This year has seen a lot of chest baring and sackcloth wearing about the differences between reviews and criticism in game journalism. I’m from the school that says not all reviews are criticism and not all criticism is a review, but that the best of both have elements have each. In other words, a great review moves well beyond the pedestrian question of whether or not you will enjoy a particular game and a great critique leaves you in no doubt as to how you would likely feel about a specific title. Reviewing and criticism are different, but related.<\/p>\n
Given all that has been written this year, driven by N’gai Croal’s inescapably essential meditations<\/a>, it’s worth pointing to Shawn Elliott’s new blog<\/a> where the first post is sort of a “what might have been” thinkposium about the nature of game reviews.<\/p>\n In the continual flight from Ziff Davis, it would be understandable if people lost sight of who has gone. Recently, Jenn Tsao and Damien Linn have left. I’ve already paid homage to the departure of Jeff Green, the grand old man of games journalism. Toss in Gamespot’s losses and games journalism has offered a huge body of talent to the development world.<\/p>\n In many ways, Shawn Elliott, now at 2k Games, was a peculiar talent, a man who earned the adulation of one audience from his stories of griefing and general jackassery on the Games for Windows podcast, but who would also offer some of the strongest critiques of cliche and boredom in games journalism. His preview of Postal 3<\/a> stands out as an example of his ideal, a portrait not just of a game, but of a developer’s mindset. I know from our email conversations that, within the brotherhood of journalists, he wore his “can’t we do better?” heart on his sleeve. And still made jokes about how nerdy gamers were, a cliche of its own.<\/p>\n His blog post is the beginning of a conversation all reviewers have with themselves and with their editors. His questions over-emphasize scores, which seems to me to be the wrong end. I’ve never really debated with myself over any more than a half star here or there. And, though I started my career worried that 2\/5 would mean a blacklist of some sort, it never happened.<\/p>\n But he has some good questions in there. I’ll answer a few of them.<\/p>\n Do scores determine our tone? Can a \u00e2\u20ac\u01533\u00e2\u20ac\u009d encourage us to explain an aspect of a game in clearly negative terms where our attitude is actually less decided?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This really depends. I think that a higher profile title will have a more negative reading 3\/5 than an indie game will. It’s a matter of reader expectations. Why isn’t EA’s latest multi-million dollar game brilliant? Why should people give Garage Games’ latest a chance?<\/p>\n Often times we will have repeatedly played and\/or previewed games in development prior to reviewing them. Does this familiarity with a particular game’s developmental process influence the scores that we assign to the final product in the way that a professor will take into consideration her students’ limitations and proven potential when she evaluates papers at the end of the semester?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Good editors will try to keep their writers from previewing and reviewing the same game.<\/p>\n This does not work so well where freelancers are concerned, of course. I can write a preview for one place and a review for another. A man has to eat.<\/p>\n But I think the biggest problem is not grading based on improvement or potential, but instead grading based on early enthusiasm. It’s easy to love something you see early on. You have access when few others do, are often treated very well by PR and developers and their general excitement about what they are working on will be contagious.This is why editors like to keep previews and reviews in different hands.<\/p>\n Given how many pieces of information and purchase points are available to consumers before a review is available, Elliott asks:<\/p>\n Do these circumstances suggest that our self-perception is, well, delusional \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a throwback to a time when magazines and websites were gaming’s gatekeepers? If our audiences believe this, even if we do not, what are they really reading for?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What they always read for – self congratulation that they feel the right way about a game. Magazines and websites were probably never gatekeepers in any meaningful way given any single source’s relative distribution compared to the gaming population. I have a friend who is confident that he can trust Metacritic or a handful of sites even though those sites have had a lot of turnover in the last few years. Corporate consensus is often a bludgeon to wield in forum warfare, but it has always been thus. Or at least for the last decade and a half.<\/p>\n This is where criticism triumphs over reviews, where an attempt to contextualize a game could help move the pastime further than a “Buy It” ever can. I was chatting with a colleague a couple of weeks ago and he commented that he loves it when people start talking about a game’s strategies and options months after its release. What is the relative importance of naval power? What strategies work best in the early game? This is the sort of stuff you can never find in a review and will only find on game forums, and even then usually on forums devoted to the game in question.<\/p>\n Reviews and criticism that prioritize timeliness and immediate hits over insight will never be able to do that. Ever. As I’ve written before, there is a presentist and futurist bias in games coverage<\/a> that assumes that all readers are interested in and in tune with the release calendar. Unless a new game comes around that explores similar issues to older titles, forget any effort at categorization or media critique beyond “the original was better”.<\/p>\n But this is a business. Though FoS gets a lot of hits for marginal games that I have mentioned in passing (Punic Wars, Pox Nora, Crown of Glory), I’m not sure how many sites with a larger overhead would want to waste time writing about them. So, the ephemeral gets the spaces, and the niche hit or eternal truths about a particular game get buried because it is yesterday’s news.<\/p>\n Spoiler-phobia leads to a lack of substantiation. Because we won’t cite specifics, we’re all fluff. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’m not a huge spoiler guy. If I am reviewing a game, I try to avoid other people’s opinions. But plot twists don’t bug me all that much most of the time. As an old friend once told me, I know when and how Hamlet dies, but I keep watching.<\/p>\n But Elliott is right that criticism of how a plot develops is often highly dependent on so-called spoilers. If you haven’t seen the entire Star Wars<\/em> opus, my comments on the nature of Fatherhood in Lucas’s magnum opus would be meaningless unless I could refer to particular moments. (Luke’s feelings for Obi Wan, Vader telling Luke who he was, the denouement of the third movie, the fatherless child in Phantom Menace, the paternal nature of Palpatine, etc.) Then there’s the whole question of a statute of limitation on spoilers. Personally, I think that after a couple of months, if I run into a spoiler that’s my own damn fault.<\/p>\n One of the great benefits of reviewing strategy and wargames is that I have no need of fancy footwork dealing with archetypes and general plot points. But, being of a literary bent, I can’t help but notice these sorts of things in RPGs, shooters and adventure games. So am I obligated to stick a SPOILER tag on everything I write?<\/p>\n Are we interested in talking about craft at all? I’m disturbed by the fact that the enthusiast press hires gamers first and writers\/thinkers second. Not once in my career have I sat in on a serious discussion about how we do what we do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I love this sort of thing and have had these conversations on and off with editors and colleagues for years, if not in a single co-ordinated session. But, for the most part, people are more interested in the scandalous stuff – how publishers “buy” good reviews, whether or not people are “teh bias”. There is no single way to write a review or a critique and some sites may prefer one over the other. And, even as readers pretend to care about “the craft”, it’s always the score and who is in whose pocket that generates forum and feedback noise.<\/p>\n It’s still a discussion worth having, though at this point even I am exhausted by the never-ending breast-beating about whether or not games writers are doing their job properly or intelligently or effectively. At some point, the circle never ends and it sometimes seems like we’ve been having this debate for years without any real progress, either in writing quality<\/a> or in insight<\/a>. The best games writing is usually not found in the review\/preview morass and it’s pointless to look for it there at the expense of all the good feature, interview and analysis work being done elsewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This year has seen a lot of chest baring and sackcloth wearing about the differences between reviews and criticism in game journalism. I’m from the school that says not all reviews are criticism and not all criticism is a review, but that the best of both have elements have each. In other words, a great […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,11],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-hW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}