Video Game Journalism

The publishers care. The companies care. I have a Game Informer article that goes on the record saying Dead Space 2 got a rating of 89 on that site, so they docked everybody's pay. Their target was 90.

"Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy."

It's like the industry's equivalent of an e-peen. Every company wants to have their games scoring high.

Standing on the edge of the crater...

Gaming is an even more versatile medium than film as far as the range of what people are looking for in them go. I wish people would stop caring so much about an Eight Point Eight score when the numbers are largely useless.

They could make the best racing game ever made and I'd still probably consider it a personal 3 at best because I hate racing games. People could be all like, "Play this racing game, it has a 9.7 on Metacritic," and I still wouldn't enjoy it because I hate racing games. Meanwhile, I think Bioware's games are the best thing ever, and yet there is someone in my house whose attempt to play them ended in, "When will these people shut the f*ck up so I can kill dudes? STOP TALKING. WHAA WHAA DARKSPAWN. I DON'T GIVE A SHIT."

There's just too many things that different people are looking for in a game for any "Points out of X" system to be reliable.

edited 23rd Nov '14 9:26:43 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

On the Disney buying Nintendo thing, well, if Disney want to expand, and by all accounts and going on what they have been up to they DO want to expand, the only company that makes logical sense for them is Nintendo. If they went for Warner Brothers, things would go pear shaped with the FCC, and people would probably want to burn them out for having the cheek to have Batman and Wolverine in the same tent.

Polygon are far from the only American based news outlet that have done stories on a possible Ninty buyout by the House of the Mouse.

The idea of a Disney/Nintendo buyout is just, well, Goofy. First: Nintendo has tons of money, tons of fans, and is on completely solid ground as far as their business is going. They don't need a buy-out. Secondly, Disney doesn't need it. Expansion without purpose is unnecessary, and they've already got some people in the videogames industry.

"Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy."

The desires of both companies aside, I can give you two words that on their own explain exactly why Disney is not going to buy Nintendo.

Seattle Mariners.

Any deal to buy Nintendo, given their current ownership of that team, is going to be delayed until either the MLB Commissioner's office approves of it, or the team is sold off to someone else. Given the logistical nightmare either of those pose, Disney would be more likely to look into a different (and likely smaller) video game company if they wanted to expand in that direction.

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

Yes, Metacritic is stupid and review scores are arbitrary, more news at eleven.

Point is publishers, or more likely their shareholders who don't actually know anything about gaming, care about Metacritic scores so development studios keep ending up with clauses in their contracts that say they need to reach a certain score or they lose money, which brings us wonderful things like that latest Rome Total War game that was developed with ticking common reviewer bullet points in mind so the game would get a high Metacritic score despite being unfinished and buggy.

In this environment you cannot simply say to ignore a certain site if you disagree with them because they still have influence on the industry no matter if you actually read them. If review scores were abolished then yeah, sites would exist in a vacuum where only their opinion matters but, outside of a few specific sites, it doesn't seem like those scores are going anywhere because consumers flock to scored reviews to quickly see if someone gave that game they're hyped for the score they want it to have. Then they feel validated and good about themselves if it scored high or angry and betrayed if it scored low, in either case emotional highs are had. It's kind of sad.

Oh, I can haz a baseball team, or I can haz Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Smash Bros, Donkey Kong and THEME PARK RIDES based on all of those? That people across the planet will flock to like migratory geese on steroids?

Oh, that's a really hard one. Offer - One baseball team, slightly used. Low price accepted. Thankyouverymuch.

And on Nintendo being on sound financial ground, well, that's a bit off too:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/nintendo-swings-to-net-loss-1406706326

edited 23rd Nov '14 12:47:39 PM by TamH70

So when publishers engage in unethical anti-consumer practices and ruthlessly exploit their workers and the audience enables these companies the blame lies... with journalists? Journalists are more the victims of this arrangement than the cause of it, caught between their own unforgiving audience and the game publishers they depend on to provide release copies of games in order for them to do their job. The number of people in this thread who are apologists for reviled companies like Electronic Arts is truly shocking.

Now you understand the mindset of The Group We Dare Not Say Their Name.

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

Is the concept of "both journalists and game publishers are acting unethically" that hard to stomach?

"Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy."

Publishers are assholes so journalists are absolved of all responsibility? Is that what you're saying? Because that sounds like what you're saying.

Anyway, I am long past expecting publishers to improve. They are giant corporations run by committees of people who only care about profit. Journalists, I hope, are people who actually care about gaming so I expect them to do better. Review scores have a bad influence on the industry and the community, and it is entirely within the power of reviewing websites to follow the example of Kotaku of all places and abolish numerical scoring. I really don't see why they wouldn't.

Reallyits about ethics in journalism

Honestly the fault seems to lie with metacritic and companies using them as a metric than it does with the points review system in general

edited 23rd Nov '14 1:23:30 PM by hazzyhaz

I disagree. The system is arbitrary, uninformative and only leads to fanboy bitching because what they imagine an arbitrary number to mean is not in line with what the reviewer thought. It encourages people to just scroll to the bottom and look at the score instead of engaging with the text of the actual review. It is also the only thing that allows the video game section of Metacritic to even exist. Numeric scores are the root of all evil! Well, some of the evil anyway.

Total Biscuit has out out another video where he talks about game reviews for 30 minutes:

re Metacritic

and also this:

I think that this is basically due to people wanting information about a game quickly — before (or shortly after) it comes out. Then you really need a trusted set of critics.

Furthermore, when it comes to easily-handled bits of information about a game, it's easy to point to a Metacritic score. It's less easy to put a paragraph or even bullet list about features onto an advertising poster.

On the other hand, for people like myself — basically "long tail" consumers, generally buying products anywhere from six months to even a decade or more after their initial release — there's far more than enough information out there on the internet and more time for the hivemind to really just settle on some sort of consensus opinion.

I guess it also helps that I'm kinda used to older styles of games being shafted by Metacritic, so I go into it with very low expectations of its matching how I think.

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re startups, indies, and other things not covered by larger publishers (I believe you mean game publishers rather than publications)

Good point. Word of mouth...I guess?

One phenomenon of the internet is that now that everything IS pretty much global, there's little compartmentalization in which these smaller players can dominate local markets or something. The best opportunity there might be to serve customers who speak languages other than English or Japanese — the two dominant languages in the videogame industry — since language does serve as a means of compartmentalization — by which we mean product differentiation as well as ease of discovery. Culture as well, to a lesser extent.

That said, I'm not really qualified to talk much about this since I am a long-tail consumer and generally face far the problem of far too much information rather than too little.

It seems that, according to hazzyhaz, /r/games (is that a reddit or 4chan thing? I thought reddit but then there's a slash at the front...) gives examples of "non-traditional" media such as Youtube, selfposts, Kickstarter, etc..

As an aspirant indie developer whose first language is English and who doesn't want to limit himself to his own country or culture (and whose culture is probably insufficiently removed from "average" Western culture), that seems awfully limiting. :/

I suspect that you'd have less to go on in your hypothetical situation, at least regarding games not handled by big game-publishers: with fewer and less-popular inlets for information, smaller developers have far less ability to get information about their work out to the public, and so less is generated for consumers such as yourself, I imagine.

Put another way, I'm envisaging consumers of such publications as one of the "pumps" of information into the system that you eventually draw from. They read articles on those sites, then go off and discuss them amongst themselves. That discussion eventually feeds into the greater pool of information from which you take your guidance regarding games.

In all fairness, I don't really use Reddit, so I don't know much about how information moves on it.

Self-posts, review-copies (whether for actual review or other purposes, such as Let's Playing) and people watching crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indie Gogo, and then spreading word of interesting projects, could be—and I imagine very much are—a valuable source of information.

Hmm... Actually, that's a good point. If we're just removing traditional gaming sites (such as The Escapist) and presumably print magazines, then, while I still feel that the flow of information would be lessened, there might yet be enough for smaller developers. I do still think that such smaller developers would be most inconvenienced—the big game-publishers likely have the money to market via other means, and so would be less significantly affected, I imagine.

However, you mentioned as the template for this hypothetical that you get your information primarily from friends and forum postings, and don't follow traditional publications; where does that leave Let's Players in our hypothetical? Are they no longer a source of information regarding new games?

edited 23rd Nov '14 4:55:20 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

My Games & Writing

It's reddit. Typing /r/insertsubreddithere will cause the reddit page to autolink to whatever sub that is. It's the same format for users (/u/yourusernamehere).

Reddit. my bad. Its usual to use /r/blablah because that automatically hyperlinks to the relevant place

Theres nothing inherently wrong with a numbers system and can be used effectively. For example, polygon played and rated the master chief collection and simcity highly at first, but later harshly downrated them, because of online problems drastically affecting the quality of play.

It's a really effective and simple way to summarize a polarizing game.

"This game is a rare gem filled with vibrancy and character, but is sadly marred by a slew of bugs and technical incompetency." You can take a review like this in so many ways. A 6 says to wait for a patch because these bugs are awful while an 8 says it's worth slogging through the bugs. Or in ign's case they find the water to be such an egregiously bad design that it dragd the wholr thing down.

There is nothing wrong with aggregating reviews either, or reddit would never have gotten off the ground. The problem is when peoplr take it to be more than it is and base things like pay off it inflexibly. Fot example, my professor may say that 90 is the cutoff for an A but he is willing to take my appeal if i have an 89. If zenimax didnt look beyond NV's 84 then that's on them, and not metacritic.

I still disagree with the entire notion. Game scores mean different things to different people, they vary from site to site, their supposed meanings are not adhered to strictly. They are only conducive to laziness and angry arguing and their meaning can be far better expressed in some lines of text than with a single ambiguous number.

Oh wow, after that Total Biscuit video I have even less respect for Metacritic, due to things like invisible weighting of sources and attempting to hamfistedly combine ratings from various sources. And I didn't have much respect for it to start with, anyway.

Good to hear that he espouses ignoring scores. It's far too easy to take scores as first impressions and convenient "summaries" of opinions, but there really are a lot of problems with reducing a game to a single number. It's slightly alleviated by showing separate ratings for different categories, but it's honestly still best to just read the review's text. Incidentally, the text will also tell you how much you can trust the reviewer to approximate your own perspective.

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That is, and that's probably a flaw of my own practice which usually just leads me to say that I'm thankful that not everyone is like me.

Well, for what it's worth, I also have basically no interest (or trust, I guess) in big-name publishers and their marketing anyway. It is a very rare day that that a game marketed to me that way will pique my interest. Though this is probably also a function of the fact that I'm not particularly interested in the general kinds of games that they offer these days...if they did offer the kinds of games I like, this might be different.

They are "valid" sources in this hypothetical, I guess. I guess things like L Ps on Youtube take the place of reviews.

Which might be better since they usually just aim to show off gameplay (and/or the player's reactions to them) as opposing to aiming to evaluate a game.

Fanboy arguments is a problem with the fanboys, not the reviews?

I'm inclined to agree, I believe.

Consider, for example, two hypothetical games, which we'll simply call "A" and "B"; A has excellent graphics but a poor story, while B has the reverse, and both have acceptable gameplay. A given reviewer considers gameplay and story to be of roughly equal value, and so gives A and B the same score.

But let's say that I value story more highly than gameplay. For me, B is superior to A, but this isn't reflected in the score.

Now, as mentioned, this could be alleviated by using multiple scores, one for each element of the game. But even then, the scores don't encapsulate everything that might be useful: A and B might both have good gameplay, but if A has a combat system that I'm inclined to dislike and B has one that I like, then again the score doesn't help me.

I could gather the difference by reading the text of the review, of course—at which point what is the point of reading the score?

Even as a general figure, individual tastes come into play: I might enjoy a game that's given a low rating, just as I might enjoy a movie that is disparaged by critics. Again, reading the text may well help me to discover this (as in a critic pointing out that a movie is "just an action-fueled monster-movie"—which may be just what I want at the time)—and again, the score seems to have little utility.

Fair enough—although in our hypothetical I would presume that at least some people would still want such games—otherwise the scenario more or less hamstrings publishers by re-writing the tastes of the audience. :P

True, although I think that some points might be better served in an actual review, whether textual or spoken, especially spoilers or points regarding sections of the game after the late stage: I don't know about you, but when I become interested in a game via a Let's Play, I often stop watching the Let's Play in order to avoid spoiling the game too much. A review—and especially a full review rather than a first impression—however, can deal with that by simply writing or speaking tactfully.

For example, if a game has a significant problem three-quarters of the way into play, that might be something that I'd like to know about ahead of time—but might also be something that I'm unlikely to discover via a Let's Play or first-impression. A review can simply state the problem, without actually going into spoilery specifics.

My Games & Writing

They happen because people look at an arbitrary number and then assume it to mean whatever makes them the angriest. If there was no number they would actually have to read the damn review where the writers opinions are adequately explained and contextualized.

edited 24th Nov '14 4:22:40 AM by McSomeguy

I don't understand why you're blaming the review for people being stupid

People shank others with knives so we should ban knives?