The VGZ blog

Reviews of videogames are great. They give you an accurate, informed and unbiased view of a game before you rush out and lay down your hard-earned cash, as well as providing a handy and accurate numerical scale by which to rate, classify and rank games.

Except none of that is even remotely true.

Over the last few years, reviews of videogames have grown into a minefield, no longer serving as useful consumer advice, instead reflecting ‘gamer culture’ (and everything that phrase has come to embody) as a whole. Before I continue, I should point out that I don’t consider this true of every review, reviewer or gaming publication (digital or otherwise) out there – Indeed, I’ll be outlining what I feel makes a good review and how to spot them further into this article. For now though, I suggest you just go with the general rule that reviews suck, for various reasons.

The first problems, of course, stem from the reviewers themselves. Not to get all ‘rose tinted’ and nostalgic, but I remember a time when videogame reviewers were people with degrees in journalism and experience in other publications. People who knew how to structure an argument and understood the weight of the written word on a consumer looking for advice. Now, any Tom, Dick or Harry with a WordPress account can call themselves a ‘games journalist’ (Yes, I’m aware of both the irony and hypocrisy of that statement – But if they can do it, so can I) and get themselves an audience by using witty captions on irrelevant images and some tangentially related Youtube videos. Before you know it, Average Joe Fanboy’s ‘gaming blog’ is getting ten times as many readers in an hour as that long-standing magazine publication you’ve been picking up for a decade is getting in a month.

This, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. Obviously, times change and if the internet was not the primary platform on which to provide editorial content in this millennium… Well, then you wouldn’t be reading this, would you? No, the problem arises when the new ‘games journalists’ behind the digital publication revolution completely fail to acknowledge their responsibilities AS a journalist.

“But Zed”, I hear you scrambling to pedantically protest, “They don’t claim to be journalists. They’re just bloggers.” That’s fine. Hitler didn’t claim to be a mass-murdering dictator. He was just a politician. My point being, whether they’re aware of it or not, these people have an influence on the opinions of thousands of readers, and that’s fundamentally a journalistic responsibility.

As a result, today’s game reviews become, by the nature of the environment in which they’re produced, irreversibly slanted with personal bias. Again, not necessarily a bad thing – They’re opinion pieces by people who originally only wanted to showcase their opinions anyway. That’s fine. The problem is that, due to a lack of understanding of their journalistic responsibilities to an audience as astronomically huge as these sites bring in, these opinions are taken by many as gospel truth, without correction. Now certainly, a writer is not responsible for the intelligence of his readers. But there IS a responsibility there to make sure that any opinion they put forward is not misrepresented as accurate fact, which many of today’s ‘gaming journalists’ just don’t do.

I mentioned just now that a writer is not responsible for the intelligence of his readers, and that brings me to the next problem – The readers themselves.

We all know how annoying fanboys are. And I don’t just mean people with a favourite franchise, or console, or whatever. No, I’m on about those people who will vehemently go out of their way to put down everything else on the market as if the people responsible for their development had gone to Mr Fanboy’s house and wiped their arse with the Fanboy family dog. These people are a blight on every gaming-related community they show up in, and it’s usually entirely impossible to reason with them.

A writer is not responsible for rabid fanboys. Hell, the companies that produce these things aren’t responsible either. But these fanboys present a problem for both writers and average, normal, sensible readers of game reviews, because anything in said review that CAN be used as ‘ammunition’ by a rabid fanboy, invariably WILL. And since we’ve already addressed that most reviews today are essentially opinion pieces with a number at the end, EVERYTHING is fanboy fodder.

So for Sensible Logical Reader, not only is almost every review often a misrepresented, biased opinion, it’s also usually surrounded by a culture of rabid fanboys who stubbornly latch on to the comments section and won’t let go until you all realise how stupid you are for liking anything else, ever.  It’s a lot to wade through just to find out if a game is any good, especially when many Sensible Logical Readers don’t really know what they’re looking for in a mess of internet memes and irrelevant references.

What everyone needs to know about reading a review is that you’re basically peering over someone’s shoulder while they play the game in question. The only information you’re going to get from a review is the experience of the person who played it. It’s then YOUR job to decide if the described experience sounds like it matches up to your personal tastes.

Read that again. Now read it again. Keep reading it. Write it down and staple it to your head, if you have to, because that, right there, is the most important yet mostly ignored concept in all of games journalism – It’s not about what everyone else likes, it’s all about YOU.

Halo 3, Modern Warfare 2 and Army Brown Zombie Aliens 6: The Grenadening are apparently all fantastic first-person shooters if you go to any big game site on the net, but that’s not really much good to someone who doesn’t generally LIKE first-person shooters, is it?

So, reader, I implore you – The next time someone, ANYONE, tells you that a game is good, be it in a blog, magazine, forum, chat room, word of mouth, carrier pigeon, WHATEVER… First, find out why. Then, decide for YOURSELF if it sounds like something you’d like and if it matches up to your tastes.  If it does, awesome. Try it out. Hope you like it. If it doesn’t, don’t bother.  I recommend, personally, that you check out gameplay videos and, if possible, a demo before you make a decision one way or the other, but whatever you do, when you’re reading a review, PLEASE think for yourself.

My final problem with game reviews, and it’s a big one, is the numbers involved. 10/10. 40/40. 8.8. These are all somehow vitally important numbers, usually far more so than the review itself.

Now, I went to school in England, so maybe I missed something, but the last time I checked, seven was not the midpoint between one (or, in some cases, zero) and ten. Seven was not an average. Ever. I don’t quite know how we arrived at the belief that it WAS, or that eight and nine are ‘good’, that ten is ‘great’ and everything else is crap, but I’d like to find whoever’s responsible and smack him around the face with a calculator.

A game should not be judged as awful if it gets a five. Five is ‘alright’ in a scale of one to ten. The developers of a game that universally receives 7/10 should not be ashamed of what they’ve produced. But somehow, ‘we’ as a collective industry have decided we only need from six to ten.

Why then, if that’s the case, do we get scores like 8.8? Or 78%? IF we’re only using FIVE numbers, why make the theoretical scale twenty times bigger? And please, oh please, people of the internet, can someone explain to me the difference between a game that gets 8.2 and one that gets 8.3? Or 73% and 74%? What does that single increment actually represent in terms of quality?

What’s even worse is that fanboys love nothing more than a nice, concrete number. It sounds a bit like a ‘fact’ and it justifies their love of one particular thing and, as a result, their seething hatred of absolutely everything else. Never mind, of course, that these numbers are almost entirely arbitrary since they don’t, by themselves, actually tell you a single thing about the game.

They’re just NUMBERS, people!

A better solution, in my opinion, would be to summarise the preceding review in a single sentence as a sort of conclusion TO the conclusion (assuming the review even has one…) for the inevitable people who like to skip ahead to the ‘bottom line’. It’s something I hope to include in my OWN reviews, when they arrive.

So, I’ve told you the problems and I promised I’d tell you how to spot a good review, so here I go: The exact opposite of all of the above. Simple, isn’t it?

As a general rule, I don’t pay any attention to any publication that awards games a score on a scale beyond 1 – 10 (including those that decide to add in decimal increments), and I always take the time to actually read the review which, if you’ve read this far, I can only assume you do too.

I prefer a review written in an informal, conversational tone, since that tends to remove any pretentiousness and says to me that the reviewer KNOWS they’re putting forward an opinion, not misrepresenting it as fact. It also better communicates the ‘experience’ of playing the game, in my opinion. That said, unless it suits a purpose, a review that goes overboard on tangentially relevant references is most likely trying too hard to be entertaining, rather than informative (I’d gotten this far without mentioning him, but ZeroPunctuation’s Yahtzee falls neatly under this banner).

Finally, a good review will take everything in the game (graphics, soundtrack, controls, etc) as one ‘complete package’ and try its best to convey the experience of playing, rather than technical jargon that you can probably get from the publisher’s press release anyway.

So there you go. A totally fair, informative and completely unbiased editorial on the problems and purpose of videogame reviews. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to swim in the pile of money that EDGE Magazine coincidentally dropped off at my house this morning.