Game Reviewing: Still Wrongheaded

November is apparently the month that I started gaming again. I’ve been immersed in Fable 2, Gears of War 2 and Rock Band 2 for the past few weeks, and enjoying all three of them quite a bit. Between that and N’gai Croal’s question about whether reviewers are missing the forest for the trees, the nuts and bolts of game reviewing is on my mind lately and, as always, I find that I can’t stand traditional gaming journalism - the softball interviews, the shoddy reviews, the lack of consistency that bedevils reviewers and editors alike.

I don’t like numbers, and not because I have an English degree either.  Well, not just.  Numbered reviews encourage people to look at the number and move on, but non-numbered reviews have a higher bounce because nobody wants to waste the time reading the review to find out whether or not the game is good.  The other problem with numbering is that a 7 from me might be a 9 from someone else and that a majority of reviews are never clear about how much a good or bad quality is affecting the score.  Oh, and of course, pressure from the publishers to score their games preferentially.

When we revamped the scoring system at Snackbar Games, we used a 1-5 scale, but attached meaningful tags to those numbers.  5 is Purchase, 4 is Niche (games that are really great, but aren’t for everyone), and 1 is Save Your Cash.  SBG also crowdsources its scores - users can submit their own scores and the site will show readers how fan opinion stacks up against the reviewer’s.

Numeration aside, though, I think reviews get it wrong because they all try to talk about graphics and control - pretty much the only thing that most games have in common.  This is stupid.  Every movie has a Key Grip, but we don’t talk about how much better the Key Grip on No Country For Old Men was than the Key Grip on Snakes On a Plane.  Listen, we keep saying that we want the media taken more seriously, but we try as slavishly as we can to compare Guitar Heros to Gears of Wars - excellent yet fundamentally different gaming experiences.

So, what’s the right way to do things?  I think it comes down to isolating what the game wants to do - something a good number of reviewers don’t think about, instead focusing on what they want the game to do - and measuring the game against its goal.  It’s tough to do that, and slightly presumptuous, so people shy away from doing it - it’s much easier to talk about a limiting camera or jaggy graphics than an interpretation of the full play experience.

If games are art, we’ve got to start evaluating them that way.