| Khuutra said: WoW you can either hold a conversation or not, but that is very close to condescension and I haven't got a lot of patience for condescension. |
I apologize. I was not insulting you.
Restaurants cater to reviews much the same way developers/publishers do because they feel they have an impact on sales. This impact on sales or, at least, this belief of such leads to tangible value in the service of reviewing. This effect goes both ways when a game developer develops with a reviewer in mind as the developer can focus on areas likely to receive extra scrutinization. The same is true in the restaurant business when you look into adding/removing items from your menu and training your staff.
In your first point above, you say that no two visits will be the same in a restaurant however the fact that no two people are the same already implies this. Even if the food were exactly the same, two people could easily walk away with entirely different experiences. The result of which leads to a problem if you put someone who hates spicy foods of all kinds to reviewing spicy dishes. The same is true of video games, when you put someone who dislikes the Wii to the task of reviewing Wii games, you will get unfavorable results. When reviewing something whether it be food, games, or anything, it is important to align the good, the reviewer, and even the person reading the review. If you find someone who likes RPGs to review an RPG and gear it toward people who enjoy RPGs then you will have a more useful review than you would if you found someone who dislikes FPS to review an FPS geared toward fighter fans.
Finally, your second point has a problem when you say food differs yet not other media. Films range from action to comedy to drama to etc. Games also have an excessive variety of genres and sub-genres. To imply that there is variety in food yet not within other media is a serious logical flaw. At the same time, you cannot say it's different on a serving by serving basis because, as mentioned above, each customer has a different palette which already sets each meal apart. And finally, you can say that the same meal served to the same customer may be different each time based on small differences but the media being compared to food is not dependent on being repurchased making that comparison more or less meaningless.
Sadly, I was hoping you would come to some of these conclusions yourself.
