What's Wrong With Games Criticism?

Over the past couple of weeks, Stuart Campbell's been running an excellent series on why videogame reviews don't matter. It's all stuff that chimes with my own concerns about why I should bother trying to write interesting words about videogames, but he leaves the really important questions unanswered:

i) What's causing videogame reviews to be irrelevant?
ii) What can be done about it?

I'll happily admit to being a reviewing novice who still hasn't really worked out how to do it properly, but it seems to me there are three pretty fundamental things that the kids who write reviews for a living already almost always fail to acknowledge:

1. No-one's an expert

I skipped this one. Is that okay?

Videogames have scarcely been around for half a century, but already there’s more stuff out there that’s worthy of being played than is possible for one person to play. You could (as I suspect is the case for most current game journalists) scurry about trying to play as many of them as possible, but it’s a self-defeating exercise. The best games absorb you completely, make you forget the other stuff in your life that you’re supposed to be doing, and for a few weeks dominate every second of your leisure time. If you want to play every game that contains interesting or unique ideas, or even just those that are widely considered to be brilliant, there simply aren’t enough spare hours in a lifetime to give them all as long as they deserve.

The larger videogame magazines and websites try to get around this problem by assigning each of their staff-writers to a particular genre. “Beardy Dan” will specialise in role-playing games, “Short-straw Luke” will get all the sports titles and “Still-lives-with-Mum Mark” will review all the racing games. It’s a fairly effective way of making sure the reviewer understands the history of the genre and has a decent grip on what is or isn’t innovative about the game they’re looking at, but also has the unfortunate side-effect of causing genre-fatigue. Inevitably, if you play the same type of game over-and-over you lose your passion for it. You then get bored, and then maybe even a little depressed, as you realise you’ve reached the very state you started playing games to escape from.

This is the crucial point: a critic’s relationship to their subject matter has to be comparable to that of their reader. For every target of criticism that existed prior to videogames, it was possible to become an expert without utterly warping your approach to or appreciation of the medium. The music critic can have a proper listen to ten albums and go to a couple of concerts every week, and still have time to spare for the rest of the cultural world. The movie critic can easily watch a couple of films every day while maintaining a decent social life. Even the literary critic, who perhaps comes closest to having the same problem as the game critic, finds that a thorough read of Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment takes less than half the time of a rushed play through of Final Fantasy XII.

The solution? Games reviewers have to admit defeat. They shouldn’t pretend to be an expert when they’re not, and should admit to being a boring weirdo if they are. The best critics show enough of themselves in a review to allow the reader to understand their influences, without ever letting themselves become more important than what they’re talking about. Ultimately we want reviewers who know as much about how to have fun playing games as they do the history of games, yet at the moment the reviewer’s professionalisation often makes them jaded or out-of-touch with the ordinary game-players they’re supposed to be serving.
 

2. The cult of conformity 

Lowest score on Metacritic? 8/10

 
Perhaps the most curious thing about videogame criticism is how often reviewers agree with each other. You could say that’s because “good game design” is an easier thing to identify than say, “pleasing sound” in music, but I’m not convinced that fully explains how rarely we see significant differences in opinion between major games review sources. While it’s pretty common for friends of mine to tell me that whatever “triple A” title they’ve been playing has left them cold, I don’t even remember the last time I saw a mainstream professional critic hold up their hands to a big new release and admit, “it bored me”.
 
This has to be a cause for concern: either game critics are all so similar to each other that they nearly always think the same thing, or they’re not always entirely honest when giving their opinion. In truth it’s probably a little of both.
 
The weird circus that proceeds the release of a new game plays a big part here. For over a year before it comes out, a game will be spoon-fed to the videogame press in PR-sweetened chunks at numerous trade shows and demonstrations. There aren’t all that many games journalists in this world, and most of them will talk - or tweet - to each other fairly often, meaning it doesn’t take long for a consensus to emerge on whether a title should be considered “one to watch”. Yet because this conversation about the game starts so early and takes place between relatively few people, when it finally becomes time to criticise, the reviewer can't help arriving with all sorts of preconceptions that tarnish their independence of thought.
 
The solution? Reviewing and previewing need to become two completely separate specialities in games journalism. Reviewers should concentrate solely on the analysis of fully released games, while previewers/news journalists focus on being ruthlessly investigative. Most readers appreciate previews but feel uneasy about the close relationship between game journalists and PR companies. This is the simplest way to alleviate those concerns. How reassuring would it be to know that your reviewer was so far removed from the PR machine of the game they were reviewing that they were unable to name a single person working for its publisher?
 
 
3. Silly scoring systems

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is worth 11,648 bananas

This one’s simple - and probably less important - but if critics (or their editors) must insist on putting a score at the end of their reviews, why are they deluding themselves about how accurate it’s possible to be? The idea that one person’s opinion could ever be summed up in an accurate percentile is hopefully already considered a 97% insane idea by all right-thinking people, so let's not dwell on that. The thing that we really need to take to task is the continuing prevalence of out-of-ten systems.

They don’t work.

Problem number one: no-one really knows what’s “average”. If a friend asked you to rate someone’s attractiveness and you said “5/10”, it would be more of an insult than a compliment. If you wanted to say something more neutral, you’d probably answer 7/10. (Or, if you’re that guy, you’d say, “out of ten I dunno but I’d definitely give her one!”) Most magazines and websites that score games out of ten will try to explain somewhere that five is what they give to games they consider “average”, yet the true mean of what they award over a period of time reliably comes out closer to seven than five. (Even for publications that pride themselves on being tough).

Problem number two: the bottom and top points of the scale are taboo. Imagine that next week I get asked to do a review for, let's say, Eurogamer. And let’s pretend that I get sent a hideous, broken piece of junk. I suffer a torturous few hours playing it through, and can’t wait to trash it when I get to writing it up. I obviously want to give it a low score, but I’m left with a problem: how low should I go? Is it so awful that it deserves 1/10, or does the catchy tune in the second level and the mildly diverting mini-game between stages three and four entitle it to 2/10 or 3/10? I honestly wouldn't know. Like any normal games player (remember point 1?) I generally try to avoid having too much experience playing the worst games that have ever been made. “This game is rubbish”- that’s all I know and that’s all my reader needs to know.

Presumably editors of games sites and magazines never ask themselves why a five-star ranking system is good enough for reviewing pretty much everything else. If they did, it surely wouldn't take them long to reach the staggeringly obvious conclusion that it’s the best way of doing it. More than anything, editors should be concerned with helping their writers stay focused on arguing their case well and being readable, not facilitating them in dithering over what precedent they need to follow when awarding a score.

 
1 + 2 + 3?

Until these things are sorted out, it's hard to see how critics can ever truly be honest- either with themselves or with their readers. Too many reviewers keep playing that losing game where they pretend their opinion can in some way be authoritative or an objective statement of a game’s worth. By doing so they put themselves under too much pressure to get it “right” and spend too much time worrying about looking foolish if their opinion differ too radically from their peers.
 
Proper critics know that their opinion cannot be “wrong”, it can only be argued unconvincingly. We should demand criticism that – like the very best games – dares to be different and follows its own agenda. Maybe then it will start to matter.