Does a player base know quality?

[Khuutra]

Esa-Petteri said:

Khuutra said:

Esa-Petteri said:

So.. who should they write to, soccer moms? Do you really think they read the reviews? They know what gamers want and review by those standards. Not the soccer mom standard for obvious reasons.

I'm so glad you asked.

You see, in criticism, you don't write for any particular audience at all, you write in order to contribute to the larger critical dialogue. This is how it works in literature reviews, music reviews, and to a lesser extent movie reviews (movie reviews have gotten a lot better in the past few decades, naturally) - you're not writing to an audience, you're writing for the sake of critical analysis in and of itself.

Reviews are never a "buy or don't buy" sort of thing. They discuss merits of a piece of work according to certain critical standards and then extrapolate from there.

I don't get what you are trying to say. For movie reviews, those top selling movies are usually reviewed quite badly and those which have good reviews aren't usually that popular. I don't know about book reviews, I haven't read a single book review but I think the same pattern is there too. Why? Because reviews are targeted to people who read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies (enough to care about reviews). If some demographic does not read reviews, why should the reviews be based on their standards?

 

Are you trying to say that the reviewers aren't critical or what? :)

I apologize if I am being unclear.

Yes, videog ame reviewers are not being "critical" in the sense that they do not participate in critical analysis. They try to come up with a measure for if a game is good or bad, but they do not do any sort of analysis of the critical sort, which is informed by the canon of critical analysis that has come before - yes, including reviews from other media. And more than just reviews, too, because reviews are not the limit of criticism. That's another part of the problem in the video game press - nobody actually studies video games as an art, or if they do they're not part of the review squad yet.

As to target audiences? Critical analysis does not have a target audience. It's just critical analysis. There are reviewers in every industry who write for the mainstream, yes, but there are also those who are actually very serious critics (read: people who partake in critical analysis) and these people do not write for an audience. Yes, there is an audilence for their work, but that is not the aim of criticism.

Video game reviewers neither write for the mainstream nor write in a critical way: they write for a very specific subset of the game-playing population, catering to tastes that are too specific to be relevant to gamers at large. The problem with this is two-fold.

In the first place, a lack of critical analysis means that they are contributing to the problem of video games not being accepted into the critical canon of art, because there is no analysis of it. That analysis is necessary for the industry itself (as well as gaming media) to be taken seriously by the intelligentia. This is going to be important in the long run when it comes to the preservation of important works, though it's not particularly important right now.

In the second place, it's bad because failing to write for the mainstream means that they are diverging further and further away from the values of the average game buyer. It's part of why game reviewers are becoming marginalized - by and large there are not reviewers who can speak to the values of the average buyer, so reviews are ignored.

It's a pickle, you see.