Rock, Paper, Shotgun has linked to a debate between a hardcore RTS player and PCGamer/Gamesradar RTS reviewer Dan Stapleton. The short version is that Stapleton gave Red Alert 3 a very positive review but AGMLauncher at Game Replays finds the review too short and uninformative. From what is written, AGMLauncher judges that Stapleton is unqualified to assess RA3 or any other RTS. Stapleton, naturally, takes offense and says that AGMLauncher is missing the point of a review written for a general audience.

The whole thing is a variant on the usual audience versus critic divide, where a particular subset of a writer’s audience is convinced that the the critic doesn’t “get it”. You see this a lot in attitudes towards reviews of comic book movies, for example. There is a generational and parochial divide here, too, where an audience that has grown up playing RTS multiplayer skirmishing online wonders why critics don’t do more due diligence in the MP aspect of a game.

For AGMLauncher, the review (in fact, any review in a major outlet) comes up short because it doesn’t deal with the things that he wants to know. (He has 14 questions he wants answered.) And about half of these questions are good ones: What is the ratio of building to fighting? (If the fact it’s a C&C game wasn’t a big enough hint.) Are the factional differences substantial? How is the map variety? Does naval combat – a big thing this time around – work? How do counters fit in the game design? These things are central to understanding if/when/how RA3 works as a real time strategy game in all three modes – campaign, skirmish and online.

A lot of the other questions aren’t so significant since they are things that are only worth spending word count on if they are a problem or outstanding. There is no reason to mention pathfinding unless it doesn’t work; if it does then it’s not interesting – it’s supposed to work. Same with lobby management or user interface. Average army size and game length in MP is highly dependent on a number of variables; critics should never mention how long it takes to play a game for the same reason. Other questions are the sorts of things that are more appropriate for bullet points in a preview, like how campaigns or the tech tree are structured.

Stapleton concedes that the review could have been longer, if only by a few hundred words. For a good writer, a few hundred words is a huge increase, by the way. And he also admits that the choice of cheesecake screenshots was not necessarily a good one, editorially speaking. But his basic argument is that the review does its job by addressing the masses of gamers who read Gamesradar and PCGamer. Competitive RTS gamers are not his audience, and besides, what can he tell them that they don’t already know? Previews, beta tests, interviews, other C&C games…Red Alert 3 is not an unknown commodity.

Then the writer starts going on about “dumbing down” of both reviews and RTS games, neither of which I’ve seen any evidence of. There are certainly bad reviews (and reviewers) out there. But a lot of good ones, too. The RTS genre is still very strong, but it is clearly dividing itself into a number of subtypes. I think that’s healthy; others don’t. AGMLauncher concludes with a list of review tips that Gillen at RPS terms “fascist” but I think are mostly too general to be useful. Point 1 makes a big assumption about readers and reviewers, 2 and 3 assume a single purpose and error free reviewing, 4, 6 and 7 are obvious, and 5 never defines “gameplay” (it’s not always obvious what is and what isn’t)

From where I sit, the debate boils down to a few very basic questions:

1) What is the purpose of a game review?
2) What range of experience or knowledge does a reviewer need to adequately assess a game?
3) In those inevitable circumstances where a reviewer cannot say everything, what is most important to convey?
4) If a game targets multiple audiences, how can a reviewer do justice to all of them?
5) What is the place of the hardcore audience in reviewing any media form? Where do you draw the lines between fan, fanatic and fanboy?