Game Reviews - How Can We Improve Game Journalism? - Extra Credits

Now here's another subject we've had a loads of people emailing us about, game reviewing. Before we get into it though, I feel like I should throw in a disclaimer because none of us have ever been game reviewers. We know quite a few game reviewers and we spent some time talking with them about the subject before we sat down to write this, but it's just not something we've ever done ourselves. Just putting that out there. All right, now that's out of the way. Most of the emails we get about this topic generally contain one of two questions. How do I get into game reviewing? And what are your thoughts on the state of game reviewing today? Let's get the easy one out of the way first. How do you become a game reviewer? The answer is actually pretty straightforward. Review games. Build yourself a blog or a website and see how much traffic you can get for your reviews. Try to find some angle or style that makes you stand out from the 10,000 other reviewers out there and start getting yourself a loyal following of readers. Once your site has a respectable amount of traffic, then you can contact one of the major websites and see if they're looking for another reviewer. Often they'll put out job postings, so always be on the lookout for those. When you're trying to get in

touch with the larger sites, one of your best options is to go to conventions and get to know the other people covering the scene. It's a great way to distinguish yourself. Believe me, a little face time goes a long way. Also, your college may be able to help you land an internship at one of these companies before you graduate, which is another great way to start. Just be warned, being a reviewer is not as much fun as it sounds. Being topical is of the utmost importance in this profession, so often reviewers will get three or four days to get through a 40-hour game. Every single reviewer told us the same thing. Most of the time when they're playing to get a review out, it's nothing like when they're playing for fun. Mostly in that it's not fun. Several of the people I know even told me of experiencing game burnout. They stopped playing games at home because they just had too much of it during the work day. Also, game reviewers aren't paid very well. There's just too many people out there who want to be game reviewers. If you think you're going to be living the high life reviewing games, you might want to think again. But if that stuff doesn't scare you off, go grab a domain, start up a WordPress account, and make with the reviews. Good luck to you. Which of course leads us to the slightly trickier of the two questions. What are our thoughts on the state of game reviewing today? Well, first off, there's the omnipresent complaint that game reviewers are paid by the same people they're reviewing.

It's true and it's a valid complaint, but luckily it's starting to become a little less true. Slowly game sites are getting advertisement from outside the game industry. And really, I'm not sure how much of an effect it has in the end. Clearly there's some effect. I mean, we all know that major game companies with big marketing pushes rarely metacritic as low as similar titles from unknown companies. But then we've also seen lots of large games getting panned this year. It even looks like there's been a concerted effort to drop score inflation of late. Speaking of which, let's talk about that 7 to 10 rating scale. Most of us would never buy a game that got a five or a six out of 10 score. And yet, many of us do go to two-star movies. Why is that? Frankly, it's because in our whacked-out little grading system, an eight is the equivalent of two stars, and that's pretty silly. It often confuses people who are new to gaming and it doesn't leave us a lot of room to differentiate an all-time classic from something that's simply very competently executed. Equally important, it gives the industry a little to strive for. If you're going to get a perfect Famitsu score for something that would have gotten you a 32 a decade ago, why aim higher? Hopefully, this is something that will self-correct as readers stop believing that every game deserves a 9.5. But I think a more important critique with regard to game reviews is

that not many of them say, "If you like such and such game, you'll like this game." A raw numerical value representing quality does have some use, definitely, but it's much more useful to have a handful of other titles to look at for comparison. And over time it gives us a much better perspective on the interrelation of titles and the evolution of the medium as a whole. I don't know, maybe that's just me. Unfortunately, I think the most important critique of modern reviews is that there's no critique, only review. If you think about most of what you read in modern game reviews, it's often merely a report on what's in the game. On the one hand, that is useful information and it's an absolutely vital service. Mainstream games require a large upfront investment, 60 closing in on $70 with tax in the United States, way more in some countries. That's a far bigger investment than most other forms of media, film, music, TV, books. You don't want to throw down that kind of money without some idea of what you're actually going to be getting. But having that as the only mainstream discussion of the works in our medium is not enough. Let's take a quick look at the metacritic blurbs from two pieces with roughly equal score. One movie, one game, chosen more or less at random. Here's one. It appears that turning the John Ford John Wayne classic The Searchers into

the church versus vampire adventure Priest was not an altogether god-awful idea. As long as we don't get The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as an elegiac zombie drama, this adaptation of a graphic novel has some bite. And here's the other. Playing this game is an exercise in patience. The graphics are mediocre at best, and even then the game struggles to maintain a consistent presentation of the world around you. Control is completely spotty. More often than not I pressed a button and hoped it would do what I wanted when I wanted. Apparently, the god of thunder didn't feel like flying in this adventure, except during carefully planned sequences marked by a shiny thing floating somewhere on the horizon. The film review expects the reader to have a certain level of literacy within the medium, but rather than using that to be exclusionary, it's being used to deliver a very concise exploration of the film. It's a commentary on the film. The game review, on the other hand, reads, "This is what happened when I played." It's a description of the game. We need to begin developing a critical language that lets us have a conversation about games, rather than simply describing them. That kind of conversation's important, not just for the purpose of improving games through critique, but also for giving your audience a truly unique perspective on a game. Without it, every game review just reads like copy-paste versions of each

other. There have been times where a strong discussion has emerged over a newly released game, and I think we've all been the richer for it. And one final thing, we have to start considering the value of what we write. Good, bad, awesome, lame. Terms like these don't really convey anything to the reader. They only contain the loosest qualitative description, and they don't get at the heart of why something might be terrible or fantastic, and thus they don't really give the reader any information to work off of, be they consumer or developer. Let's go back to that Thor review for a second. Here's a line from it. A couple of the bosses are pretty cool, though they still lack some polish. This sentence has no context. It's considered a finished statement, but it means nothing. Our reviews need more rigor. It takes no more words to say, "The bosses are visually impressive, but are plagued with animation bugs," than it does to give the vague personal opinion I quoted before. If we practice drilling down into why we hold the opinions we hold, and finding ways to express that rather than just delivering a review full of opaque personal feelings, will create more useful reviews for the consumer and help build a culture more prepared to think about games. So, are today's reviews useful? Well, yeah, of course, but there's a whole field of analysis and critique

waiting to be explored that our industry badly needs. I'm hoping some of you possible future reviewers watching this will be the ones to help deliver that. Thanks for watching. See you next week.