Minimum Tempo

Wikipedia defines “review” as:

A review is an evaluation of a publication, such as a movie, video game, musical composition, book, or a piece of hardware like a car, appliance, or computer. In addition to a critical statement, the review’s author may assign the work a rating (for instance, one to five stars) to indicate its relative merit. More loosely, an author may review current events or items in the news.

Reviewers are supposed to evaluate a publication based on its quality and its offerings. A game reviewer should review Black based on the game itself without considering Criterion’s past games or any other games on the market. He or she must take what is presented and play it, and base his or her opinions solely on the graphics, presentation, audio, gameplay, storyline, replay value, etc. Why should a reviewer acknowledge outside influences in his or her review? Is what Half-Life 2 offered in the FPS genre important to one’s critique of Black?

Yes and no. If Half-Life 2 introduced concepts that actually break new ground and positively change the expectations, then Black should not ignore it if Half-Life 2’s influences apply to the game. But Black is not Half-Life 2; it’s not a sci-fi first-person shooter based in a dystopian world. How can someone say Black is flawed because it doesn’t have amazing physics that the Source engine offers, or it doesn’t offer online play?

Reviews of all media suffer from multiple problems: bias, rating scales, pressure, money, and countless others. It is also important to take the reviewer’s experiences and education into account; a high school dropout may not appreciate Neon Genesis Evangelion the same way as a college graduate might (let’s not get into the whole NGE sucks argument, people). Even that assumption is limited because the dropout may actually be smarter than the graduate. Bias plagues reviews; some publications are rather labeled by the public as being biased, namely GamePro and GameSpot. There’s also the issue of rating scale issue which is problematic for review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and GameRankings. The Gerstmann-gate fiasco and the blacklisting of Electronic Gaming Monthly and Games for Windows: The Official Magazine by Ubisoft, the Mortal Kombat team, and Sony’s sports division really raise questions about the authenticity of game reviews.

This isn’t a post with any firm thesis. It’s more of a rambling about why reviews suck. So many reviews are from the perspective of that reviewer who is probably better educated in or more knowledgeable of the medium and never consider the fact the reviews will be read by those unfamiliar. Not only that, but anime reviews in particular tend to spoil the whole damn story. It just bewilders me how a review reveals the whole plot. Don’t get me wrong, I do this too, but I’ve recently recognized the problem and am trying to avoid it.

Should a review be geared toward visitors that have already watched/played/read/heard the media or toward visitors that have not watched/played/read/heard the media?

As mentioned before, reviewers often take past experiences into account. Although they may not reference the games directly, reviewers will often say the game does not tread new ground or it’s a rehash or something of the sort. It’s perfectly fine for them to do so; they’re wasting time on a game that plays exactly like a previous game. But what if both games are fun? If the game being reviewed does its job well and entertains the player without bringing anything particularly new to the table, is it really all that bad?

After all, people that have not played both games won’t care if one’s similar to the other; they just want to learn of a product that is enjoyable. Maybe a simple “fans of this work will enjoy this…” type of sentence wedged into the review will suffice, but then the reviewer might have to explain the other title and why they are similar works.

The latest episode (April 8, 2008) of GFW Radio nailed it perfectly: the Internet tends to allow people to ramble on needlessly (just like this post). The lack of a limit on the Internet encourages writers to be lazy, which leads to articles of poorer quality. In physical publications (now referring to magazines and newspapers), a physical limit is present, so the writer must be very concise and clear. This in turn, may actually produce better writing because the editors are required to eliminate the fluff. On the Internet, however, this limitation is gone, and writers are free to post without restraints. I believe that’s one of the main problems with reviews; they talk about pointless things and digress into details that do not really affect the quality of the reviewed title.

Perhaps that doesn’t only apply to reviews, but the Internet in general. Errors are spotted in blog posts and online articles all the time. Is that a sign of laziness? Probably, but there’s little we can do when it’s so convenient to simply press the publish button without care of complete grammatical correctness and whatnot. Maybe this should have been a post about the Internet and laziness. Hopefully this is the last Minimum Tempo post without a real, clear point.

Feel free to jab at me about how this post doesn’t really talk about anything and doesn’t contain a coherent structure. Don’t bother commenting that you edit your blog posts meticulously and blah blah blah. I don’t care. This isn’t an article I’ll work on later, so I might as well push it out now, eh? I feel lazy, I’m sad that it’s the last day of spring break, and I really want some cake.

This post is tagged Ramblings, Random Thoughts, Reviews

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