It’s all about the review.
Let us first accept that. That is the primary reason why people are reading games media. Sure there are also the news and the interviews and other stuff but these are merely the stones paving the path to the review. We’re out for the review here.
Naturally if something bad happens, it happens in the reviews. Reviews are the gauge of good and evil. If a certain website is good it’s because of the timely and well written reviews and vice versa.
Maybe because of the similarity between the two mediums, but more probably because video game reviewers are aspiring to become like their more respected counterparts, this whole thing is quite similar to movie reviews. Except that game reviews are a lot more confused than movie reviews.
A typical game review is a huge text that can be as long as 8 pages if the game in question had a lot of press coverage prior to release. In comparison a movie review occupies usually only one page. Why is that so? Are games really about eight times more complicated than movies for the purposes of a review?
I wish they were. I really do. But sadly that’s not the case.
The difference is in the method. Movie reviews had plenty of time to get refined. A professional movie critic like Roger Ebert usually writes a relatively short text about the movie. The text is short because he instantly gets to the point; the point being him liking or disliking the movie and his reasons for liking or disliking it. The point is this because this is essentially the information people want to obtain by reading a review. Not more, not less.
You won’t ever see Mr. Ebert writing about different devices used by the grip crew or what kind of things foley artists used to create the sound effects or what sort of lenses the DOP preferred when he shot the action scenes. That would be an in depth analysis of the movie, and it would only interest an academic or a student.
Regardless of its detail a game review is usually needlessly long. The writer gets lost in trivial and technical details giving frame rate or polygon counts. If that’s not the case you can find the reviewer writing a huge page detailing a personal memory or sharing with the reader an irrelevant anecdote meant as an introduction.
No one is interested in these things. Therefore most people don’t even read these things. They skip right to the end of the text where they can see a score, which gives them the exact information they were looking for: Is this game any good?
And apparently games are good. Unbelievably good in fact. David Jaffe is interested in this phenomenon as he could not hide his amazement at the review scores games are receiving. It appears that many games are in the top 25 percent on the ever popular percentage scale of awesomeness. In comparison only a few movies seem to have achieved the same feat so far. Naturally Jaffe asks himself if all games are really that good and if the industry really produces a few dozens of timeless classics every year…
The mystery lies in the difference between arithmetical interpretations of those scores. In short, the math is different. A game which scores over 90 is good, one that scores over 80 is average and a game over 70 is “meh”. Everything else is equal to pure garbage not worthy of anyone’s attention. As you can see, there are only 4 ratings: “Awesome”, “Average”, “Not Bad” and “Total Disaster”. However they still insist on using the percentage system. Apparently we need this kind of fine tuned scores to review games. Apparently there is someone out there who knows what exactly the difference between 90 and 91 is.
The situation is made even more complicated by several sub scores, each with their own criteria for success. Add to this fact that every single reviewer seems to have his own set of criteria for judging games — which, by the way, is the reason why Japanese Turn Based RPG games are often criticized for not having enough action — and you can easily understand why it is entirely impossible to draw a logical or at least a coherent conclusion from any game review.
“A real gamer doesn’t read reviews. Who cares about the review? Don’t read them. Just play the game and decide for yourself,” they started to say on the net.
They, whoever they are, may be right, especially considering the fact that the online revolution in gaming now allows many people to try out any game before buying it. But doesn’t that defeat the purpose of writing reviews, or for that matter, writing anything at all? If no one is supposed to read something, why are we writing it in the first place?
The solution as usual lies where the problem is. And while everyone is focused on “the how” as detailed above, I think the main problem is “the what”.
Games journalists are not really sure what it is they are writing about. This, of course, as previously mentioned, includes people who accuse turn based strategy games of not featuring enough action, which is pretty much like criticizing a horror movie for not being funny enough. But the problem is deeper than that.
People are not really sure about the definition of games.
The aforementioned Roger Ebert had to endure a lot of hate from gamers and game journalists because he said games are not art. Many people saw this as a belittlement of their favorite pastime. It is not necessarily that way. Ebert just makes a comment based on his, admittedly limited, observation of the medium. He says games are not art. Many things in life are not art. That doesn’t make them less valid or less valuable as a thing.
Ebert simply thinks games are products. The game developers’ focus is on making money, rather than producing a piece of art. He says that people who make games don’t intend to make art. Therefore games can never be pieces of art.
I disagree. But that is irrelevant. Whether he’s right or not is an entirely different issue.
The issue here is the reaction of the games media. For the first time the whole games media united against the Evil Ebert Overlord, claiming that he is a stupid old fart and reciting names of games they thought of as art. That was very sweet.
The same media however keeps on criticizing games for being expensive or short for instance. This can be. Perhaps the game is too short indeed. But have you ever seen a game being criticized for being too long?
That’s because while they are trying to review the games as art, somewhere in their minds games are still products. They see games as objects which give your x hours of entertainment for y amount of money. The higher x/y is the better the game is. Let’s face it, that’s a game reviewer’s chief concern. And precisely this is the definition of a product.
Last year 1UP said they would substract 1 whole point (10 points on the percentage scale) from Incognito’s “Warhawk”, if the game’s price was higher than $ 30. Back then the game was still unreleased. According to 1UP, a multiplayer only game which can be digitally delivered wasn’t worth anything more than $ 30. The main question here is this: Does the arguably high price make it an inferior game? When you answer “yes” to this question then you really have no right to be angry at Ebert for saying games are not art.
There is a reason why any self respecting academic work starts with a definition of its subject. That is the key to knowing what you’re doing.
I’m sure Mr. Ebert knows what he’s doing when he’s reviewing a movie. I just think it’s time for game reviewers to figure out what they want to do.