Recommended Reading: More Musing on Game Reviews

While there's been an off-and-on call for changes to the way games are reviewed for years now, the intensity of these calls seems to have increased over the past 12 months. Some people are finding reviews to be impenetrable. Others think they don't offer enough actual criticism, with many outlets devoting pages and pages to essentially retyping the instruction manual before getting on to the "is this game any good or not" part. Then there are the random attacks from folks who seem to think that reviewers aren't even playing the games they're writing about.

With a varied outcry like this from several different groups of people, you might think that the status-quo for game reviews has got to go. Well, I'm still not entirely convinced that game reviews have travelled to the land of music reviews, where only a scant few seem to actually get anything meaningful out of them, while the rest of us just buy music that we've heard before and already know we'll enjoy. Part of that's because games often have mild-to-severe technical issues that can absolutely ruin the experience. The other reason is that at $60, games simply can't be the disposable, impulse purchase that music and movies can be. But I'm not really here to defend the form.

I've read a couple of interesting articles that touch on some of these topics that you may want to check out.

Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander has a piece up on Kotaku discussing, specifically, the notion of people being into games enough to be into games, but somehow not into them enough to get online and actually read anything about them. It's a large segment that probably accounts for the majority of people out there playing games. Believe it or not, there's still a world of people out there who make their game purchasing decisions based on a cool ad on TV, or game rentals, or even by staring at the back of the box.

Sounds like a crap shoot to me, but then, as the guy who has written game reviews for the last decade or so, I'm the very guy you'd expect to say that game reviews serve a very real purpose when used correctly.

The other article is a bit more pointed, it's Keith Stuart penning an article for The Guardian titled "Do game reviewers really understand innovation?" It goes on to talk about Mirror's Edge and starts to compare game reviews to film reviews. He claims that if Mirror's Edge were a movie, "it would be considered a forward-thinking masterpiece."

Personally, I think Mirror's Edge is a forward-thinking mess, though my opinion on the game doesn't really have much to do with what we're talking about here. Considering how much of a game's enjoyment typically comes from its execution, great ideas that don't translate well into an actual game are effectively useless and only serve as a big, blinking sign that screams "UNTAPPED POTENTIAL." That's a big part of why you see reviewers lamely say "maybe they'll fix it in the sequel," and it's what makes the comparisons between game reviews and film or music misguided. It's only in extremely rare cases--take most the Metal Gear Solid series, for example--that a game's concepts and ideas can elevate it above and beyond clunky, frustrating mechanics. And Metal Gear essentially did it by making the most interesting parts non-interactive.

I'm not really here to defend "the game review." In fact, I think most of them could be better. Most of the popular styles of game reviews that are employed by outlets today are less valid than they used to be, since attempts at singular authority and true objectivity make the insane assumption that there's a "right" answer to the game review question. As gaming spreads out and its audience's tastes diverge more and more, no one review can possibly serve everyone's needs. At best, it's my feeling that the right path is one that deals in specifics about our personal experiences with the game, even though there's no guarantee that the reader will have an identical one. We can point out the things we feel are relevant, and hopefully answer some questions that any prospective buyer may have about the product in question. Not to bring too much of our take into the discussion, but it's this concept of "no review fits all" that led to a lot of the decisions we made about Giant Bomb's reviews, from the scoring system to the first-person tense.

I find that I'm also becoming increasingly drawn to more personal takes on game quality, even if I don't think those serve the same purpose as a more traditional review. Take, for example, this review of Gears of War 2 from Tim Rogers. It's a fun read, definitely moreso than my own text review of the game was. But then, I don't think I would get nearly as much out of the review if I hadn't already played Gears of War 2 for myself. As a result of that, I can totally relate to Rogers' highs and lows, or at least understand precisely what he's getting at in cases where I don't agree. If I was trying to figure out if I should buy the game for myself, I'd probably come away from that article thinking "well, that guy sure seems to like it" and very little else. The Escapist's regular video series, Zero Punctuation, is largely the same way. Without any shared reference points, the words would lose much of their meaning. I'm not intending this as a knock against either Rogers or Ben Croshaw, mind you. That's just a factor of the way they've decided to cover games and I'd guess that it was a very deliberate decision.

But to just blindly throw out every aspect of game reviews in order to ensure games like Mirror's Edge get more credit than they probably deserve doesn't exactly sound like a great way to go about doing things, either. It's asking reviewers to talk more about the developer's intentions than about the actual product. That doesn't seem right at all. The people seeking revolutionary innovation at all costs are also probably the people who would listen to a podcast or dig deeper into alternative coverage of a game to see that, even though the core game is absolutely flawed, there's still something here worth seeing.

Either way, these links are some interesting reads. What say you, dear readers?