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Forums - Sales - Does a player base know quality?

Esa-Petteri on 15 May 2009
Khuutra said:

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.

Well.

I see it like that they are critical, according to the standards gamers have set. I don't see a problem with that, just because the people who actually bother to read those reviews are indeed gamers. If they would review games by soccer mom standards, then a lot of those people who read reviews could stop reading them because they would/could consider reviews as bullshit.

I don't know what "the mainstream" is but if you are talking about those people who buy casual (as in wii casual) games, I doubt that they read reviews that much. What point there would be to make reviews if they won't read them. Average Joe usually settles for something that happens to be popular/cheap/easy enough. In my opinion, those popular things are being reviewed critically. That is why they get low scores. :O

 

 



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Khuutra on 15 May 2009
Esa-Petteri said:

Well.

I see it like that they are critical, according to the standards gamers have set. I don't see a problem with that, just because the people who actually bother to read those reviews are indeed gamers. If they would review games by soccer mom standards, then a lot of those people who read reviews could stop reading them because they would/could consider reviews as bullshit.

I don't know what "the mainstream" is but if you are talking about those people who buy casual (as in wii casual) games, I doubt that they read reviews that much. What point there would be to make reviews if they won't read them. Average Joe usually settles for something that happens to be popular/cheap/easy enough. In my opinion, those popular things are being reviewed critically. That is why they get low scores. :O

I see I am still being unclear. I apologize again.

I do not mean criticism in the sense of "finding faults". Of course they're doing that - but criticism has more than one meaning.

"Criticism" as I am referring to it is .... well I'm a literature student so the easiest parallel for me to draw is in textual analysis of literature, but there are movie reviewers who do the same thing. Criticism in the sense that I mean it refers to the exploration of theme, of modes of expression, genre definition, of the intent of a work and how it operates within a medium. What a work means and what it does just as much as what it is. Wii Fit, from a critical standpoint, is an absolutely fascinating game because of how it subverts the expectations of what we think a video game is capable of, and the way in which it changes how a game can interact with its player. But video game reviewers don't think this way, because msot of them have no backgrounds in critical analysis. I just can't take them seriously because of that.

Oh, right, one more thing, not related to the whole "criticism" thing.

Video game reviewers agree with each other more than any other reviewing industry, within a margin of error so small it's surprising. Does this mean they're objectively clsoer to the truth? Well, no.

The problem there is that video game reviewers primarily all subscribe to a single value set - there is no diversity in the values of reviewers as it stands now. They all wants "gamers' games" and nothing else. That's fine for people who subscribe to the same value set (or who only want to read reviews speaking from that value set), but it also means that they can't speak to people who have any other value sets - they necessarily limit themselves, and yes, that makes them come across as different mouthpieces for a single sweaty nerd entity.

Reviewers as they are now limit the industry in more than one way.