Every day is the "End of the Week"

     In the game industry, reviews are important. For the consumers, it lets us know what games are worth our money and what game are just not any good. It forces developers to make the best product they can and can act as advertising to sell games to those who might be unfamiliar. This is at least the ideal relationship that reviewers should have with both the game makers and the game players. Sadly, I don't think that kind of relationship exists.

     I love reading reviews, especially to see what they think of movies or restaurants. However, and maybe it's me, while reviews are useful tools in other industries, in the gaming world they run it. There are many publishers who look at sites like Metacritic to determine what is popular and what isn't. It seems to determine what games get the funding to expand and what games get sidelined. I believe that it is this kind of attitude from the publishers that make it so Call of Duty gets made every year and why other games struggle to stay above the water.

Every. Single. Year.

     Because of this, a game sometimes completely relies on a successful review, which leads into some complications. For one, there have been several known instances of publishers bribing reviewers either directly or by threatening to pull advertisements from magazines or websites if their game doesn't get at least a score like an 8 out of 10. This used to lead me to purchase games that I was ultimately dissatisfied with, although more often than not, I just didn't understand why everyone went so crazy over what seemed like just a rather okay game.

     I think what people tend to forget is that reviewers are just people. Video games as a field of study is still in it's early stages, and while the social and cultural aspects are routinely looked at by researchers, there is very little in what I would like think of as game critics who observe particular game design techniques and judge the game based on whether they were used effectively or not, at least in the mainstream. The reviewers who write for the big gaming websites, are journalists, and while there is nothing wrong with that, to me it just means that they are competent writers and not necessarily very knowledgeable about their hobby on a deeper level . Many don't have a clear, objective view of what game design actually consists of and I doubt many of them actually know anything about the inner workings of game design and production. They know what they like and what fun is to them, but to me, as a potential buyer for a game, that means very little.

My perception of the average big website review: Smug Automaton.

     A person's opinion is a person's opinion, not a fact. Yet, people treat it as such. I once was in a conversation where I stated how I disliked Heavy Rain for having what I thought as a weak storyline, confusing plot twist, and how it cheats it main selling point of every decision being meaningful. This was in the context of the game receiving a story award that I thought it didn't deserve. I was immediately yelled at for not getting it's "deep" and "engrossing" story that all the reviewers must have understood. 

     Likewise, many of the complaints of Metroid Other M stem from reviewers who focused heavily on the controversial Ridley scene rather than other parts of the story and gameplay. Many of their comments seemed to ignore the logbook style of the narration and pieces of story that are explained at one point or another. These reviews decided that it was best to fuel the controversy, suddenly becoming concerned with the sexist aspects of the game that weren't there to get hits. Meanwhile, people who I know to have played the game, as in they can reference other scenes from the game, loved it, including the story, which involved a recently traumatized Samus overcoming her doubts and fears and actually gaining a good amount of character development (although I'm not saying its wrong to still hate this game, after all personal taste and opinions are just that). To me this indicates a rather large disconnect from these big websites (and those who followed suit) and the actual audiences of the game. And not just for this game, but for many others where deeper readings of these games are not touched upon, instead relying on usually very shallow interpretations.

     This works conversely too. A famous example is when Gamespot review gave Twilight Princess an 8.8 and there was a huge Internet backlash, because fans felt that one of their favorite game franchises was entitled to high reviews. Which is strange considering that it was impossible for any regular person to have played the game at that point. Also, I think the writer of that review was even fired for causing such a debacle, regardless of the game's actual level of quality.

This game was at least an 8.9.

     To me this indicated that people aren't using reviews as the tool they were meant to be. Instead they are using reviews to justify their beliefs. In a broad sense, no one can accept that Heavy Rain is a bad game because not only would all their hype be for nothing, but it would be an insult to their personal taste.

     I think as a community of gamers, we need to lower the importance of reviews in our gaming life. For many of us, it probably won't be easy, after all, sometimes we don't know what we want, especially on more obscure games. On the other hand, many of us know what type of games we want and so we probably don't care about reviews for those kind of games anyways. For example, I'm a sucker for Star Wars games, so I will probably buy anyone that looks cool, no matter what the review is (which led me to buy The Force Unleashed 2). I also feel like if we, as a community, want games to be accepted as art, instead of just as pop culture, then we need to start looking at games at a deeper level.


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