Game Reviews ... How Do You Review Art?

The Escapist (easily the single best game industry "magazine" on the planet) is running a piece on the seedy underbelly of game reviews. I can't help but agree with a lot of the points in the article. Reviewing games (or movies, or any other sort of art) is always going to be controversial. They never seem to do a product justice, they're totally arbitrary and loaded with bias (or worse, favoritism), and really don't seem to affect how a game sells at all.

There are aspects of game reviewing that the article never quite gets to. Reviewers are unconsciously pressured into not only skewing a review score because of the pressures mentioned in the story, but even the language can be crafted to try to get a review onto the box or into an ad campaign as promotion for the publication.

The "games as art" thing is a oft-debated issue, and despite the fact that every game "journalist" (as if there was such a thing, don't get me started) has broached the topic at one point or another, I decided to wade into it for a research paper at the University of Washington. I took it in what I feel is a different direction, keeping it personal as all artisitc experiences should be. You can download a PDF copy of my "Video Games as Art" paper, or you can e-mail me for a file. One thing that I came across is that some of the games that were most like art (to me) didn't sell very well.

And there's the root of the problem. For as much as games (and movies) are an art form, they're also a consumer product, and anytime someone is exchanging money for something, they want to know what they're going to get in advance and whether or not it will be worth it. The product has to make a value proposition, and the end result needs to meet or exceed that proposition. Valve is a company that gets this on a deep, fundamentatal level. Gamers know that if they buy Half-Life, they'll get a great game. But they'll also get enough free content and other game experiences with it that they could play that game for YEARS. The reviews just don't matter, because the value proposition is blown out of the water.

So I've finally reached a level where I feel I can put my metaphorical foot down and say, I'm not going to review games anymore. Everyone's experience will be different with a game, so all I can really tell you is whether or not you should Buy It, Rent It, or Skip It. Anything else is just background and opinion, but those two words are enough to tell you whether or not a game meets or exceeds its value proposition. I could talk at excruciating length about how gorgeous a game's graphics are, or how the controls work, or how it sounds, but in the end, none of that matters unless you play the game (or don't).

Thus, I'm getting rid of all the fluff, and Two Word Reviews is born. The great part about this is that it simply doesn't matter how long I play a game, or finish it, or anything about me. It becomes all about whether or not a game is worth the price they're charging, or the price to get it into your hands temporarily. (On that note, I should specify that when I say "Rent It", I'm talking about a service like GameFly, so we're talking roughly $20/mo. or just under half the price of the game.) Pretty much all opinion is taken out of the equation, because by and large, the value proposition of most people is the same.

It'll be an interesting experiment. I'll probably never get my review on a box, most game websites wouldn't want to run these reviews (or pay for two words), but I know I'll feel a lot better about it.