Welcome to the latest installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza created by bs angel and coordinated by Game Couch. Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month's Blog Banter question, asking whether every game needs to be a grade-A blockbuster title for you to get playing, begs a few questions. It's as much an analysis of our generation's interpretation of quality as it is a personal question addressed to each one of us. I'll present first my theory on on the former, and then address my own views on the subject.

I can recall a time where the gaming press was a subtle niche market. When I was a kid, probably around eight or nine, there were few gaming publications to turn your attentions to; few to influence your better judgment to any great extent. If I was lucky my parents would buy me a magazine, and just perhaps I'd come across a review of a game which would lead me back to my parents, pleading for the money to purchase the title in question. Of course, the obligatory "I'll clean the house for a month!" pledges came to light. The kind that carry about as much weight as the promises of a presidential candidate, pre-election (once I get that game you'll be lucky to see me leave my room once in a month! Suckers!)

I digress. My point, in a roundabout way, is that I had little influence from gaming journalism back then. There would be few times, if any, that a review in a games magazine would pull those glorious, transparent strings above my tiny little mind. Things changed, however. I grew, the world turned many times, and information spread like some sort of virtual epidemic; within a few years we all had access to the world's thoughts and opinions. It's as a result of this that my generation in particular (I'm 21 years-old), those that grew parallel to the internet's own global expansion, have become reliant on information to define their own tastes. There's less adventure for us now; less reason for adventure. If someone's already been there, done that, and hated the experience, then why should I be the sucker to do the same? Websites such as Metacritic and Game Rankings have perpetuated this mindset ten-fold; they've served to cement the idea that if a game doesn't reach a certain criterion; a specific ratio of thumbs-up, then it is not worth your time. So many of us rely on these aggregators to judge a game's relevance to ourselves, which only serves to bunch us together. We're all loving and hating the exact same games, usually months before anything is even released, because we've all read the same preview articles and inherited another person's opinion of something.

This brings me to my own personal view on the subject, and I know it sounds as if I'm condemning those who use the aforementioned sites to judge games, but in actuality I'm just speaking from experience, as I too am one of those people. Try as I might I can't help myself. I see scores, and they define my own tastes. But when I take a step back and look at exactly what I'm doing it leaves me questioning just how irrational I am being, as what I'm taking for gospel truth is, at the end of the day, a collective of opinions. The thoughts of human beings; flaky, absurd, egotistical, frightened human beings, just like myself. Who is to say even one of these people know how I get my kicks, let alone the whole bunch?

I'm not saying that reviews are a bad thing, they offer insights and perspectives that could serve to help us enjoy our favourite games even more. But I, like, many others, must learn to use reviews as reference materials. and not just look at the numbers and convince ourselves that we have no further interest. We could just as well convince ourselves that the games outside the grade-A blockbuster bracket are in fact worth our time, and that those titles falling below the 9's and the 10's have something to offer us after all.

Blog Banterers!: Zath!, Delayed Responsibility, Silvercublogger, weblog.probablynot.com, Crazy Kinux, Gamer-Unit, Unfettered Blather, MasterKitty, Game Couch