The GoldenEye Effect

I've been telling myself I would write this for ages, and now that I have enough other things I want to procrastinate on, it's finally time. It's about a type of media literacy failure that might have a formal name somewhere but I've been calling it "The GoldenEye Effect."

So if you were alive 20-30 years ago (and even maybe if you weren't), you're probably aware of the GoldenEye 007 video game for the Nintendo 64. It was a first-person shooter made as a tie-in game for a then-recent James Bond movie. And unlike most movie tie-in games (yes, that was common in the Old Times), GoldenEye was incredibly popular. Tons of people have fond memories of weekends with pizza and friends, playing 4-player split-screen free-for-alls, and yelling at the one kid who kept picking Oddjob and saying it's only because they like the character and not because his hitbox is half the size of everyone else's.

Yes, I too played this in my youth (my older brother was Oddjob Guy). Another thing that was part of my youth was a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Part of that magazine was a set of awards for games in various categories based solely on reader votes. You would send a physical letter to the magazine's office listing your picks for each category—things like best graphics, best music, best controls, and so on—as well as the best game overall. The magazine would then publish the results in a future issue.

Like I said, GoldenEye was incredibly popular. Nobody was surprised when Nintendo Power readers voted it the best game for that round. However, it also dominated most of the individual categories, often defeating games that were unequivocally superior in those specific categories. It was so egregious that the magazine even went as far as to directly chastise its own readers for so blatantly just picking their favorite game over and over instead of being honest about individual categories.

The best graphics in video games at the time, according to Nintendo Power readers.

I was a kid at the time, not exactly a paragon of media literacy. Maybe that's why having this distinction spelled out to me stuck in my memory so much. This was my first conscious exposure to this fact of human behavior: many people will not differentiate between their evaluation of a thing as a whole and their evaluation of its individual facets.

Now, I'm calling this "The GoldenEye Effect" because it was both an egregious example and also my personal first awareness, but it goes far beyond just video games. It's an issue with media literacy more broadly. (Probably also in other things, but that's beyond what I feel like getting into right now.) You read a book or see a movie, you fall in love with it, and then you start listing individual traits and over-selling them as each being as good as your overall appraisal.

A more recent example is the series Arcane. When it came out, I couldn't go 2 minutes without hearing people raving about how incredible it was. I watched it, and came away simultaneously impressed and disappointed. On the one hand, that show was fucking gorgeous. The visuals were stunning, not just in art style but in cinematography. The music was great, and was also put to fantastic use in how it was integrated into the action. Furthermore, several individual scenes were wonderful—the fight between Ekko and Jinx, for example, could have been a stand-alone short film on the strength of its visual storytelling.

But.

The plot was disjointed and jerky. The show would signal a focus or direction, then do something else instead (and not in a "dramatic reveal plot twist" kind of way). Several key characters had unclear personalities, shifting around to serve the plot like Captain Janeway cranked up to 11. The show had some real warts mixed in with its accomplishments.

Which is fine! Most things have strengths and weaknesses, and if something's strengths outweigh its weaknesses for you, then you'll probably like it, and that's okay! Nothing needs to be perfect to be loved. But that's not the same as being great in every category. I've seen people say everything from "it's basically perfect" (normal hyperbole, I can overlook that) to "it has no flaws" (that's a bit more specific and debatable) to "in addition to its beauty, it's a masterclass in storytelling and characterization" (hold the fuck up).

In Conclusion

Nothing is perfect. If you love a piece of media so much that you've read/watched/played it multiple times, but you still can't point out any real flaws, you're probably deluding yourself.