by Joseph Hilgard
We’re presenting this article alongside Kyle Stegerwald’s piece today as paired examples of an emergent (heh) strain of game criticism; they both concern the act of game reviewing, but also suggest broader issues within game culture. -Karl
What’s wrong with game reviews? I could complain what a useless measure game scores have become, since the current range of 8-10 scores is too restricted to have any meaning. Imagine how difficult it would be to talk about height if everybody’s height was described as a number between eight and ten. Worse, I find that the most interesting games tend to score in about the 85s, so imagine that sometimes people who were 10 feet tall were actually shorter than people who were eight feet tall. Even if the range of scores were better distributed, though, it still seems like the least interesting titles would still rise to the top. Why is that?
As DaveThier recently put it , the people who write game reviews seem to be less “game critics” than they are “game enthusiasts.” They love games, and they want games to be great. They’re exceptionally optimistic about the future of video games. They’re eagerly anticipating the day that video games are the predominant form of media, eclipsing television and movies.
Unfortunately, this leads to a disproportionate amount of emphasis on the recent trend of video game storytelling and emotions. We don’t get informative reviews of how the game plays. That is, reviewers often seem oblivious as to how the player interacts with the game in pursuit of goals, and whether this is at all interesting or challenging or fun.
Instead, we tend to get a lot of words about the feelings and emotions the reviewer felt. This might just be an attempt for more engaging writing. Saying, “ The longer we stay with Niko, the more we see that there is a broken human being inside, one who would give anything to escape the person he once was ,” is more interesting than reporting on the dull, repetitive missions.
Reviewers rarely bother to say much about the dynamics of gameplay – instead, we get reviews which are generally 60% plot, 20% raw mechanics, and 20% technical information as to whether the game runs well on particular hardware. I would like to see more consideration given to the whole system of play. Telling us about the new gun or gimmick is all well and good, but to really understand the game, we need to know its role in the dynamic system of play. What is involved in the new gimmick’s use? What skills does it require? What tricky choices govern its use? Is the player allowed to experiment with it freely, or will the game helpfully force the player to use it at appropriate intervals?
Game reviewers rarely seem to be particularly insightful or discerning. I often wonder how they could miss so many glaring problems with so many games. This is one reason customers suspect journalists of being unduly influenced by publishers – no reviewer seems particularly insightful or talented, so in the absence of other virtues the consumer presumes them to be corporate plants. Routine high scores exacerbate this problem. 90+ scores are so common as to become meaningless, and many uninteresting games routinely break 80 on Metacritic.
When was panned by critics earlier this year, my friends and I were a little envious. Over beers, my bridge partner asked me, “Why don’t we have guys like this in video games?” Here was a music album that was competently made, and even had a hit single, and yet critics managed to find plenty of reason to rake it over the coals.
Big-budget videogames never get this reception – even the worst attempt from a big-name studio with a lot of buzz will attain at least an 80 on Metacritic , and anything below 85 is considered a failure . Game reviews exist in a strange alternate universe where every summer blockbuster, no matter how derivative, boring, or stupid it is, gets an enthusiastic two thumbs up from reviewers.
In videogames, there are no Michael Bays – nothing that makes the reviewers all shake their heads and say “This is garbage, and yet it will sell like hotcakes.” Granted, there are some cult classics – games which received comparatively poor scores given their ingenuity and quality. Most frequently, however, we see games which are met with reviewer acclaim and consumer vitriol.
In the end, game reviews rarely boil down to more than “It’s just fun.” Unfortunately, for game reviews, nobody seems to know what is fun. Reviewers rarely exhibit any insight as to what makes games fun. Words like “depth” and “satisfying gameplay” get thrown around, but do they mean anything anymore?
The one thing that we can count on reviewers reliably deducting points for is bugs or glitches, perhaps because these are the only thing that anyone can point to as being objectively bad. Imagine a film critic who couldn’t be counted on to understand or critique movies, so he rates movies based on how many scenes you can see a boom mic in the picture or the camera in a mirror, and you have the game reviewer.
This has lead to a workmanlike view of video gameplay which reads like a series of checkboxes: Does the game run? Can you shoot guys? Do you have some numbers that go up? Do the graphics look alright? Sounds great! You’re well on your way to a fine score – 80 for an indie studio, 90 for AAA studio.
This is not to say that bugs are to be tolerated or excused, but they do seem to have an excessive influence over a game’s score compared to, say, whether the game is at all interesting or fun. How else can you explain the prevalence of cult favorites, games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat or Fallout: New Vegas , which received much poorer scores than the similar-but-worse Fallout 3 ? The cult favorite frustrates us, because it doesn’t seem that the game has been snubbed so much as it seems that the reviewers just didn’t get it.
To be fair, it’s a miracle that critics manage to play any portion of a game and rush a review to press before the review embargo ends. I feel like this rushed process leads to critics stuck in that initial honeymoon phase, not yet familiar enough with the game to notice its faults. Given the demands of the lightning-quick news cycle, it’s almost understandable why reviewers respond so favorably to flashy, polished games with shallow play – it makes it easier to chew them up and spit them out.
It is often incredible how little knowledge of the game is involved in writing a review. “I can’t wait until everyone else in the office has played it, so they can tell me what would’ve happened if I’d only killed person X in my sixth year in the city,” PC Gamer’s Rich McCormick gushes about Dragon Age 2 (94/100), blissfully unaware that the player is not actually allowed to kill person X and that nothing changes. One would think that Rich might try saving and then trying it either way, noticing that both lead to the same outcome. Instead, he gives the game the benefit of the doubt – a puzzling decision, especially when one’s gamer-sense should be tingling, suspecting that the player is on rails the whole time.
Not only that, but he sees no problems with the combat and fails to mention the recycled maps. Why am I bored to tears by the repetitive, dreary combat, whose waves of spawn-in enemies remove all semblance of tactics or positioning, while the reviewer feels that this game is six points shy of perfect? (Rich mentions the game’s “deep, complex combat system,” seemingly oblivious to these problems.)
If we are to have a system of reviews that works, we need more intelligent, more critical reviewers. We need reviewers who can understand and disdain the cheap appeals of unlockables, level-ups, and embarrassing romantic interludes. We need reviewers who have read books, so they know good writing when they see it. We need reviewers who have played the classics, games like Chess or Bridge or Football, so that they understand the crucial qualities and marvelous thrills that only games can provide. We don’t need more , which is as interesting and helpful as a bore describing last night’s dream. We need smarter, more discriminating reviewers.
