The fundamental problem with game reviews is that they’re analyzing products, not pieces of art. Or more clearly stated, art reviews decide if something is worth your time; game reviews decide is something is worth your money.

Mark Wilson on Kotaku

That’s just hypothetically speaking, though, because I can’t remember having seen a game that would fit in the latter category. In the end, of course, mechanics and content should go hand in hand. And that is still very rare.

Anyway, this doesn’t excuse the right-or-wrong attitude of gamers. People should realize that there are different ways to play games. And different things that people care about. I know many people who will gladly deal with an “inferior” game mechanic if the story moves them or the images are pretty. Those people are not wrong.

As for the good/bad game argument, I’m sure that most reviewers recognise that their review is simply their opinon. I’ve rated games generally considered average higher because they struck a chord with me. I think the reason that games are considered more binary good/bad, and the reason the metacritic scores for a game are generally more compressed than a film, is that games have a mechanical element as well as an artistic one. So you have some level of objectivity pulling against the subjectivity of the artistic elements.

It’s far easier for a game to become frustrating, dull or repetitive owing to its mechanics than its artistic intentions. And you’ll find a broader range of people agreeing that a game is bad or good based on these elements. After all, you may have a real passion for Wild West zombie settings, for example, but if the game is deeply mechanically flawed, you may not be able to muster the urge to continue, even though you feel artistically it has merit. Chances are, those journalists will agree, maybe to the point of saying ‘Wow, I really wish someone would make a better game with this setting.’

Also, when was the last time you saw a film that was fundamentally broken? So, the camera was pointing in the wrong direction during a crucial scene, cutting off half the character’s face, or a similar fundamental collapse in the film making process. It doesn’t happen often, but in games that mechanical element, necessary for interactivity, often gets in the way, making it a ‘bad’ game.

Every so often there’ll be a game that polarises opinion, where the mechanics are consciously different from the majority of games and the artistic style is an attempt at something interesting. At that point, reviewers will disagree more, as with Space Giraffe, and you’ll just have to read those opinions and decide for yourself based on their arguments. Which, I feel, is sort of why we have critics in the first place…

Apologies for length, and as an aside, if you want snobby (sorry, thoughtful) analysis of gaming, my friends at http://www.rockpapershotgun.com have the PC gaming side of things down. :)

“How would you compare working in the fashion industry to working in something completely different like the videogames industry?

It’s totally different. It’s completely the opposite. If you think that the fashion industry is filled with divas, no, the worst divas are the guys who got wedgies in high school. Game divas are the worst divas than a guy reviewer in a Helmut Lang suit standing in the second row of a show. Those guys are easy compared to the pissy gamers.”
– http://tinyurl.com/ml38d

The man did have a point, regardless of what you may think of him or his game. Naturally, depressingly, he and his game got absolutely hammered, even before the game was launched. It wasn’t a great game - frustratingly buggy - but not deserving of the reaction it got.

I agree. These days I’m only interested in games that have a score of 7 or less. I know that I’m not going to like anything that gets a higher score in the games press. The most important keyword I look for is “boring”. When game reviewers call a game boring, I know that there’s a chance that I might like it.

I wish I didn’t need to use such upside-down logic though. I guess what I would like is a little more variety: different kinds of people reviewing games in different ways.

Anyway. My gripe is not with journalism. I think most journalists are doing a fine job. And they are indeed expressing their own experience and taste, There’s nothing wrong with that.

It’s the comments section that I have a problem with: the way in which gamers think of the quality of a game in absolute terms. I would like to see a little more nuance and tolerance in that area. And some understanding of why some people like Guild Wars because of the landscape and don’t care much about PvP. For instance.

1) The perception that Space Giraffe is just a “remake” of Tempest with trippy visuals. As Jeff has maintained constantly, it is a *different* game, and if you play it like Tempest you will lose

2) That Jeff’s blog post was saying “remake = bad”. No, he was asking why something as *unchallenging* to players as Frogger outsold something genuinely new and interesting by 10 to 1 in that particular week.

I’m glad there is someone like Jeff there to push boundaries. While I agree that there has been a lot of negative reaction towards critics of the game, Michael’s blog sums it up nicely.