your appetite.
One thing that really annoys me in discussions of upcoming movies is when people mention the story has a “twist”. That in itself is one of the most blatant spoilers you can give. The whole point of a twist is that it’s unexpected. If you know there is one, even if you have no idea what it is, the entire narrative function of having that twist ceases to exist. It’s tantamount to giving away the name of the killer at the start of a whodunnit.
Games are slightly different in that there are mechanics to be discussed. I don’t consider information about the way a game plays to be a spoiler, unless it’s something for which the actual discovery of the mechanic forms part of the entertainment value, which would be very unusual. I don’t consider the art or design to be spoilers, either, under normal circumstances. I’m having one hell of a job writing about the GW2 expansion right now without giving away any of the plot, which is actually the thing I most want to write about, but there’s just no way to do it without making it one of those “SPOILERS!!!” posts. I will do one of those when I finish the storyline but until then I’ll keep quiet.
So I’m curious then where you would think people could or should reasonably expect the baseline to be.
If there isn’t a giant sky-written ‘Here be Spoilers’ line to the review, how much or what type of information is acceptable to you, as someone fairly hardline on spoilers, vs. what would piss you off to see without such a warning?
My suspicion is, your version of hardline isn’t quite where some people have got to today where it has become a joke, for a reason, that to know the name of a game/book/movie/whatever is itself a spoiler. ;)
Mechanics for Games is an interesting topic though. I agree with you though, that mechanics in most cases are absolutely fine. Albeit when it’s a mid- to late- game revealed mechanic it becomes a bit iffier to freely talk about.
Even when it is listed in the general feature set or trailer of the game, that isn’t a sure fire thing to say people won’t be mad about it these days.
I’m pretty much right in line with what Bhagpuss said. I do everything I can to avoid spoilers, but all I ask is that the content creator make us aware that a post/video/whatever is going to contain spoilers so I can opt out of it.
What gets me is when a spoiler is in, say, the excerpt of a blog post (so it shows up on Twitter/Feedly/search results) or even in the title: “Red Oaks Murder Review: Can You Believe the Butler Did It!?” [And yes, I’ve seen places do things like that.]
Time is also a factor. If something is a year old I think it becomes even MORE on the consumer to protect themselves. I do hate when, for example, a new show comes on a streaming service and it launches at midnight or 4 am and by lunchtime sites and people are talking about what happened. Like everyone is expected to stay up late or take a day off work to watch the show first thing in the morning. Some days I feel like I’m the only one who has a job! LOL
Yeah, spoilers in the headline or excerpt really piss me off too. I’ve had a good number of show spoilers where I was only an episode or two behind spoiled (sometimes quite significantly!!) by headlines in my news feed.
That is quite a different story to someone wandering into a specific episode review or show reddit and then getting angry they saw something they didn’t want to, in my view. xD
Same question for you as Bhagpuss then though, where do you personally draw the line between an acceptable baseline of info that doesn’t necessarily require ‘SPOILERS!’ in flashing lights vs. what would irk you if it wasn’t flagged?
For books & movies it is basically almost anything in say the 2nd half of the work. Plot points, new characters… honestly if I’m going to read a book or watch a movie I just avoid reviews entirely.
For games, mostly stuff around the plot/narrative, but also it can be location or some really unusual enemy type. It’s hard to draw a definitive line. Like if I’m paying a modern shooter and further into the game you encounter an enemy with a rocket launcher instead of a rifle, having that ‘spoiled’ isn’t going to bother me. But if all of a sudden there’re ghosts or dragons…y’know a really unexpected enemy type. Then that would be a spoiler for me.
But I think ‘traditionally’ when a game review says its going to be spoiler-free they’re talking about storyline and maybe biomes.
This all makes sense to me and I agree. Good examples. :) I think examples are perhaps the easiest way to discuss the topic short of any simple and universally understood definition of the term ‘spoiler’.
In the case of Elden Ring specifically, I don’t want to see anything – I went in almost completely blind, and I hate seeing screenshots and boss clips on Twitter. I realize it’s unrealistic to expect people not to share, but I still get annoyed, haha. I want to find things on my own, and still be surprised when I walk into a new area, or encounter a new NPC or boss for the first time. I’ve been trying to limit my social media time to avoid seeing these types of things, until I’m much further along in my own playthrough. ((side note: I hope you’re enjoying the game!)) But yeah, very picky about spoilers – which is basically everything for me – because I like to experience things myself, not be told about it by clout chasers on the internet, LOL.
Elden Ring seems to be having the effect of having a lot of people keen to avoid info on it like the plague! I guess with ER, so much of the experience is in… Well; the experience. The discovery of it all, that this makes sense. :)
Hopefully the screenshots I’ve shared so far have been early enough and/or lacking in context enough not to bother you!
Thanks for the additional insight. :)
Your screenshots haven’t bothered me at all! Most of the people I follow seem to be fairly respectful in terms of either marking spoilers, or sharing limited info. Unfortunately Twitter keeps recommending ER content to me, which is usually where the spoilers come from :(
It took me a moment to get to this, but here I am! Okay, so my personal lines… I know you are certainly more okay with some things than I am, that’s going back years to something from my recollection. I do have a habit of constantly second-guessing for plot points and waiting for things I’ve heard will happen when I’m told something even as innocuous as “somebody dies at some point” you know. However, I do think that even my line doesn’t fall that far. I would prefer to go in with the vaguest notion of what the story is about and keep everything else fresh, to fully enjoy for the first time, but I don’t expect to always be able to keep things fully untouched by spoilerdom. Thing is if there’s a moment where somebody may or may not die, very tense, and I hear “somebody dies at some point”, then throughout that scene rather than just enjoying the scene, my brain is constantly whirring around with “ok but I know they die…. but what if they don’t and somebody else dies? … Nah it’s gotta be this person, but what if they last and die in the next book and someone takes their place” and so on, right? And that buzzing is so frustrating it honestly spoils my enjoyment a little. Again though, hard to avoid. It’s a vague enough point.
When it comes to reviews, using the same example, I personally would probably talk about a very tense moment rather than “somebody dies”, it lets you still discuss how well or poorly that scene worked and things like that without needing any specifics. If you are avoiding discussing story points like that entirely to be careful then you perhaps are being a little too careful, yes. But as I said on Twitter, who are you writing the reviews for? If you consider that question when you’re not sure what to include, then perhaps it will help. :)
And to add to things after reading other comments, hi hello, I’m back. Reviews are for consumers and should not spoil. The line itself… you really have to draw yourself. And by that point, it is absolutely on the consumer to be careful on what they choose to look at. I used to go into a World of Warcraft expansion completely fresh. I wouldn’t look at fansites with all their datamining, I’d be careful which blogs I checked, and I learned to skim Twitter so I could slide right past people mindlessly posting images from new zones. So I suppose where I would personally draw the line: general images – ok. Images that reveal something really cool to discover – less ok, but if you wanna include them, make it clear that your blog is not safe for folks who want to discover things like that for themself. S’all good. Same goes for mechanics and loot and whatever else could fall in that grey area. Personally, generally speaking, if that stuff is part of the story or a suuuper cool moment, I’m not gonna want it spoiled but I don’t mind if it’s like… “I discovered neat thing” cus sometimes you just wanna share neat thing and I get that. That, in itself, does not ruin my experience. Maybe I’d have liked to discover it myself too but eh, that particular onus is on me, not the content creator. :)
I think simply saying ‘Think of who the review is for’ isn’t terribly helpful without further info. That is largely what this exercise is for! About determining where the line is for the potential reviews between spoiler and helpful info.
Thankfully… You also DID include a lot more useful context, so thank-you. :)
Although I think ‘someone dies’ is a bit of an extreme example. I think that in itself, even with no other info at all, is too far to go for exactly the reasons you mention.
I think how I might approach that though — and curious for your thoughts on this — is to talk about the book as a whole, ‘This book follows the George R. R. Martin school of thought, no-one is safe.’ Or if perhaps it wasn’t that extreme, ‘This book doesn’t quite go to the same lengths as George R. R. Martin, but characters can perish.’
Yes, in this example GRRM is still my touchpoint for this kind of thing… Maybe I need to find a more modern one. xD
Now the reason I might include something along these lines is that I feel that some people do want to know what they’re in for in this regard. Sometimes people only want to read books where the hero always wins, or need that kind of story in the moment. So warning if that isn’t the case I think is valid.
It is an interesting one though, because it does perhaps cross over into what you were talking about but hopefully in a less intrusive way…?