Theory

[icycalm]

Also can you refrain from using the word 'journalist' in association with games. Hunter S. Thompson was a journalist, fear and loathing on the campaign trail was journalism - writing a fucking review of a slightly tweaked version of FIFA year-on-year in your shared shit-hole apartment full of retro games and Simpsons figures whilst wanking yourself into oblivion over episodes of Heroes is not 'journalism'. Sticking feathers up your arse does not make you a chicken.

http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2009/02/a ... -only.html

And that takes care of that.

[icycalm]

An interesting notion that never occurred to me, probably because I stopped reading casual reviews a long time ago:

This thread gives me a good chance to voice an observation with Eurogamer (and perhaps others) recently. It seems like if the reviewer suspects the game will wind up being overrated, they mark the game even lower than they might normally (Fear 2, for example) whereas if they feel a game will be underappreciated, they mark it higher than they might normally (ie giving it a 10). I might be imagining this, but I think it's a dangerous precedent on a larger scale. I wonder how many review scores, with the advent of metacritic and suchlike, take into account the score they suspect it will get from other publications? With the scores being so openly compared, they are no doubt more concerned with what their score says about themselves as a reviewing body, rather than the game itself.

http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?s= ... &p=5848263

[icycalm]

Someone should give Brandon some sort of medal for missing the point:

I've been incommunicado for a while, but that doesn't mean I have nothing to say. One thing that's been bothering me yet again these days is the poor state of game reviews. I've said a lot of this before, but here I particularly want to highlight some of the worst language tropes that people fall into when reviewing games. These phrases are nearly meaningless at this point, and are often used in order to attempt to be more personable or clever, but wind up being overused fluff that takes the place of actual thought, writing, or criticism. This isn't mean to be all of them, it's just all I could think of after working all day, at 12 am. Here we go:

let's just say
let's face it
don't get me wrong
the visuals
wonky
however (without juxtaposition, the word "however" is irrelevant, yet people continue to use it improperly)
minor gripes aside
while it doesn't bring anything new to the genre
pales in comparison
worth the wait
hot little hands
it was only a matter of time
literally (while actually meaning figuratively!)

There are plenty more, but you see what I'm getting at. Most of these are used as filler, while the author thinks they're actually doing real writing which simply upsets me to no end. Many of these were checked against IGN site-specific searches for returns of over 10,000. These are the kinds of phrases you find Gamefaqs forums fans emulating. And these are the kinds of phrases we need to get away from if we ever, ever want to move toward real criticism. I don't forsee that day coming, with every journalist wanting to become a developer and leave their "writerly" past behind, but hey, we can dream.

http://www.insertcredit.com/archives/002614.html

A review could contain every single one of those banal phrases and still be the best review ever if the writer was an expert on the game and genre in question. In fact, given that most people who are experts on a specific genre tend to also be somewhat functionally illiterate (see SRK, Shmups.com, or any number of FPS/MMO/whatever dedicated forums), expertise and banal phrasing almost go hand-in-hand. But Brandon Sheffield, Steven Poole, Tim Rogers, Kieron Gillen, Stuart Campbell and their kind would rather have flowery language in their reviews than expertise, because that's why we read game reviews, right? The flowery language. That's right. We don't read literature for flowery language -- no, no, no -- that would be absurd. We read game reviews.

This is what Baudrillard calls "Artificial Stupidity". How stupidity can utilize the networks in order to spread and multiply itself just as well -- if not better! -- than intelligence.

[BlackerOmegalon]

Who needs expertise?

http://shawnelliott.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... olicy.html

The confident tone some of these people have is really something. I was half expecting someone to proudly say "lol, I don't even play games!"

[raphael]

How come Alex never got invited to one of these events... I seriously wonder.

For sure some people definitely don't want to hear what he says. But a symposium organizer shouldn't fall in that category.

[icycalm]

lol. Like inviting a wolf to a chicken party. Those people have too much sense to commit such a blunder.

[raphael]

Lol. I have seen this kind of blunder commited many times, and often on purpose. More simple explanation: they don't know about your work yet. This should be fixed with your first book.

[icycalm]

At least half of those people know me very well indeed, if not all of them. As for my books, nothing will change when they are published, apart from making it a bit harder for all these people to keep ignoring me. They will somehow manage it though, I am sure -- because they have no other choice.

[raphael]

When you say at least half of those people know you very well, I suppose you mean half of the participants. I was thinking of the organizers.

[icycalm]

Well, it seems there were three organizers: N'Gai Croal, John Davison and Shawn Elliott. I would be very surprised if none of them had heard of me yet.

All of this is beside the point though, since even if they had invited me I wouldn't have accepted. I'd rather just keep blasting them from my frontpage, which I control completely. The same goes for "Game Studies" conventions, seminars, etc. or any kind of intellectual-philosophical gatherings. I want to have nothing to do with any of those people, apart from making fun of their abortive attempts at insight in my writings.

Now if Baudrillard was still alive... that's another matter. I would have done anything to get in touch and have a little talk with him :(

[icycalm]

I actually skimmed through that link, and found the following post entirely reasonable and intelligent:

Jeff Gerstmann, Giant Bomb: I think that, for a good stretch of years there, there was something that could pass for the one correct, objective way to do this. When gaming itself was a niche, it seemed like everyone had much wider interests, genre-wise. Nowadays, just to give an example, my opinion on sports games is fairly useless because I haven't stayed current with the genre. Even if I happen to like the game, is my take on Madden NFL 09 meaningful to someone who's played the game every year for the past two decades? A review that starts out with "I don't normally like this kind of game, but boy, this one's great" doesn't serve the person that's likely to be the core audience for that review. I'm not even sure if that review serves anyone at all.

As the market for games expands, attempts to answer the question of "should I buy this game?" have become far less meaningful. The audience's taste has already splintered a great deal, and it's getting more and more scattered as time goes on. Attempting to weigh a game and write out some sort of recommendation for every possible audience leads to phrases like "If you're the sort of person who likes this sort of thing, this game's for you!" It's like having a person with no kids review a kids game and attempt to guess if a game would be good for children or not. Or having your flight-sim guy review Ico. Or having someone who's a lifelong Madden fan make educated guesses about the game's approachability for non-fans.

In today's market, I really think that readers need to bring their own tastes to the review and filter our words through those tastes. Really, that crosses all mediums these days. Faced with this notion, I've stopped answering the old question. Point blank, I don't know who's reading, I don't know their experience level with games, and I don't know how much money they have to spend. Sure, we could all go off and conduct focus tests to find out some of these things, but we'll never know for certain. So, instead, I've started answering the "what do I think of this game?" question. After spending most of the last decade never EVER EVER EVER writing reviews in the first-person, it's been an interesting and exciting transition that's really freshened up the process for me. At the very least, I'm no longer writing 2,000-word reviews and immediately receiving an e-mail from a reader that says "so what did you think of the game?" But this is a transition that's only really felt possible relatively recently, maybe over the last two years or so. Whether this is evidence of the audience for games (and game criticism) actually widening or me just going mad with power after perceiving that there seems to be some group of people out there specifically interested in what I have to say about this stuff remains to be seen. I certainly still attempt to provide the objective facts about a game -- the amount time I spent with the game, details on its performance, and so on -- and then pepper that with my take on how all those things clicked and, as I become more and more comfortable with writing reviews this way, maybe a bit of touchy-feely stuff about how I reacted to the game. It's still an evolving process, of course. Old habits die hard.

Even the technical aspects, however, can be up for debate. Personally, I think that dodgy, uneven frame rates are one of the worst things happening in gaming these days. Seriously. So I'm always sure to call that out one way or the other. If you, the reader, don't care about that, then great. Ignore that point and move on. Even if we completely disagree, you'll hopefully have learned something meaningful about the game you are considering purchasing. With that in mind, you'd think that I'd be able to run off and review something like Madden or a flight-sim or a Final Fantasy game. But at some point, rattling out your own opinions on something you have no interest or expertise in becomes more noise than signal. It's with that line in mind that we decide when to review a game or pass on it. Giant Bomb didn't review Madden this year, or, really, any other team-based sports game. We don't need to slap our opinionated stamp on every single release that comes our way.

John's right that the "genre expert" stuff started with things like flight sims and the like. For me, though, the specialist reviewer craze really got big with sports games. I remember EGM gaining a big, breakout section on sports at one point, and guys like Kraig Kujawa essentially turned into some of the first sports game reviewers. Now, it seems like every publication has a sports guy, or maybe even a team of guys that are mostly focused on sports...but these days, that's just as likely to have to do with presenting a large sports area for the purposes of selling ads to sports-focused advertisers.

Though I feel that the sports- and MMO-focused sections at some publications can go a bit too far, it's useful to have someone in place who can approach a game with a certain level of perspective on the genre or series. It's not about getting "fans" to review the games. It's about having a person who potentially fits a product's core audience cover it from a starting point of cautious optimism. Ideally, this person should have enough history with the genre to know if a game is just shamelessly ripping off games of the past, or if it's something truly innovative. And a group of peers should be in place to call that reviewer out in cases where he or she starts to apologize for a game's flaws (the "Oh, that's just how JRPGs are" case that Shawn mentioned).

He's really not that far from the truth, but I guess the size of the distance can seem different depending on which side of the divide you happen to be standing.

[icycalm]

Back on the subject of Brandon's comments:

Concomitant with the emphasis on the signifier, on external forms, is the wrestler's development of secret, esoteric holds, characteristic of an activity which reaches its decadence and emphasizes the technical over the substantial, the form rather than the substance. The rodeo in the American west even exhibits the tendency, especially in break-away roping, where the lariat releases after the rider has shown his skill, but the animal does not have to be thrown--a "decadent" proposition as a result of the disappearance of the frontier. When a culture, a movement, an institution or a scientific theory reaches its end, there tends to be a great emphasis placed on technique, on performance, rather than on production or the explanatory value of the theory. Fredric Jameson has written in The Prison House of Language that the last days of a theory are characterized by more attention being spent to adjust the theory so that it will remain valid than on applying it. Decadent literature emphasizes style and technique over content. In roping, it is the technique, the form that counts, not the capture of the animal.

http://www.msubillings.edu/CASFaculty/P ... UFFOON.htm

[icycalm]

This is supposed to be nouveau corporate criticism, right?

http://www.giantbomb.com/reviews/

Well, currently I am seeing:

Code: Select all

1    *
5    **
13   ***
19   ****
9    *****

Same old same old.

[icycalm]

Compared to this site's frontpage:

Code: Select all

8    *
14   **
18   ***
10   ****
14   *****

Of course, there are also the 13 Videogame Art reviews, but those would of course be 5-star games -- we pick them for this very purpose out of the entire history of gaming, so they don't count.

Not to mention that if I was in charge of that website, which only reviews the latest crap, I would be even more severe with that stuff than I am with the eclectic mix of games featured on Insomnia.

[icycalm]

And how annoying are their actual reviews:

http://www.giantbomb.com/resident-evil- ... 9/reviews/

A detestable design, and full of retina-burning, pointless links.

[dai jou bu]

Their Dawn of War II review was utter trash. The captions consist of screenshots taken from the official website for the game with a statement that bears no context to what's happening in it.

My head hurts from just reading one paragraph:

The skirmish and multiplayer components of the game play much differently from the campaign, and feel fairly standard for a strategy title. When playing online, you'll start with a pre-built base and have to capture control points and power nodes to requisition new troops. For some this is going to be a jarring experience, as you'll have to learn new skills and menu elements that don't exist in the single-player game.

So if the multiplayer features are standard for the genre, then why would people be confused? Also, the single-player campaign in every RTS game is ALWAYS meant to train you for the multiplayer experience, which is infinitely more complex the moment you start facing clever human opponents.

Finally, the paragraph ends on this note:

For those familiar with more typical RTS games this won't cause a problem, but if you're coming to the Dawn of War II with more action-RPG-oriented tastes, you may find yourself in a strange new world after you complete the campaign.

Apparently the reviewer forgot that Warcraft III was a big title that was a hit with the masses for differentiating itself from Starcraft by incorporating elements used in Diablo II. There were also missions in every popular RTS game where the player has no base and has to run around the map with whatever units they were given to complete objectives, a concept Relic decided to improve upon in their single-player campaign by emulating how players in WoW tackle dungeons, right down to bosses that take minutes to kill and will literally one-shot party members if you don't tackle them correctly.

[Adjudicator]

Here is an interesting article which puts forth a theory that the game review sites are in some way pressured by demand from "fanboys".

http://www.destructoid.com/is-the-gamin ... 7568.phtml


This is quite an interesting take on the "mainstream" game reviewers, since I was usually under the impression that it is publishers / executive meddling that ruins game reviews as stated in the other articles hosted by this site.

[icycalm]

The situation would be pretty much the same even without the rabid fanboys. The rabid fanboys, at any rate, are not so much propping up the corporate sites, but rather keeping down sites like this one, which try to improve the situation. And they fail even at that, because every effort on their part to stifle sites like this one has a boomerang effect, leading them to become increasingly more well known. That is how Insert Credit achieved whatever the hell it was that it achieved (an important achievement, relatively speaking, but ultimately, objectively, a rather minor one), and that is how this site is achieving whatever the hell it is that it's achieving. The fanboy hatred is instrumental to success.

The site that you linked, by the way, is part of the problem. You will never get any genuinely worthwhile commentary from sites that are part of the problem.

And P.S. The answer to the article, by the way, is this:

The gaming press is not scared of its readers: it is merely pandering to them.

[icycalm]

Note also that every effort to NOT pander to the readers, and to simply write what the author truly believes, has results almost as terrible as those that come from pandering. Just check the blogs of all the "well-known" game journalists, including Kieron Gillen, Stephen Poole, N'Gai Croal, Tim Rogers, Eric-Jon Waugh, Brandon Sheffield, the hobags (Leigh Alexander, Heather Campbell, et al.), and anyone else you care to mention. Even when posting in their blogs or in forums they still say the same stupid things they say when they are getting paid to write -- and sometimes even stupider.

If I have any respect for some of the above people (mostly the IC guys), it's because they are at least more knowledgeable than the average IGN reviewer, and because they have enough of a personality to create their own writing style. This often leads to MORE hilariousness than that provided by random corporate whores, but individuality should be respected in all circumstances, even when it leads to spectacular failure. The individual, at any rate, provides a better spectacle than the corporate drone, and that is one thing strongly in his favor.

And I will close this tirade with a passage from Schopenhauer, which says pretty much everything that needs to be said on the subject:

The ideal journal could, to be sure, be written only by people who joined incorruptible honesty with rare knowledge and still rarer power of judgment; so that perhaps there could, at the very most, be one, and even hardly one, in the whole country; but there it would stand, like a just Aeropagus, every member of which would have to be elected by all the others. Under the system that prevails at present, literary journals are carried on by a clique, and secretly perhaps also by booksellers for the good of the trade; and they are often nothing but coalitions of bad heads to prevent the good ones succeeding. As Goethe once remarked to me, nowhere is there so much dishonesty as in literature.

http://insomnia.ac/essays/on_criticism/

[icycalm]

To put it another way, by themselves, honesty, knowledge, and power of judgement are not enough.

-Honesty by itself leads you to the millions of retarded forum posts that the internet is flooded with every day.

-Knowledge by itself leads you to Wikipedia-style reviews: pointless regurgitations of useless factoids.

-And power of judgment by itself leads you nowhere, because without knowledge of something ON WHICH TO EXERCISE YOUR JUDGEMENT, you have nothing to judge.

That is why Schopenhauer says that: "The ideal journal could, to be sure, be written only by people who joined incorruptible honesty with rare knowledge and still rarer power of judgment; so that perhaps there could, at the very most, be one, and even hardly one, in the whole country".

By the way, you get no points for guessing what that journal is in the field of videogames.

[icycalm]

More proof that Brandon just doesn't get it:

http://www.insertcredit.com/archives/002623.html

OK, maybe I can't get off my butt to post news on insert credit anymore, but when I do, I try to read about my subject, find correct information, and represent it in a way that is interesting and informative to readers. That's journalism, right? It's an attempt anyway. Witness the opposite. The author of this Joystiq post, one of the most influential game blogs, is almost relishing the fact that he can't understand some Gamestop financials - and that *is* the entirety of the story.

In case it changes, here it is: ""GameStop is reaffirming its first quarter comparable store sales guidance of flat to +2% and earnings per share guidance of $0.40 to $0.42. Full year comparable store sales guidance remains +4% to +6% and full year earnings guidance is still expected to increase between +18% and +22%." That's the release, but we have absolutely no idea what that means. We see some pluses, that's what you want, right? We mean ... they're better than minuses."

This is the kind of representation of game journalism that gives us all a bad name, and gives others legitimate cause to put quotes around the term. For my part, I've sent author Justin McElroy a stern email, like the petulant old man that I am. I only post this publicly that we may all push together for a higher standard.

The Joystiq post is everything gaming "journalism" should be: funny, period. I mean who really gives a fuck about financial issues, let alone financial issues of a crappy US game retailer? I mean I barely give a crap about the finances of my favorite game developers, let alone anyone else's.

But Brandon wants to be respected for being a game "journalist", and until everyone writes about games as if they were writing for the Wall Street Journal and the Artfag Review of Culture, he feels that he won't get it. Hence, posts like the above.

[Molloy]

On the money as usual. I picked up a copy of Edge magazine the other day and realised what an idiot I'd been for buying it for 5+ years. It's less about games news than games industry news. I don't really play new games anymore so the fact that the journalists writing it weren't really playing them anymore either didn't bother me that much.

Did any of you guys listen to the Next-Gen/Game Theory podcast that died out a year ago? The fellows doing used to spend the hour discussing sales figures. I'd say they hardly played 3 or 4 games a year.

I was in HMV yesterday and was shocked to see that half of the shop was dedicated to videogames. Whatever about retail dying, games are going to be the last to go. I read recently that the average US household has 80 DVDs. Despite massive discounting people have just stopped buying them. Blu Ray has tanked almost as badly as UMD. Music sales are even worse. Shifting 100,000 albums in the first week is now considered a massive success.

Games are still selling in the millions however. Piracy has been kept under control. I find it surprising that chipped consoles haven't been a feature of this generation. I bought a chipped Dreamcast and was kind of sorry I bought a legitimate Gamecube and PS2 last generation.