Despite Redfall, video game reviews don't need fixing
Nothing can keep Twitter from a civil war, even as it continues to tumble ever closer to absolute chaos. We see it time and time again, in the gaming world especially, that fans simply can't seem to make their minds up as a unit.
There's always something to complain about, even if we've complained about it before to little avail. The gaming industry has been on the receiving end of a lot of bile from its "fans" in the past, with developers and journalists alike finding themselves on the receiving end of toxicity, bullying, death threats and the like.
With no indication of this "they think they're better than us!" line of thinking finding the end of the thread, it's something that they're (and we are) just going to have to put up with. Perks of the job, eh? The current discourse du jour, for the umpteenth time, is the function of the video game review, in its written and presented forms.
Players are growing ever-concerned that they don't actually mean anything and that a review score that isn't resounding across publications is a failure of the industry's ability to be of use to the fans.
Everyone's idea of what a review should be is hyperspecific, but more importantly, absolute nonsense. The video game review is the way it is for a reason, and no amount of whining is about to change that.
The video game review is under attack
Click to enlargeDiscourse is back on Twitter in full force, with threads all over the shop indicating exactly what features would make a review better - features that actively cannibalise the review itself.
Some are even calling for early access reviews to be banned, to eradicate preferential treatment between journalists and fans, removing the chance for players to even learn what a game is like in the first place before they splurge upwards of $70 on it. Before we assess these suggestions, though, we first need to tack down what exactly a review is for.
A review, in this context, is defined as a "critical appraisal" of entertainment in any form, assessing its fair market value. This value changes depending on the item itself, but the clearest way to put it is this - our job is to tell you if a game is worth what its developers are asking for in return.
A 5/5 score means it's absolutely worth its cost, and a 0.5/5 indicates it isn't. There are plenty of bells and whistles along the way, with the writer themselves taking up creative liberties on structure and tone depending on the subject, but they come in tow, working to keep you engaged through the bullet point list of notes they've made.
This applies to video games simply - journalists complete the game (or they don't, indicating so in a "review in progress"), have a poke around in it for extra things of note, and tell you what it's like. But, many take issue with this - not so much due to a direct objection to its "validity" or "trustworthiness," though the average review comments would have you believe it is. Rather, it's a kickback against their hopes.
We've seen it already with reviews of Redfall, the game hoped to fire life back into Xbox's first-party lineup that has fallen dramatically flat. Fans are jumping into the fire with fury, demanding that reviewers that didn't enjoy it give them a different result, angling their dismay to the messenger. All without having played it yet.
As each of these fans cries out for a "fair" appraisal, and as journalists insist time and time again that they are, the distance between them grows, leaving a proverbial line in the sand that has severed the relationship between the two parties - and every suggestion to bring them back together only pushes them further from each other.
The video game review won't change
Click to enlargeThe video game review is always designed for the consumer first and foremost, and though there are outliers, this always remains the writer's focus. Cries from gamers that journalists shouldn't get games early, nor should their reviews be completed by one writer or personal experience all point towards a new structure of review that defeats their purpose in the first place.
The avid moaner seems to have gotten too used to the nullifying effects of the review aggregation site, with Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic becoming the basis for quality to many. These sites are useful, yes, but they don't contribute to specific criticism by design as a result of its final decree being a skim-off-the-top number.
It's this arbitrary rating that dictates a game's quality to the wider world, for better or worse, and the thought of specific critiques has become secondary. These specifics are crucial to assisting the consumer in making their minds up about such a hefty purchase.
Tough many feel they understand the industry well enough to base their buys on mere aggregation, that doesn't take away from the importance of reviews themselves. Whether they're art in and of themselves is for you to decide, but ultimately, going without saps the aggregation of anything to aggregate.
There are poor examples, of course, as there are with any article types (we all start somewhere) - but that doesn't make all reviews useless.
The video game review already does its job
Click to enlargeMake all the arguments you want about how much money they actually bring to sites (not much), or if a site is being paid off by bigger companies (they're almost definitely not), but the structure of a review is crucial. Especially in such a costly industry as gaming.
Without reveiws, we'd have no way to hold industry giants to account for turning out poorly developed titles and flagrant bargain bin fodder, leaving the gaming industry with few points of reference for competition.
We need high-profile critiques of the gaming industry just as much as we need people to tell us, without the bias of developers that created the product, what's worth our well-earned money and what isn't. You don't have to like us journos, but come on - we're not useless all of the time.
