Hidoshi of That’s Not Kanon published a post criticizing reviewers and had a lengthy rant about video game reviews. He described a job of a reviewer as a “god-awful, soul-sucking, self-demeaning trap.” Here is an unauthorized excerpt from his post:
The other major pitfall is the gigantic overlooking some reviewers do. If the graphics aren’t good or the music annoys you, fine, but these are the only things you should overlook as a general rule. Everything else is pretty essential to what’s going on. If there’s a major issue to the gameplay don’t try to feed me the idea that this title is playable merely because you used the words “if you can overlook this…”. Stand up for what you’re trying to promote! Get a bloody opinion and stop being so wishy-washy. It’s either enjoyable or it isn’t. This isn’t a field where you have to practice a high degree of amicability or politically correct diddling the reader’s balls/clitoris in order to get your job done.
As far as game reviews go, there is a major problem with game journalism which was highlighted by the recent Gerstmann-gate episode a few months ago. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Jeff Gerstmann, former editorial director of GameSpot, was supposedly fired for giving Eidos’s Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (360 & PS3) a poor review. Now there are arguments for both sides on this, but it is apparent that publishers have been pressuring writers for some time. Dan “Shoe” Hsu of Electronic Gaming Monthly wrote in his opening editorial and a blog post about three companies that were blacklisting EGM from any insider coverage and previews (specifically these developers/publishers were Sony’s sports division, Ubisoft as a whole, and the Mortal Kombat team).
The problem with game reviews is that game journalism is still relatively new compared to journalism for other media. Video games have only been around for about 30 years now, as compared to film and mass-distributed music which will reach their 100th year anniversaries far sooner than video games. Although I can’t exactly say game journalism is in its infancy, the open-endedness of video games allows for further experimentation and requires a greater degree of open-mindedness. Hence the catering to multiple audiences, because reviewers don’t want to piss everyone off.
Video game journalism has grown up in a time when the Internet, perhaps the most revolutionary technology and most significant development of the 20th century, integrated itself into mainstream society and culture. This means people can send their thoughts and opinions out to the world, which means the criticism of journalism is much more common. Writers feel more pressured (not only by their readers but advertisers and the higher-ups as well; after all, they write to put food on the table) to stay safe and not completely destroy a game’s reputation or marketability. Writers also must compete with the fans themselves since the Internet is essentially one gigantic forum where everyone can voice their viewpoints on a game and if he or she enjoyed or did not enjoy it. In some ways, reviewers may include things in reviews so that they won’t face an unnecessary backlash (even though in certain cases it’s quite the opposite) from the community who keep the industry and the media alive.
Video games are also a much different medium than music or film. As technology advanced, new movies were not released with some films looking incredibly inferior than the others. Although there can be arguments against that for music, movies are the prime example since improvements of the visual quality are much more noticeable. In video games, dated graphics are extremely evident in older titles and there are still titles such as Ninjabread Man (Wii) being released commercially even though it plays and looks like complete shit. Are you telling me, with games like Gran Turismo 5: Prologue and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare out on the market, I (and reviewers and fans) have to deal with terrible visuals such as Mario Kart Wii (judging by the current screenshots)? Don’t misunderstand me, I gladly accept and enjoy games on the DS that are in 2D, and I still love those NES and SNES games of yesteryear. But when the technology allows it, why not strive to look the best, regardless of your format? Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros. Brawl look absolutely gorgeous for the Wii, yet Mario Kart doesn’t seem to be looking so hot.
Also, remember that reviewers probably play nearly a hundred games each year. That’s far more than the vast majority of gamers purchase in a console generation. No doubt that they have higher expectations from video games, have seen most of what gaming has to offer, and are just doing their job. In addition to the games they must preview, the games they must play or see with private developer meetings, and the games they must review, reviewers have games they want to play on their own! Time is an important factor, so it’s much more difficult to fully value the game (especially if a reviewer is playing a review copy from the publisher). Remember that because they are doing their job, they are limited in the amount of time to play the game and write a review about it. There are deadlines to meet, and reviewers simply won’t have enough time to reflect on their experience for a greater period of time. I don’t think it’s a cycle we can change; a game’s success is highly dependent upon the first few months of sales, and publishers need magazines and websites to push the reviews that could potentially increase or decrease the sales of those latest titles.
So abruptly closing this, why do reviewers need to list the flaws, even the slightest ones? Because people of this Internet age are nitpickers, and the slightest comment or remark (or lack thereof) can spark flame wars and the Internet rage machine. In some cases, this doesn’t work and a reviewer mentions something that need not be criticized, but can you really blame him or her? It’s his or her job, and he or she needs to get that review out on schedule. Reviewers’ opinions can change too and may feel completely different about a game a week after the review was published. The Internet is here for us to publish our own reviews if we don’t agree.
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8 Comments
Oh I know Reviewers are doing their job. I’ve worked at RPGFan for the last five years and I’m well acquainted with GOOD reviewers. But most of the video game reviewers in the industry are a god-damned joke and should be ashamed of themselves. The same thing applies to the companies that hire them. The fact is it’s time to develop a damned model for good reviewing and stop trying to cover the whole of EVERYTHING.
There are as many if not more books published per year than video games, and somewhere down the line book publishers learned that it was a bad idea to review everything in existence. Book reviews tend to be a bit more credible (though not always) because they split it up a bit. One fellow does romantic novels, another does historical fictions, and yet another does high fantasy works, etc. Video games need to be treated the same way because this homogenous view of interactive digital culture isn’t just insulting to the very spirit of video games, but perhaps one of the most striking examples of critic-and-fan based ignorance on this planet.
We need specialists, damnit.
Also: I believe the whole graphics argument is utterly trite bullshit. It’s an utter vanity to bitch and rant about the graphics when the game itself is fantastic. If I may refer to C.S. Lewis for a moment, his whole disgust for stylemongers is pretty much the same thing: People more concerned with how you used a god damned comma or period, or how “modern” your writing was, giving little importance otherwise to what you were saying.
It was bullshit in Lewis’ time, it’s bullshit now. If the gameplay is good, it’s /good/. It’s a GOOD game. Yes, badly used graphics can be a bit of a problem, and yes there are instances where it actually affects the gameplay. But overall I can’t see Mario Kart Wii’s graphics getting in the way of any of its fun, so it’s ridiculous to rate it lower merely for looking a bit last-generation.
re: Everquest II was an amazing feat of graphical power back in the day, but I wouldn’t call it a good game. It’s outright awful, and in fact so are the graphics in every way BUT the technical level of detail and realism. Someone please hire a god damned artist before I shoot the makers.
But then that’s yet another argument, because I also feel that games with good artistic direction are in every way superior to good graphics with poor artistic direction. The whole problem is that everyone will pull the “beauty is subjective” card and dodge that whole argument, which makes it a bit pointless.
Oh and lastly: I believe having comments and user-related ratings on reviews are actually counter-productive to the site’s content. There’s a certain erroneous logic in the whole “the masses are correct” sort of reasoning. The fact is that 90% of the time the internet masses know bull and shit, and whatever they DO know goes down in quantity (and quality) whenever they post comments.
Hmm, specialists. I want to support specialist reviewers, but I don’t believe that it would work for the gaming industry. When you cut the lowest of the crap (think Big Rigs-quality), there aren’t that many video games as opposed to the sheer amount of books published every year. There is still enough room for reviewers to cover multiple genres; it’s quite obvious that an anti-FPS review should not be reviewing the latest Brothers in Arms, but I believe a person that loves RTS but still enjoys FPS can review that game.
The only thing that bugs me is the amount of money spent in creating a game as opposed to writing a novel. If an author’s book doesn’t sell very well, the number of people most heavily impacted are only a few: the author, the editor, and maybe a few others. Now if a game doesn’t sell very well, the number of people affected is a lot higher: we have the developers including the producers, directors, programmers, artists, designers, etc. and the ones in the executive side of the business. Therefore, I think reviews are sometimes a bit mixed because you have to often appreciate the work they’ve put in.
Moving onto your graphics argument, I don’t think we should be getting graphics that are dated given the technology available. Sure, visuals aren’t everything, but given what we have seen on the Wii already, why shouldn’t the players be getting more? Art direction is often more crucial than the technical aspects of graphics, but that’s not an excuse for slacking on the technical specifications either. I believe that the graphics could be better, especially since Mario Kart Wii is a first-party title and they have greater experience and support with the hardware. A third-party developer I could perhaps understand, but in both cases it is unacceptable if the hardware platform is incredibly similar to the predecessor of the system.
Factor 5 and Capcom Production Studio 4 have shown what the GameCube can pull off (15 million polygons on screen with no slowdown in Rebel Strike and just fantastic graphics with great gameplay in Resident Evil 4), so why doesn’t Nintendo give us something more impressive with Mario Kart Wii? Given this, I think rating the game lower would be acceptable after acknowledging that the development of Wii games, with the exception of motion controls, is similar to the development of GameCube games. That means we would see more games that near the max quality the Wii can produce, right? Wrong, and we get something that (at this point) looks worse than its GameCube predecessor.
Publications and websites have different criteria for their game reviews, so it is up to them whether they factor graphics into their final score. If they choose to do so, then there should be no problem in doing so. It is up to the reader or fan to acknowledge this and take this fact into consideration.
Should we play games with no expectations at all? If we did, I’m sure every gamer would feel a bit differently about each game. But once we play games, we have a certain expectation for future games to match or exceed the quality of the last title you played in the genre. People don’t want to retread on the same ground, they want something different, and “innovation” is a common way of providing that. Reviewers are simply jaded because they play so much and things that may be revolutionary to us aren’t so impacting for them. They demand a bit more to complete the gaming experience.
Comments on reviews are fine because it allows for the writer/reader interaction. The “masses are correct” thing is definitely false (as well as the “customer is always right” mentality), but sometimes, the masses see things that the “intelligent” may not. Regardless of how stupid the masses may be, it’s still important to take them into consideration when they are usually the main audience.
Granted on the matter of how the graphics are output there should be variance, but my issue tends to be with reviewers who don’t really understand context. Griping on about this and that without doing the research (and you have done your research) is something I see plenty of at, say, IGN. That’s what I protest.
I stand by my argument for specialisation however. I’ve worked at RPGFan for years and believe we have some of the better review standards because we specialise. Overarching sites should probably have departments. An expert in any field of research is worth ten or twenty general adherents because of their specialisation. I’d much rather read an RTS review by someone with a history of playing RTS’ because they understand those games inside and out. Sure it’s a bit elitist but then I wouldn’t exactly trust a fishmonger’s opinion about cheese. Both he and the guy in the dairy aisle work in food, but they’re specialised for a reason — they know their product. Or at least they should.
I just don’t think larger sites such as IGN, GameSpot, or 1UP can function through specialized review departments. These sites function with departments based on game systems; most people will own only 1 or 2 consoles, so in a way I believe that this is the better way; those editors and writers for a certain system department will be much more informed about the system (Matt Casamassina for IGN Wii, for example) and be able to provide better information and coverage for the owners of the specific system. I’m not sure if you would advocate larger gaming sites to be divided into genre-based sections instead of system-based sections, but assuming that you would, it would not work. The average person would not be interested in reading an RPG review for a PS3 game if he or she owned a 360.
Even if system-based departments remained with the editorial staff divided into separate genres they would write for, you have to factor in system bias. This is rather unfortunate but clearly evident in some major gaming publications, so it would be discouraging and misleading if a reviewer gave all the Wii FPS titles he or she reviewed scores of below 7 while giving most of the 360 FPS titles an 8 or higher.
Anyway, I don’t even know if that even matters. I may have been going off on a tangent. In any case, could you change your blogroll link for loli-pop blog to Minimum Tempo? =P
I think that’s inherently flawed tough. Yes, top-based organisation by console is somewhat necessary, but let’s face facts — basing the actual specialisation of content around consoles is meaningless. The actual console has little to no bearing on the quality of the game, so its function is category only. Now, for editorial purposes or hardware reviews, yes, this is a fine way of doing things, but for games themselves it’s erroneous in the same way that a custard pie plate does not make a good hubcap. It may look like a feasible idea, but believe me, it’s not really all you might think.
Searching based on console works, but you can’t really guarantee any sort of quality without specialisation, which is why I feel a good reviewer should ignore console bias and be assigned to reviewing whatever possible in his or her particular genre. It does away with that “Review everything on this console and now” problem that seems to be the heart of all this slovenly shit-throwing.
And while yes, console bias exists and all that, we can still deal with that at another level.
Also: I shall in the morning.
I think it is important to distinguish graphics and art. Titles such as “Shadow of the Colossus” did not have the greatest graphics, but was hauntingly beautiful.
IGN is actually my favorite source of game reviews. Yes, sometimes they do have erroneous or flawed logic and judgments, but the reason why I like them is that they have a rather personal tone when reviewing. Instead of sounding like the industry is saying this game is great or sucks, by having personal judgments, one can deduce what parts of the review they can agree with and not agree with. Now, the bane of game reviews, I believe, should be those goddamned Gametrailers people. They consistently show bias toward Microsoft games. For example, they loved Lost Odyssey’s GREAT voice acting… and how DEEP and INVOLVING the plot was. The reality is completely the opposite, and general consensus shows this. Gametrailers reviews sometimes don’t have a single clue of what the game is. They have taken their Guild Wars: Eye of the North review down now, but when it was up, it showed 1) the beginning area of Guild Wars (1st campaign, different game) and 2) previews and trailers from the website. The entire review was a bunch of garbage words that basically said “Sure, if you like Guild Wars, go buy it.” Such vacuous statements and bullshit reviews cannot be tolerated in my opinion.
IGN is my second reference for game reviews and 1Up, third. But my own opinion is my first and hell of a lot more important and anything else.
As for your argument that IGN’s model being highly erroneous: well, perhaps. But I prefer imperfect reviews with personal bias here and there rather than corporate bias influencing the reviewer.
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