Last year a friend of mine passed away. His name was Stephen Bray, but everyone knew him by another name. He was a video-game reviewer in his spare time, using youtube as a platform for his reviews. Without a doubt, they were the most incredible, well done reviews I have ever had the pleasure of encountering- with a sultry west Yorkshire accent to boot. I will be stealing from him for as long as I write or talk about video-games, just because I think it's never been done better. I think first of all its important to ask: 'what is a review?' because a lot of people don't seem to know the answer. Ultimately its a decision-making tool for us as consumers. It helps us decide what to spend our money on- in a world where a game can set you back £50, its not a decision to be made lightly. So firstly we have to trust the reviewer to have our tastes- a game I hate he or she may love and vice versa. Films, games and books are all ultimately subjective things- if everyone loved and hated everything unanimously, we'd live in a much sadder place than we already do. So, considering that the reviewer is not an AI built around predicting and mirroring our exact individual desires in a game, what is his or her job? To an extent, its to explain, to describe. To help us make the decision for ourselves. There are objective factors that can be described, for example, the lip syncing in Deus Ex: Human Revolution is poor. That's a fact. Whether this undermines the entire immersion of the game is subjective. Yet, reviewers have to be the every-man. They are mankind condensed.
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| Totally unbiased. Definitely. |
Reviewers have to give us scores, right? We love scores. Metacritic is big business, especially in the games industry. This is what Take-Two's CEO had to say on that subject: “Unlike many other entertainment business[es], ratings by Metacritic and others' reviews really can influence the success of a newly-released title… if your ratings go below a certain level, it can really hurt your ability to sell the title, and above a certain level can make a real difference in your success.” To me, the idea that a game (or anything else for that matter) can be rated on a numerical scale is insane. People are lazy, they don't want to sit through your boring review- give me a number! Give me a number now! They don't want to compare the individual merits and flaws of two games, they want to be able to see at a glance which is better. Its all about sales. You know who has money? Publishers. You know who wants money? Review sites.
Lets say I'm a publishing company, full of more money and willies than Boy George's house, and I'm paying a certain review site a lot of money for advertising. Review sites are very responsible for creating "hype", and nothing kills hype like a bad review. So I'm going to pay them loads of money to make sure nobody thinks badly of my new money-making baby. I pay for the review site to exist! Who would be stupid enough to bite the hand that feeds them? They don't even try and hide their bias! When you have a magazine called "Official Nintendo Magazine" or "Official Xbox Magazine" its akin to having a film review magazine called "MatrixMateys" and trusting their word on Reloaded and Revolution. Its corruption, Jim, but not as we know it.
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| This was found with review copies of Dante's Inferno. Seriously. |
Anyway, what does Stephen Bray have to do with this? He was by no means a large name in the reviewing world, but he was large enough to be bribed multiple times. Not even by large publishers, but by indie developers. Not only did he deny these bribes, but he explicitly revealed them in his reviews. If you've got to pay someone to give your game a better score, you're saying wonders for the game's quality. Stephen was all about showing the audience that he is one man, with one opinion. He presented his own, subjective experience with the game- and to an extent, the reviews were made for himself. Ironically, this made them more useful to me than anyone else's reviews. No numerical sliders, by the way. Just a guy telling me what he thought of a game. We didn't always agree- in fact we often didn't, but he was honest.
References and links:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/game_culture/2005/03/ten_unmissable_examples_of_new_games_journalism.html
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18393883
http://www.vgchartz.com/article/87176/metacritic-catches-games-reviewers-taking-bribes/
http://uk.ign.com/articles/2012/07/16/is-metacritic-ruining-the-games-industry
http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/6470855/1
Image links:
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/09-23-2010/200dantecheck.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/PlayStation_Official_Magazine.jpg
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