At his Cut Scene blog, Variety's Ben Fritz has responded to 'Coming Home,' my much-trafficked, post-Homecoming rant here at SVGL. You could say I wrote it because I was touchy about being the one of the only reviewers to like the game (that did make me feel weird)[*], but what I was touchy about is how highly arbitrary the strikes critics levied against it were. Some reviews complained there are too many health packs and the game was too easy; others said there weren't enough health packs and the game was too hard.For the record, I think there were just the right amount of health packs, and survival horror fans know how to pace themselves. Noobs soon learn, and people who prefer plentiful supplies probably should not play survival horror or any game in the Silent Hill franchise.
But that's neither here nor there! The health pack thing is just an example, albeit a slightly off-point one. Anyway, largely, I was expressing some exasperation at the tendency of reviewers (not excluding myself) to be arbitrarily nitpicky -- and what Ben seems to suggest in his response post is that reviewers are actually more inclined to be overly positive than overly negative:
I didn't see many critics deliberately searching for things to dislike in "Grand Theft Auto IV" or "Halo 3" or "Mass Effect" or "Super Mario Galaxy" or "Super Smash Bros. Brawl." On the contrary, these AAA, heavily marketed franchises (mostly sequels) with gameplay very similar to what the hardcore audience has seen and loved before got overwhelmingly positive reviews. Sure, many admitted, the story in "Halo 3" was inpenetrable and the the combat in "Mass Effect" was wonky and "Brawl" is barely an advance over the last installment and has major problems with online play, but those were largely brushed aside as minor considerations.
I felt the same way about Brawl, actually, and wrote an entire column about how we were sold on it before we even played it because of positive associations with the characters. I agree with Ben on the over-positivity thing in general, which is part of why I was frustrated when I felt many Homecoming reviews elected to miss the big picture and focus on the details, or fault it heavily for things that are a matter of taste without recognizing that there's an entire swath of the audience who doesn't have the same taste -- when they'd been so willing to wave other franchise titles through with 9's and without similar close scrutiny.
Ben wrote:
Basically, I think another way of saying what Leigh's getting at is that many game critics, particularly those who write for avid fans, can obsess over controls or menu design problems in titles that are doing something innovative in tone or theme, but downplay the same types of faults in games that are essentially improvements on the ones they already love.Thanks, Ben -- that's exactly what I was getting at, actually. I neglected to present the flip side of the coin with an example like Grand Theft Auto IV -- as Ben says, now that we're several months out from its release, we can raise a bit more of a skeptical brow at review quotes like "Oscar-caliber drama"(IGN) than we did when we were still in the afterglow of positive feelings around its release and the fact that our expectations -- and desires -- for it were so, so high.
And maybe this also helps explain the puzzling "four-month bell curve" that I've written about before, wherein titles are considered to be near-perfection at the time of their launch and then suffer a fall from grace -- sometimes an out-and-out backlash, as in BioShock's case -- about four months later.
Now, on one hand it makes sense that games with familiar formulas get better reviews than titles that really try to do something odd. There's a reason the formula's being repeated -- because we're familiar with it and it works well. To some extent, games have a laundry list of "things not to do in design," and often when design avoids those line items, the result is largely similar to other things that have been successful.
That's just logic; it's just smart evolution. When a title attempts to explore uncharted areas, it risks stumbling into areas that have been neglected for a good reason -- because they don't work as well. But when we fault them for trying, without recognizing that the game might have done a few new things well, or when we treat creativity or an attempt at inventiveness as a design flaw, we're sending the industry some problematic mixed messages. We demand innovation and invention, and then we crucify any attempts in that direction.
Ben also said something to the same effect:
The result is that we don't value innovation or attempts to do something big and new, like make a funny game that's thematically consistent with an all-time great TV show or create psychological impact through artful storytelling integrated with gameplay, because we obsess on the mechanical problems or the length of the cutscenes. Not that those things don't matter. But they don't matter that much, especially for an artistically immature medium in desperate need of innovation and freshness.
The nature of game design suggests that there probably won't be any overwhelming overnight overhauls. Iteration happens gradually over time, and it probably is a wise strategy -- both in terms of design logic and sales numbers -- to try and make subtle evolutions on the familiar rather than try something totally new. Very few games go way out to left field and do well unless they are both very skilled and very fortunate -- think Portal, Braid, Katamari Damacy.
But the funny thing was, Silent Hill: Homecoming was far from totally new. In fact, it was a subtle iteration on a formula -- a formula Double Helix aped quite admirably for not having originated it. It was about as different from prior Silent Hill games as any of them are from each other, and fans will probably disagree widely on whether or not it worked. Fans have always had subtle Silent Hill disagreements -- which one's "the best" and why, for example.
The fact that I read so many forums and comments and get so much email is actually probably a problem as well for me as a reviewer -- and for others. All of the reviews I've been citing thus far are online. I and my colleagues serve an internet audience. When our readers have expectations, preconceptions or hopes for a title's outcome, they're looking to our review to either affirm or deny. Often, our reviews end up being an extension of their feelings -- after all, we're responsible for addressing their concerns and fears as we've perceived them, or at least we feel like we are.
Moreover, we're part of the community, too, perhaps to an unusual extent. I wrote about groupthink and the hype cycle yesterday -- if there's a tidal wave of buzz, we're riding along on it, too. Interestingly, reviews tend to be the most inconsistent when "the internet" had no preconception or prevailing opinion ahead of the release. Do reviewers feel like they're "supposed to" like a title just because their readers or colleagues are excited about it, or "supposed to" be extra critical just because there are tons of early warnings? I wonder.
I'm always a little surprised at what the world is like when I shut the computer off -- no lie. Even when I go to GameStop, where you'd expect that most of the shoppers would be something "like us." I end up chatting with other customers and am always disoriented -- believe it or not, people shopping at GameStop usually haven't heard of Kotaku. They haven't heard that the game they're in line to buy was delayed twice or is made by the wrong studio.
Then, when those people start to talk to me about what they've been playing lately, I'm always surprised to learn that they enjoyed, say, Kane and Lynch. They didn't notice the problems reviewers did. They never heard of Gerstmann-Gate. They don't know who he is, and they certainly don't know who I am. They thought The Darkness was the best game they played last year. They like Geometry Wars but not Braid. They love Madden and don't even know that "we" snub it.
In other words, they're normal consumers, and their opinion is different than ours. They have a kind of distance on the industry that we just don't. I should try talking to these people more often.
I've digressed all over the place, but anyway, Ben's whole response to my post is very thought-provoking and worth reading.
[*]Oh, addendum: Aside from UGO, whom I noted, Destructoid also liked it.
29 comments:
Hey, The Darkness was one of the best games of last year!
But it's an excellent point that is always worth keeping in mind: Power users are usually not representative of the majority of users, no matter what you're talking about: tech, cars, video games, hell, even cookware. It's still surprising to me when I find out that someone owns only one game console. Even so, I think most people agree that consumers and critics of video games agree more often than do, say, moviegoers and film critics. This is something that's been changing more recently (Carnival Games ftw!).
On a broader point, I've been following this recent series of posts with sort of a raised eyebrow. I don't doubt that there can be currents of hype that are hard for even an experienced critic to swim against. But just as often, there are some games that are really good, and most people agree on them. That doesn't mean everyone has succumbed to mob rule.
Even so, I feel a small swell of pride when you mention games like Halo 3, Mass Effect, and Smash Bros. Brawl, all of which were universally lauded titles that I slammed -- I want to congratulate myself on being such an independent thinker! That can be a trap, though. When you have an unpopular opinion, it's tempting to assume that everyone else is in the throes of groupthink. But that's not always fair.
Despite what Gamespot might say, there's never an objective way to review a video game. If there were, no one would ever disagree! As it is, people disagree just enough that I think Occam's Razor applies here: certain games tend to get the most praise because a certain type of gamer tends to be writing the reviews.
Mitch --
Oh, totally. I never meant to imply that universally positive reviews mean that people are just groupthinking hype suckers -- Portal is one of the most mob-beloved favorites, after all, because it really is that good.
And I know it sounds like I'm pointing fingers at other reviewers just because I disagreed with them on Silent Hill, but I'm really not, honest -- the mixed opinion has just made me think about what factors might influence, or might not influence, not just a review but a weird "perception of sentiment" that sometimes seems to surround them.
And I also agree with you that there's no objectivity -- but like you say, there are plenty of people who still act as if there is, and a lot of readers buy into that, too, which isn't fair to a lot of games. I'm one of those in favor of embracing and contextualizing the subjective opinion in order to make it more useful to people by helping them understand where the reviewer's coming from.
A big problem is that people writing reviews tend also to cover the business side heavily. Everyone who is going to do a review of a Take 2 game knows they have been the subject of a a take over bid. That's going to influence how future games are received (did they spend too much fighting off EA? Maybe this game reflects that!).
Compare this to say books or plays where unless there is some ungodly large advance to an author no one knows what is going on on the business side. TV and movies tend to have separate reporters doing the business side and the review side insulating the reviewer from business news. Games really don't do that.
Now this isn't entirely a structural thing, a disgruntled TV worker can post on TV webboard and not make a sound, a game employee makes a message board comment and leads on Kotaku. And since unlike other reviewers, most game reviewers are web based its just harder to avoid the business news. A production studio lays off 30 people after a show run and who knows? Silicon Knights lays off 30 people after a game release and it leads for a few hours.
And hype matters of course, thats the only thing that can explain Little Big Planet. Sure it looks fine but I see no way that it becomes a PS3 killer app like many are saying.
Reviews in any medium are read by only a very small subset of the consumers of that medium. I think this is a universal truth. So reviewers are, as Leigh already pointed out, written for a select audience that is interested enough in the subject to want to investigate it beyond just browsing the shelves at Gamestop.
The problem with games is two-fold: first, as a new medium, game reviewers are still feeling around for a language of criticism. The second, and more profound problem is that games still exist as an enthusiast niche. For all Nintendo's in-roads, and all the vastly increased numbers (and varieties) of people playing, the people writing about games still write to the enthusiast audience. When you look at enthusiast reviews elsewhere, you see similar things. Look at car reviews in Motor Trend, or blu-ray reviews at thedigitalbits.com, or -- god forbid -- reviews for high-end audio equipment almost anywhere. The reviews are esoteric. Film grain? Tonal matching? The average consumer's eyes glaze over and he says, "Who the fuck cares? I just want to know if it's GOOD."
Imagine if a review for a new Britney Spears CD focused on the quality of the room tone in the studio she recorded in, or how much compression might be on her voice at the high end of her vocal range. A certain group of audiophiles might be fascinated by that, but it would be a smaller group than the number of people who might be interested in how many of the songs on the album the reviewer liked.
The best reviews (in my view) are written from the standpoint of a technically knowledgeable aficionado with broad tastes and a desire to discuss his or her chosen medium experiencially. How was it? What was enjoyable or not about it? What are some things that I, as a layperson, might want to look out for? It's not that such a review is less subjective, but rather that it is focused on being evocative and empathetic to a broader audience. Nothing is take for granted by the reviewer, other than the notion that the reader likes the medium in general and is interested in learning more about the particular piece being discussed, if for no other reason than he or she likes reading the work of the particular critic.
Interesting that Mass Effect is picked out there as a game that had it's flaws glossed over. From what I read it seemed much the opposite, it's flaws accentuated and reviewers quietly buried and forgot a truly spectacular game.
I've often talked myself about how with certain franchises (GTA, MGS, Final Fantasy, any big Nintendo franchise...) there's simply no point reading reviews, because many (but not all) will hand the new game ten out of ten regardless, and there's no way to know the quality of it until some time later, when the initial brainwashing wears off. I call this 'Titanic Syndrome'.
It's not limited to sequels though, nor does it happen with every big franchise or hyped game. Assassin's Creed and Spore had massive hype, but, rightly or wrongly, had every single failing raked over and hacked apart. While Gears of War, which had no lineage whatsoever, managed it's hype so well it was already guaranteed top notch score well before release, and it was not till sometime later that the homo-erotic jokes kicked in, resulting in mediocre reviews and sales when it finally hit PC.
I honestly don't know what governs it, where it comes from, what disease it is that infects people when these names come around again. I just wish it would stop, and we could, just for once, have all games treated equally.
There are some interesting points raised here. I think that nitpickiness you mention can come from a variety of sources. Preconceived notions which grow out of extreme hype are definitely one such source.
I also think that sometimes it's the result of a writer who can't contextualize the game's generic elements since s/he is not a fan of the genre. Lord knows I've been guilty of that; most game journos will eventually end up stuck with a review assignment they're not crazy about. While I do think that makes the review less useful for someone who is a fan, I also think that the additional perspective is still valid. After all, it's not like the reviewer is making up these impressions; they're just what s/he walks away with as a relative non-fan.
The enthusiast gaming press definitely services a specific niche community. What's amazing to me is that as the medium evolves, the community finds itself splintering as different types of games begin to fill increasingly specific niches. One person's shiny new Wii Sports Tennis is another's dated, waggle-happy Pong remake. "Innovation" is always touted as the route to the next great thing in gaming; as titles like Silent Hill: Homecoming illustrate, adhering to generic elements while evolving them in baby steps can be equally effective.
Before I end this ramble, I want to comment on something Mitch mentioned (quoted ahead): "I think most people agree that consumers and critics of video games agree more often than do, say, moviegoers and film critics."
Think about that for a minute. Film criticism is something that's evolved - hand-in-hand with the medium it is tied to - over more than 100 years. The VG medium is itself still working things out; the hardcore v. casual divide is a clear example of this. All of these synergistic genre-mashers, retro revivalx, enhanced remakes, straight genre works... basically, all of this combined experimentation going and derivation on is a sign that the medium is still working out its own semiotic language. To me at least.
And lastly... The Darkness was indeed the summer hotness for 2007. Starbreeze FTW.
Interesting (related) post I just saw on Kotaku:
http://kotaku.com/5060373/molyneux-begs-for-non+gamer-game-review
I very much enjoy talking with gamers who don't keep up on all the same news I do, because they encourage me to play games I may have seen slammed elsewhere. Because there is no objective view, it helps me balance my own views, tastes, and thoughts versus others' on both sides of the spectrum.
I've also gotten into the habit of reading reviews' key points and seeing how those reflect amongst themselves; this means I ignore the scores completely. Scores tell me nothing that I want to know about the game.
I really respect reviewers that refuse to give a score for this very reason. It's sufficient to cover what you did and didn't like about the game, and leave it up to the reader to weigh the relative importance of those features. It brings the subjectivity to the fore and invites more interesting discussion of merits and flaws. There are even some sites that will give a score, but make it a point to highlight the qualitative highlights and lowlights (the Onion's AV Club, for instance, with it's "worth plaing for" and "frustration sets in when" headers). I think this type of review format will lead us to more useful and honest reviews by guiding reviewers to address both positive and negative aspects of the game.
I did enjoy Kane and Lynch, even after reading the negative reviews. It was the only game I've played that captures the crime movie vibe well. Maybe the mechanics could have used some polish, but I felt like I was playing a Tarantino film and that's an impressive feat in itself. Seems to me that if those things were laid out in the reviews, people who would enjoy the game could be lead to it and people who wouldn't enjoy it could know to steer clear. Isn't that the whole point of reviews anyway?
I think a big problem with mainstream game reviews -- and I know this has been brought up here, and elsewhere, many times before -- is the scoring system. Specifically, I suspect that game critics often fall into one of two scoring related scenarios: in the first scenario, a critic dislikes a game, for whatever reason, gives it low score, then feels obligated to defend that score by pointing out, and at times exaggerating, every one of the game's flaws -- technical or otherwise; conversely, the second scenario finds the critic loving a game and giving it a high score, then glossing over or ignoring its flaws, lest the veracity of his or her score be called into question.
I'm sure I'm not presenting anything radical or revolutionary in my theory. In fact, many of you would probably file this in the "well, duh!" category of what's wrong with the current state of game reviews. But hey, I've already taken the time to type it out.
I definitely don't think the problem is that game critics are too critical. I mean, it says it right there in their job title: they're supposed to criticize games. If they don't, who will? Well, a bunch of 12-year-olds will, ad nauseum, with gratingly poor spelling and grammar, on every games forum on the internet. But we're rarely relying on those 12-year-olds to help inform us of where our hard earned gaming dollars should be spent.
But that doesn't mean I want game reviewers to be clinical or completely objective in their reviews. On the contrary, I agree with Leigh that there should be more subjectivity in game reviews. I want to be excited about games. Generally, I'm looking for an excuse to play more games, not an excuse to play less games. So I want the reviews I read to get me jazzed about playing a game, if it is a game that I already think I would like. I'm kind of a sucker for hyperbole in those cases. GTA IV was already a game that I was very much anticipating, so I ate up the reviews that lauded it as the greatest thing ever. To put it another way, I'm generally looking for a review to talk me into buying a game, not to talk me out of it.
But that doesn't mean I don't want to know what a game's perceived flaws are. The importance of those flaws will certainly vary for me (as I'm sure they do for everyone) from game to game. But nothing infuriates me more than buying a game after reading a bunch of overwhelmingly positive reviews, only to find that it contains a single, previously unmentioned gameplay issue or glitch, that -- for me, at least -- is a game killer. Whether it should affect the review scores is another matter for debate, but I think a reviewer does have a responsibility to inform readers of all of a game's rough edges, no matter how otherwise wonderful that game is.
Something I'm becoming less tolerant of lately, are the broad hyperbolic statements that reviewers tend to make about so-called "must own" games. You know the reviews I'm talking about: the ones that insist that if you own a working pair of opposable thumbs and are not a homeless person, you owe it to yourself and your country to immediately purchase this game -- "come on! It's only a $20 download, you cheap bastard!" Or the reviews with lead paragraphs that start off like this: "If you are reading this review and have not yet purchased [insert awesome game title here] get the fuck off your couch--or quit your job, go buy this game right now, lock yourself in a dark room until you've played through it at least twice, get a tattoo of the main character on your back, then come back and read this review for affirmation that you did not, in fact, just waste a week of your life."
Ugh! This is what happens when I decide to post comments here while I'm at work, and have to keep stopping to do, you know, actual work, and then picking up where I left off. Hope you enjoy the rambling, unfocused mess of my thoughts.
And yes, I realize that I completely contradicted myself on several points.
There are a few deep reasons why I think reviewing video game is a very difficult task:
1) Games don't offer common experiences. The reward a game offers is often a function of the effort the player puts into the game -- how deeply they play the game. So a reviewer has the difficult job of trying to guess how most people will play the game.
2) This is also one of the reasons why I think game reviews tend to change after 4 months. A lot of games are good for the first 10 hours of play... but it is a much rarer game that still feels successful at hour 30.
3) For historical reasons, we tend to think of the category of VIDEO GAME as being a manageable one. But if you really think about it, saying "video game" is like saying "playing" or "sport." The breadth of experiences offered by things in the category of video game make it kind of unreasonable to try and report on this category as a whole. Asking a reviewer to tell us whether GTA and Braid are a good game is like asking a sports columnist to report on a football game one week and a figure skating competition the next.
And yet, sports columnists are often tasked with such disparate assignments. There's no doubt that it's challenging, but such challenges are part of the job. I don't think the answers lie in using a broad standard against which to judge all games, so we're in agreement there. But I also don't think it is unreasonable to expect a journalist to be able to report on the merits of both GTA and Braid with equal clarity.
Groupthink definitely damages the critical community on the (obviously) group level. But on the personal scale, cognitive dissonance often seems to dictate the overwhelmingly warm responses to games preceded by months of hype and pre-emptive praise. Players condition themselves to believe one of those games is indeed good, lest they have to psychologically justify getting so excited for a crappy game. This would also explain the slow wearing of warm opinions toward a game; in that time, critics and players can assimilate their negative feelings more comfortably.
Just a theory though. Great blog.
well, i must confess that i don't read sports journalism so my example may have been suspect...
but perhaps I can make my point stronger by pushing the game example a little bit farther...
is it reasonable for our game journalists to provide clear reporting on GTA, Braid, Harvest Moon, Sim City, Blue Dragon and Grand Turismo?
Unlike movies, where the only thing that is different is the content, different video games have different paradigms of play.
Take, as an exmaple, the 200 some odd feature film releases in a year. Now pick the two films that were LEAST alike in that year. Do the same thing with video game releases.
My claim is that the two most dissimilar films are orders of magnitude more similar than the two most dissimilar games. Because in video games not only does story and style change, but the actual mechanics of play change.
When it comes to analysis, lumping "games people play with computers" together makes about as much sense as grouping "jobs people do with computers" together.
You can do it, and for historical, social and financial reasons we have, but it isn't clear (to me) that it is an informative and useful grouping for analysis and criticism.
Anyone hyped for Persona 4? ;)
I am definitely hyped for Persona 4, though I still need to finish Persona 3. I'm so close.
One of the issues I have with gamers, aside getting hung up on the nitty-gritty, is often the wish that the game they were playing was actually a different game altogether.
Quoting MSV: "My claim is that the two most dissimilar films are orders of magnitude more similar than the two most dissimilar games. Because in video games not only does story and style change, but the actual mechanics of play change."
I'm not sure I agree with this. You wouldn't send a film critic like AO Scott or Roger Ebert to review the latest works of avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow. Film critics have their specialties just like anyone else. Similarly, although there are no changing interactive mechanics to worry about in film, groups of films stand apart from one another in the ways they're meant to be absorbed. Action blockbusters like Iron Man or The Dark Knight are designed to hit audiences in specific pleasure centers, entirely different from what you'd see for, say, Rob Zombie's Halloween remake, the latest Apatow comedy, an indie darling from Sundance or a lovey-dovey "chick flick."
Foreign output is also far more distinct in the film world than it is in gaming. Japanese games may contain their own unique signifiers, but on the whole film offers a more accurate reflection of the culture from which it comes than games do. By way of example: playing Rainbow Six Vegas, can anyone tell the game comes from a French studio? Guys like Michel Ancel may stand out, but I ascribe that more to auteuristic tendencies than I do to any national culture.
Ultimately, I think that criticism of any sort is difficult work and that writers should always try to play to both their strengths and their interests. Unpleasant assignments invariably come along, but a hardcore FPS player should not be handed a 30-hour JRPG epic (unless they're into that sort of thing as well) in the same way that AO Scott won't soon be covering the next Wiseman documentary. The fact that these boundaries are still so loose is (to me) yet another sign of the gaming medium's still-ongoing maturation.
Real people outside?
Those people are people I've been thinking about a lot too; did I tell you about the time I almost became a game store manager? I'm going to write about it.
Robert -- I wonder if business-side issues should be factored into a review, or at least noted. I'm sure it depends on the publication and who the audience is, what the format of a review is, and so forth. I certainly don't think it should be factored into a score, but the environment in which a game's being made is part of its overall "place" in the industry, I think. So not a factor in a final judgment on the game itself and not to be used as a predisposition, but a method of providing context, a way to go beyond "buy or don't buy," for a game as part of an industry?
Matt -- well, I think there is a place for a review that addresses the finer points that the hardcore audience is interested in, but there is also a need to have reviews for a broader audience, too.
Stephan -- I'd say I'm "looking forward." I'm not hyped per se, because I expect, and even rely on P4 to continue a tradition rather than forging a new one. We'll see!
Daniel -- Totally.
Etelmik -- The world of game store managers is a bizarre one. It'd make a great sitcom! Please do write about it.
There absolutely IS a place for enthusiast reviews for the hardcore. My complaint is mainly that, up to this point, that type of review has largely been the only kind you can find. Unfortunately, the reviews that have appeared in mainstream media outlets up until fairly recently have been perfunctory, and largely (it seems) aimed at parents trying to make more informed buying decisions for games for their kids.
I think it's great that the New York Times and Variety want to run game reviews. I hope that those types of media outlets (and the people who write for them) will continue to explore a broader type of criticism, though. Criticism is actually a great way to entice the uninitiated to explore something by which they might otherwise have been intimidated, but only if the subject matter is covered in an approachable, entertaining way. We're moving closer, but I don't think we're there yet.
@Matt:
well, actually, a.o. scott DOES review wiseman. :) (and likes him)
http://www.metacritic.com/video/titles/lastletter
and while that isn't the end-all-be-all of your point, i think it's illustrative...
i think the truth is that most film aficionados are much more indiscriminate against genre than video game aficionados... i speak as a film buff and professional film writer.
and i think the reason for this is that there is something more "common" between films than games... related (i think) to the mechanics of interface.
and, yes, there are exceptions. a film like Jarman's Blue is almost not a film at all but rather a group experience (because of the way in which it moves your attention away from the screen and onto your surroundings)
But just take *major* releases... say, films in more than 1000 theaters... and compare that to video game *major* releases.
two different games in this category are "different" along so many more vectors than two different films... every vector appropriate for a movie is there (style, tone, genre, camera, sound, etc...) but then there are other vectors that only games differ on... length of play... difficulty of play... style of interaction... interface tool...
so not to belabor the point, and maybe this is just me repeating myself, but i do think scott and ebert are more qualified and more inclined to review the breadth of films released in a year than their equivalents would be for the breadth of video games.
I think the biggest issue online with games and other nerdy things is the whole "Groupthink" syndrome.
While you see it in many things in real life (look at politics right now in the US. I don't want to go all political but there is serious group think going on there...), its really bad online, especially with forums.
Look at Fallout 3. Most game sites and forums are generally enthusiastic about it.
Now go to a Fallout fansite or hard core RPG fansite with forums.
Its apparently the devil, anyone who worked on it or any other project for that company in the last 10 years is NES LJN levels of horrible game maker, and anyone even slightly interested in the game and any journalist saying anything positive is an ignorant moronic plebian.
Forum groupthink is insanely established to the point you generally go to forums that agree with you, or you learn to fit in fast or shut up about anything that the regulars have deemed to be wrong.
Ill give a recent non videogame example.
In Japan they made a tabletop RPG based on that whole creepy maid fetish thing. Its been translated into English for commercial release.
On RPGnet, the largest tabletop RPG forums on the net as far as I can tell has had a long discussion debating the pros and cons of this, given Japan's proclivities towards "moe" and other Chris Hansen alerting things. Some think its nothing to worry about, others think its really creepy, others are somewhere in between.
RPGnet tends to be incredibly left leaning politically and generally full of more open minded people. (It has a rather huge GLBT community that is probably the reason for this.)
Now the same game on a rather large general interest forum?
Everyone who plays the game is clearly a creepy loli loving pedo scumbag like all anime fans are. (And they do the Net Detectiving to prove it. And sadly, they tend to be RIGHT MOST OF THE TIME. Is it any wonder I am no longer interested in most anime and manga?)
Because at that forum bashing anime is acceptable, and few people even attempt to argue it.
Its groupthink in action.
Try being a fan of Fallout 1 & 2 and its style of gameplay on a console RPG forum?
I have. It aint pretty. I am clearly an ignorant fool who just doesn't understand the beauty of Squall's brooding douchebaggery and his game's god awful game system. Don't I understand my own choices mean NOTHING in the face of FF6's Opera Scene?
Now go to RPG Codex as a Console RPG fan?
That fan would be a brainless weeaboo teenaged moron who can't handle actual roleplaying.
Now put all these groupthink people in easy contact or commenting to online games reviewers?
Yeah. The results are not pretty.
Even the rational folks online get Stockholme Syndrome-d if they spend enough hours wasting their time on blogs and forums and whatnot.
@ m. scott veach:
Well whaddya know. I stand corrected. Go AO! On a totally unrelated note, Wiseman's films are now available on DVD at consumer prices (used to be institutional only) via the Zipporah website.
You make excellent points, all of them. I still tend to think that gaming's inherent difference, those rooted in the medium's interactivity, will become less of a divisive factor among critics as gaming continues to mature. That said, we live in the here and now and you're absolutely right in saying that film critics are better equipped to handle the entire medium than game critics are.
Hope you folks don't mind my posting here. I just kinda wandered over via an excellent article written about the evolution of survival horror on Kotaku(it was very good, I really enjoyed it). I do amateur game journalism over at Racketboy.com, meaning yes, I'm probably labeled as the accursed "Retro Gamer." I really stopped keeping up with mainstream reviews about five years ago, when I noticed that I wasn't playing any games with a score of 8.0 or less on IGN. Since then I've gone back to older consoles(mostly), and word of mouth is usually the only method I have of finding new games.
On Racket's website, he has a personal rule about reviews. As we cater towards the retro/collector crowd, we don't use scores. Our articles are generally short when it comes to reviews, usually coming in at just a couple paragraphs so people can read them really quick in their free time. Because of our focus on collecting, we do go into the history of the business at the time, often factoring it into our discussion because it might affect how difficult a game will be to find. I also tend to watch comments on my articles like a hawk so I can interact with readers.
Effectively, it's a different market we're catering to. Flashy graphics and sound take a backseat to substance, or so we like to think. Nostalgia factors in highly, and generally a lot of folks on the forums make claims like the latest game generation is terrible. Because we have such a niche audience, it's easy to cater to them.
But then there are the times when one of our articles goes mainstream, such as an article written by a friend where he discussed why he preferred the 2D Final Fantasies to the 3D. His article was panned pretty hard on Digg, he got lots of hatemail and a few character attacks, and he generally decided to take a break from amateur journalism for a while.
Game reviews are tied heavily to the Internet, where anonymity and groupthink can turn a community into a largely volatile mob at times. I think some reviewers are just trying to appease that mob, by giving specific series or games with lots of hype higher scores so they aren't burned at the stake. Sometimes a game has too many glaring issues to gloss over, and people will then dissect it, ripping it apart one piece at a times. Sometimes reviewers have an axe to grind with particular games(not implying anything about you guys as I know many of you are journalists, just saying it happens). Sometimes reviewers also get caught up in the hype themselves, hence the 4-month bell curve.
As for Silent Hill, I haven't played it yet. I have seen it in action and was greatly impressed with the combat system and creature designs. There are a few points I'm hesitant about, such as the overabundance of effects and things related to the film. Pyramidhead's inclusion also bothers me. But many of the changes make sense for the backstory given for the character. I will probably have a lot of fun with the game, regardless of what reviewers say. I had a lot of fun with SH: Origins' port to the PS2. I worry that the community reaction is going to lead to the effective demise of the franchise now, though. Konami has its least successful chapter and then hands the game off to American companies...as a business move, that makes me worry. I don't know how involved Konami really was in this venture, and so I can't say if this is really an East meets West brand or a company being handed a big project and little support beyond Yamaoka and a movie and being asked to make a game. So in this case, I'd say putting some history into the review would be a good thing.
Well...sorry for the book. I realize I probably ramble a good bit in there. Just trying to give a perspective from one of the crowd you guys are trying to write for. In the meantime, keep up the good work!
Oh, and Virtua Fighter 5 was the greatest game of 2007. Heheh
Silent Hill presents an even greater challenge to review: it is product which largely derives its power from "mood."
What that mood is and how it is best presented is entirely subjective. Be it graphical presentation, control design, health pack placement, GUI, or narrative pacing, EVERYONE will take away something different.
I find that I generally approach a product based on expectations. (not at all an objective method)
For example, the PSOne era was full of games with cumbersome controls. So I expected nothing more from Silent Hill, which allowed its other elements to shine.
By Silent Hill 4, long past the time where average studios were capable of mapping silky smooth control, I was expecting more. Because my expectations were not being met on one front, I was distracted from other aspects that I may have actually appreciated.
Come Silent Hill 5, my expectations have been replaced by outright frustrations, and anything less than a perfect leap forward will not lift my opinion of it.
Fair to double helix? Objective criticism grounded in the vacuum of a single product? Not at all.
*sigh*
Is it the time of year where we all bitch about game writers again? I'm not singling anyone out here, the problem is as large as ever but...there is only one solution and that's to rise above it all. Stop talking about the little stuff and talk about the overall experience. Stop worrying about graphics or the fact that you aren't having fun and focus on what the game is trying to deliver and why it isn't. Avoid the first person when talking about a game and talk about it in the second person.
I read posts like this and every time I wish they'd post links to reviews they did enjoy. I wish they'd cite examples of what they are looking for instead of what they are not.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
The problem is that by and large, game reviewers are not as intelligent or well-read as critics of other media, and their level of expertise compared to reviewers of other types of products is seriously lacking.
The general trend in game writing is to try and write both a consumer product review and an Art critique in the same article. This is impossible, because the goals of Art and mass media are not just different but mutually exclusive.
Game review writers, as Art critics, are failures because they are not well read in Art. They do not understand Art, its genre conventions, movements and trends, or even significant contemporary artists. Their associations with the word "Art" are superficial - games as Art, pop music as Art, movies as Art. Most of them haven't seriously thought about Art or the Art world beyond the occasional angry comment posts on Roger Ebert's website, or a hastily constructed argument about censorship. Game writers have nothing to say about Art as a whole, so there's no reason to believe they could have anything of value to say about games as Art.
As consumer product reviewers, game writers are failures as well. This is because most game reviewers are not experts in any area of videogames. They are super-generalists, super-consumers; they have taken cursory, rushed playthroughs of many, many, different kinds of games in many different genres, but they have no deep knowledge of specific games or specific genres.
An expert is someone with deep, nuanced knowledge in a particular area. An expert is someone who can differentiate between extremely similar things, develop a preference for one thing among many similar things, and then has the depth of experience to be able to actually explain why he or she prefers one thing over another.
Videogames offer an extremely broad range of experiences, and the potential to fulfill an extremely broad range of desires. Any videogame in particular, though, will only fulfill a handful of these desires; many desires being mutually exclusive to others. Game reviewers do not understand this, and so they review games according to an ever-shifting and arbitrary criteria. They do not keep track of what the criteria is, or what the goal of a given game should be; it is all in their heads. Consequently, the most important determining factor for a metacritic score is marketing push, brand familiarity, and hype/buzz. These are the forces that cement in a reviewer's brain what it is that a given game "should" be, and they review the games accordingly. By the time a "AAA" title is released, PR forces have already done their work to calibrate the minds of the gaming community to believe in a certain set of values, and they review the title accordingly. Halo 3 is a near-perfect game if you evaluate it according to its ability to fulfill one specific set of desires. Halo 3 is a perfect game if you value the things that Halo3 values. It is however a deeply flawed game if you value the things that Dragon Quest values.
There are many sets of criteria by which a game can legitimately be deemed a "failure" or a "success" - the four month praise-reflection-backlash cycle is a byproduct of this. When a "AAA" game is first released, everyone has been essentially brainwashed into only valuing the things that said game excels at, and taking little interest in the things it does not. As time goes on, however, the gaming public begins to adopt a new set of values in game design priorities, usually because the marketing forces are no longer in play, or are pushing the values of the next AAA title that will be coming down the line. The prior "AAA" title is looked upon according to a new set of criteria. Under this new set of criteria, the game may not be so "perfect" anymore.
A true game expert would have their own set of priorities in game design which they value above all else, and would be less susceptible to these marketing forces. In other words, the reviewer would have to be "biased". The only way to have values like these is to actually think about them and state them for the world to see. If they are not externalized, they can be shifted around by marketing methods.
Halo3 is both gaming trash and gaming treasure. It is legitimate to call it the "best game ever made", but only if that statement is contextualized. The statement must be made within the context of a *known* set of criteria, which must be explicitly stated *somewhere*. The problem is that game writers do not understand their own criteria, and so they can never state it. When pressed, they fall back on meaningless terms like "gameplay", "story", "graphics", etc.
Reviewers do not make a case for or against. They do not make a case at all. What they do, essentially, is run down the hypothetical list of bullet points on the back of the game box and discuss whether those bullet points are true or false. They evaluate games in terms set up by marketing. On the rare occasion that a AAA title is panned, it is always because the publisher has misrepresented the game in their marketing. The backlash against Assassin's Creed, for example, has much to do with the way it had been presented to the public in the year leading up to its release. If the social blending and stealth elements had not been so emphasized, their weakness in execution would not have been emphasized by critics. Assassin's Creed was a failure because it did not excel even according to its own criteria. It is a failure even according to the hypothetical bullet points on the back of the box. However, the game has many strengths which were overshadowed by this. It is not hard to imagine that had AC been marketed differently, hyped differently, it could have received 9s and 10s.
In well-established genres and sequels, this dynamic is even stronger, and the title carries with it a whole slew of implied "back of box bullet points" leftover from previous games. If publishers don't actively address these points in their marketing campaigns, game writers will fixate on them. Bioshock is an example of doing it right - it is an FPS that has no multiplayer, which is normally inexcusable. However, in the year of hype leading up to the game's release, 2K fed us a series of excuses and justifications for the omission of multiplayer, and even tried to portray the omission as a strength, because it implied a greater focus on the single-player game. We bought into their excuses and when Bioshock was finally released, reviews did not fixate on this omission. The publishers of SIlent Hill: Homecoming did not work hard enough to sell us on the departures and omissions from previous Silent Hill games, and when the game was released, it did not receive favorable scores. Of course it didn't - anyone who likes the other Silent Hill games would automatically fixate on all the changes that were made. Someone who has never played a Silent Hill game might like this new one very much, but such a person is unlikely to write a review of the sixth game in the series.
If game writing is to be of any use at all, it will eventually become necessary to distinguish between the game critic and game reviewer. They serve different purposes and address a different set of concerns. One is academic-artistic, the other is practical-commercial. Both approaches are valuable and necessary, but if you try to do them both at the same time and put a number on the end, the result is a murky confusion that can be nothing but an extension of advertising.
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