I''m rather ambivalent about videogame criticism myself. I don't use it to chose or judge games specifically, but will normally look at a few reviews to get a general feel for what a game offers - in this sense I suppose I use it as a buyers guide to an extent, although in a fairly marginal way.

To be honest, being 43 and having played videogames since year dot, really, I often feel that I myself have a far better grasp of a game and it's potential worth than many reviews I read - the issue being I need time to do some research, understand the developers, get my hands on a demo, etc.

In the end the issue is, I believe, that at heart most games are a mechanic, with set rules such as a game of Tennis, or Chess. Sure, these days many have plots, etc. but really these are for the most part tacked on and poor. The core of any game is its mechanics - and while in certain ways that allows for a certain kind of review focused on function - i.e. is the frame rate good or bad? Does the cover system work or not? - it also posses some issues due to the extremely broad range of potential tastes, etc. of the end user.

Anyway, keeping this short - I think the review system works in three ways:

1) fueling demand via previews, etc. as part of the incestuous nature of the industry, in a similar fashion to most entertainment industries

2) as a buyers guide in some ways similar to a restaurant review - i.e. if you like Pizza this is good Pizza, if you like FPS this is good FPS

3) as a post release evaluation mechanism - hey, if X, Y and Z were added next time this thing would sell gangbusters, and I guess sometimes as a measure of success - did the game get a good Metacritic average or not?

I feel that like anything new VG are in a state of childness. How old is electronic gaming? How is is electronic gaming compared to say professional cooking, theater, cinema, automobiles, wine, it's relatively more of a toddler than the others. The behavior of the entire industry shows this child like behavior as well. It's much like kid society in Star Trek(Kirk), Lord of the Flies, shcool, Fallout 3 little town. A place where kids pretend to be adults, but more end up not understand the nature of maturity ending up being some what extreme while still childlike. VG reviewers are people who write reviews instead of broad world write for their child siblings. So these aren't adult that wish to see other kids grow up right, but instead more with a malicious intent to be harmful or disruptive. Much like spreading bad rumours about other kids in school so they are ostracized.

This is probably why a review from a magazine like the Times, Life are more valuable than say Gamespot or IGN. They generally or at least always haven't been written with the notion of game is good, ok or sucktastic depending on the game design. It's not to say that they are not prone to misinformation themselves. Sometimes these mature reviewers tend to look at the kids because of their knowledge and assume they no better.

Gaming is in a transition from child to teenager and those kids are screaming like hell, dragging their feet and doing anything they can not to grow up. So yeah I would love to see core reviewers be more like Anton Ego, but that's going to take a lot longer.

Fascinating discussion here!

I think it could benefit from a little bit of semantic clarification:

"Criticism," of the type that you are doing towards literature in a university is not the same activity that a film critic is doing when he writes a review of a recent film.

As you have accurately pointed out, "criticism" that we see in reviews is essentially a buyer's guide:  it helps you to get information about a product before you invest in it.  At best it gives you a broad-strokes impression of the game, and helps you decide if it a worthy investment.

But when Harold Bloom writes about Shakespeare, he isn't trying to convince you to buy "A Midsummer Night's Dream."  For that matter, Susan McClary's "critiques" of Beethoven aren't trying to convince you not to listen to his symphonies.  Scholarly criticism is more about canon-formation and historical development.  It's useful to people studying the creative process of an art.

So the analogy of scholarly criticism in video games would be a someone who studies "the development of the airship as a symbol of freedom and as a crux-point in the game-flow tempo in JRPG's."  This would involve comparing the use of airships in the Final Fantasy Series, Chrono Trigger, Tales Series etc. and developing some type of framework for analyzing how different airships impact the experience and pace of the game.  Such a study would then be useful to "ludic academics," as professors who study gaming call themselves, and also to game developers.  I don't know if anyone does this type of "criticism," as gaming is still pretty young as an art form. 

But remember what Jean Sibelius said about critics:

"Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic."

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.