Shawn Elliott’s Review Symposium
Shawn Elliott has recently posted the first in what will hopefully become a series of posts questioning game reviews and critiques, based on an idea he had when he still worked as a games journalist. The themes Elliott planned (plans?) to use are based on ideas covering the whole spectrum of issues surrounding game reviews.
Review Scores
Reader Backlash
Reviews in the Age of Social Media
Reviews in the Mainstream Media
Casual, Indie, and User-Generated Games
Review Ethics
Reviews vs. Criticism
Evolving the Review
Topics which I myself would love to see discussed (and most likely will discuss in later Review Review editorials).
Troy S. Goodfellow (Flash Of Steel) has written an interesting reply to Elliott’s proposals. He concludes that although interesting to people like us, chances are topics like this will find it hard to impact the mainstream.
But, for the most part, people are more interested in the scandalous stuff – how publishers ‘œbuy’ good reviews, whether or not people are ‘œteh bias’. There is no single way to write a review or a critique and some sites may prefer one over the other. And, even as readers pretend to care about ‘œthe craft’, it’s always the score and who is in whose pocket that generates forum and feedback noise.
I agree this very pessimistic outlook is indeed the case, for now. The fact articles like this exist, however, shows that the number of gamers looking for more depth to their games and subsequent reviews is increasing.
News Tags: 1up, Flash of Steel, reviews, Shawn Elliott
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There are plenty of topics that aren’t interesting to the average person, but the fact that the topics are being discussed is important in that it allows the subject of the discussion to be taken seriously by the average person. In order for video games to be taken seriously, we have to work on a unique review system, that doesn’t borrow from the movie industry… even if some people don’t get it.
Even though Goodfellow says “score and who is in whose pocket” are some things that makes all the “noise” I really think its more of word of mouth that should spread if a game is good or not. Sadly, that doesn’t happen enough and everyone just ends up reading reviews online.
For example I read the Prince of Persia review (on IGN) and found it difficult to read. It talks about the game referencing different things so much that it’s hard to grasp.
If we’re going to use online reviews as a standard judging tool, there needs to be a standard of rating that tool (like saying “this is a good review” or something). The problem with any kind of rating system is you’ll get fanboys who’ll mess with it and try and turn it in their favor.
Yikes, this is getting long. I should just write about this… next week >.>;;
Btw, I realize that I only talked about one small detail of the article instead of the main idea of it so it’s a little off topic. >.>;;