From a certain point of view…

I’ve talked a lot recently about personal taste and opinion. In ‘Can’t we all just get along‘, for example, I talk about how people seem to confuse personal preference with quality. Thinking along similar lines, I’ve also been wondering whether traditional video game reviews are actually a good idea…

A certain point of view…

I’ve been made to think about this on two separate occasions recently. Firstly, I was watching reviews of ‘The Wolf Among Us, Episode 2’ and saw two reviews with very different opinions of the game. One site said that it was not as well-paced, action-filled or interesting as Episode 1 had been, whereas the other said that it had a much richer atmosphere and was MORE interesting. This is, perhaps, not surprising when you realise that the first review is written by one guy, lets call him Steve, and the second by someone else, who we shall call Sarah, but I would argue that this is the problem. Steve and Sarah each bring their own opinions and biases to the table, the obvious one being gender, but I’m just talking about the difference in personal tastes.

Obviously the best thing to do is to watch both reviews and to try to make your own opinion, but even then are you getting the full picture? Metacritic might be  a good, as you get many reviews from across the spectrum, but how many of those reviews can you trust not to have been written by trolls or by people paid by the publisher trying to boost its score?

Curse of the Fanboys

Similarly, we need to consider whether the reviewer is a fan or foe of a game. This came to light recently when I watched a review of a game that was the latest in a series (I can’t remember which game, but lets pretend it was the latest Final Fantasy). The reviewer was clearly a fan of the series and was therefore already invested and may have been taken in by the nostalgia of the game. So is the opinion of an existing fan really helpful? Well, yes it can be, particularly to someone who is also a fan. However, as someone who isn’t a fan of the series, I think I would also appreciate an outsider’s opinion…

The Solution

I just think more people should be involved in the process of writing a review. I’m not necessarily talking about a ‘review by committee’, as that would be bad (like all committee-developed stuff). This is not necessarily a problem if you follow an individual on a blog (such as Zero Punctuation for example) because you can at least get an idea of whether you are likely to agree with that person, but a when a site like IGN does a review, it is less clear and could vary dramatically depending on which editor wrote the review. But at somewhere like IGN, other editors could give their own thoughts on a game, not all working together on the actual review, but all giving a short comment and perhaps their own review score at the end of the article so that you get a range of different opinions and can evaluate the game based all of them, rather than a single individual’s opinion.

Final Thoughts

I don’t necessarily expect individual bloggers (like myself!) to change their ways, but larger sites like IGN and The Escapist could definitely improve their reviews by getting second (and third, fourth…) opinions from some of their other journalists. This would give players a better idea about what people think of a game, without having to ‘shop around’ for other opinions or having to venture into the dark, wretched world beneath the word ‘Comments’…