Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less

by Jamison DeLorenzo

Understanding the role of a game critic has become a rather difficult task. Game critics have many different facets to their job - advertising for games, informing the public, washing hands with publishers, entertaining viewers, and so forth. Knowing how to handle all of these so-called responsibilities can be difficult. Sometimes you get fired just for speaking your mind.

During my early years of writing about games I took it upon myself to write reviews whenever I could about any game in my illustrious library. There is always an uphill battle due to having to front the costs for every game and getting new people to pay attention. Coming up with a system that you are comfortable with and having it mean something to people is always the biggest challenge. There is almost nothing to gain by copying systems that are already in place because regurgitating information is never original or interesting. In fact, regurgitation is often quite disgusting.

It took me a couple of years to realize that writing reviews was largely for my own edification. I did get occasional e-mails from people asking questions about games I had not reviewed yet, which was refreshing, but it was never a fulfilling hobby. Gaming was the primary hobby, so the futile reviewing was put to bed and the endless gaming continued.

Several years later my semi-weekly rants starting to become a norm. I had built up a lot of anger over many years of playing horrible games, listening to idiotic reviews, and seeing idiotic mistakes made with console technology. Eventually these rants started to become relatively coherent. This was a big development considering the number of e-mails I got when writing about things I didn’t really understand. Still, they always served as a highly customized aphrodisiac to calm my nerves.

Today, I find myself wondering what the real role of a game reviewer was in today’s gaming culture. This sounds like an asinine question, but there is a philosophical question at hand. We have so many different reviewing publications and sites that hand out numbers and awards the accolades have almost completely lost all meaning (this is more commonly known as the Jiminy Jillickers Effect). For example, you must find it disturbing how many different video games can become a Game of the Year.

In a sense that sounds like I’m suggesting that only one group should be able to give a game this, or any other title. The Ivory Tower approach is hardly the situation I think we should be in either, but the number of reviewers should be trimmed down. Reading differing opinions on games is always a good thing, provided that there is anecdotal evidence backing up the claims that are made.

A lot of what you read now about games is very comical. I don’t even mean funny comical - I often mean comical with respect to degree of incompetence or integrity. Once we started having visual proof that reviewers were being paid money to say positive things about games the game reviewer in the public eye shifted from honest reviewer to company spokesperson. You cannot take these people seriously. They are paid to write positive things or too scared to write negative things because they won’t get advanced copies of future games (which is the crux of my argument that most video game reviewers are inconsequential).

More to the point, sometimes money was never needed to get reviewers to write positive things about games. Lawsuits, or even the lingering stench thereof, kept certain reviewers from saying what they really wanted to say about a game.

This was part of larger problem that the Jeff Gerstmann firing raised. He wrote a game with a score that was deemed to be too low by his employer, so he was fired. Naturally, this was not the reason GameSpot gave, but you cannot expect a company to ever seriously admit fault no matter how transparent the lie is.

Think about what sources you implicitly trust for honest game reviews. How many different sources are there? If it’s a publication, how many of the reviewers that work there do you trust? What is the lowest score for any game you have seen from them? Which games have received the highest scores? Are they owned by a parent company that also produces games or consoles? Do they provide concrete reasons for why they like or dislike certain games? If you have not thought about these questions before it is time you start doing so.

To me, the mark of consistent reasoning behind reviews is not the most important ideal anymore. I need to see a publication have the testicular fortitude to give bad games bad scores. Find a game that is absolutely terrible on almost every level (e.g. Apex, Driver 3) - did they get a score below 30% (or even 50%)? I need to know that a site is willing to completely bury a game when it is deserved.

If you want to know the worst about games you need to find people that work on the entertainment of how games are described and ignore the professional reviewer. My current hypothesis is that web comics are the most informative game reviews we have going. The weekly Zero Punctuation web comic, one of the funniest and most entertaining running pieces in the known universe, is popular because he is, along with other reasons, willing to completely skewer a game when necessary. The same thing holds true for Penny Arcade.

Look, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a subscription or two to gaming magazines or monitoring several gaming websites to get information. Getting previews and detailed descriptions on games far into the future are very invaluable. All I am saying is that placing your faith in one source for video game reviews, or any other form of information for that matter, is always a bad idea… except for me.

You can always trust me.

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