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we all know there is only one objective way to review games
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Jun 1, 2016 05:36
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Incoherence posted:Even that's subject to variance between reviewers. I love Killer 7 but it plays like a railshooter and the story is written by a Japanese weirdo with a tenuous grasp of American geography and doesn't make a ton of sense. I could imagine a well-meaning reviewer giving it a very wide range of scores. While what you're describing is ideal it's not really possible currently due to immense churn in critics, and I don't see that stopping any time soon. The minuscule barrier to entry means lots of new voices and perspectives but it also means almost none of them can actually pay the bills to push those perspectives unless they aim straight at paid programming, which is honestly fine but even then most seem to crash in short time. For a film comparison, waaaaaay back in the 90s when I lived in LA I got the bulk of my movie reviews from the LA Times (also because there wasn't an internet to speak of). I got lucky that I generally agreed with their lead reviewer's views on film (Turran) and a couple of their secondary reviewers were reliable to my tastes for certain genres (but useless in others). Those people were around for at least a decade (I think Turran is still at it). Who in games criticism from the 90s is still writing? Who in games criticism from 2010 is still writing without coming from a major pre-existing outlet? Hell, who in film from 2010 is still writing that wasn't long-established by a major outlet, as identified on RT as the "top critics"? If the method you describe was working we should be seeing a lot of reasoned, well-written, differing perspectives rapidly broadening the dialogue but... it's just not. Even interesting points get undermined by clearly pre-selected conclusions, sub-D&D levels of intent projecting, and just naked incompetence. The 90s LA Times only having 4-5 voices isn't ideal, and if I didn't like them there were other options but not many, but all of those people were (presumably) supporting themselves simply by watching, analyzing, and writing about movies while continuing to grow as critics. The closest to internet-mode of that was probably the AV Club, but they all left to The Dissolve, which died, and their AVC replacements just aren't that good (and frankly seem to improve too slowly). Dr.Stab posted:When you're talking about what a game does well/doesn't do well, that's a very subjective matter. Doing well doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's only if people experience the game and enjoy it that you can say whether the game is successful in its goals. If one reviewer didn't enjoy the experience of playing a game because they are grossed out by the depiction of women, is that a less objective opinion than if they didn't enjoy a game because the platforming feels too floaty to them? Zachack fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 05:53
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It seems like the way video games "should" be talked about is in a way that is useful to the critics audience. I play games almost exclusively for their mechanics, and how those mechanics interact with the game world and also for a challenge vs other players, as such don't really give a poo poo about the clothing the characters in the game are wearing or the characters back story's. So if someone regurgitated to me something about why the all-male cast of TF2 characters is problematic, or that the Pyro is actually a lesbian, I'd probably just make fun of them on the internet. However I also acknowledge that everyone isn't me, and that some people play games for the "story." Thus I'd expect a critic who liked games for the story to discuss/critique the story with all that entails. Some people play games for other reasons, and some critics have their own moral-crusade they care about, and maybe some aspects of their analysis is interesting enough, but they in no way represent anything that "should" be, or the "correct way" to enjoy a game. So really the OPs question is loaded since the "right" answer only depends on what the individual is looking for. For me the "right way" to talk about most games is via the mechanics, and the consequences those mechanics have on the game world. But others obviously feel that games should personally speak to them via the character you play, their back-story, their struggle, the game-world etc. So for those people the way we "should" talk about those games differs greatly. Neither is more "valid" or "better" then the other, it depends on the audience.
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Jun 1, 2016 06:59
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Most games use resident evil 4's gameplay to tell a movie-inspired story, they usually suck at exposition and often disregard subtext entirely. You're lucky if they run at a decent framerate and you're even luckier if the gameplay isn't a complete rehash of RE4 / a walking simulator. I propose the following as a test to check if a game is any good: Play it for the first time while skipping/disregarding all non-interactive sections, such as cutscenes.
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Jun 1, 2016 07:01
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Dapper_Swindler posted:Pretty much this and its kinda what i want. Opinion pieces are fine. but when i look for game review. i want to know what the basic premise is, how it plays. what it does well and what it doesn't. A review is specifically an opinion piece, you can't separate the two. What you want is someone to review from the same perspective as you, which is fine and given your stated opinions that's something you can get from Game Informer or the like. What you seem to annoyed about is that people are reviewing from any perspective different than yours, though the unstated "mainstream reviews are slanted garbage pushed by adverts and developer access" seems to be a major point too. I can accept that there's people out there reviewing games that don't match my tastes at all without whinging about it constantly, why is this such a problem for so many gamers? If you're worried that AAA gaming will go away because of some art critics, I wouldn't lose any sleep. AAA design is way more likely to fall apart due to economic issues and the unsustainable house of cards it's set up for itself. But you may see some of these critics' ideas filter into these games (because dev studios have to realize on some level the sameness of the products being put out, and thus see that small changes might reap better rewards) which seems to be the fear of the "objective" review crowd in the first place.
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Jun 1, 2016 08:48
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bewilderment posted:
I can't think of an AAA game that isn't the Avatar of gaming. Dapper_Swindler posted:I guess i dont completely buy the whole "critize because we love it" thing. because i have never seen any of these people talk about stuff they liked in something like GTA or DOOM or whatever. its almost always a puzzle game or a walking sim. Different strokes? I'd love to see the "walking sim" genre expanded upon because I think it's interesting, and I don't enjoy action games.
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Jun 1, 2016 09:07
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Zachack posted:While what you're describing is ideal it's not really possible currently due to immense churn in critics, and I don't see that stopping any time soon. The minuscule barrier to entry means lots of new voices and perspectives but it also means almost none of them can actually pay the bills to push those perspectives unless they aim straight at paid programming, which is honestly fine but even then most seem to crash in short time. Powercrazy posted:So really the OPs question is loaded since the "right" answer only depends on what the individual is looking for. For me the "right way" to talk about most games is via the mechanics, and the consequences those mechanics have on the game world. But others obviously feel that games should personally speak to them via the character you play, their back-story, their struggle, the game-world etc. So for those people the way we "should" talk about those games differs greatly. I'll use Saints Row 4 as another example. Saints Row 4 gives you superpowers very early in the game, allowing you to basically Hulk-bounce across the map. This breaks a lot of the systems in SR3 (which sort of makes sense given that SR4 was originally intended as an expansion pack): you no longer need a car at all, wanted level is very easy to get rid of, and you have a lot more options for open-world combat. The game then invents a series of excuses for why your superpowers temporarily don't work in campaign missions. Personally, I consider this a big reason why I liked SR4 less than SR3: it made the open world feel a lot smaller and less impactful, and removed the possibility of emergent storylines that could come from just driving around getting into trouble. Others consider this a big improvement: it removed a lot of the tedium of shuttling from place to place and let you concentrate on doing cool poo poo. Both of these are valid, defensible views. Neither is somehow "tainted" by association with the game's storyline.
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Jun 1, 2016 09:12
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Zachack posted:I'd expect the grossed out person to also comment on floaty platforming if the platforming is actually (and clearly unintentionally) floaty. Some games are just amateur hour in construction, just like film, TV, books, etc. Not all reviewers will be able to recognize unorthodoxy and some may not place much weight on, say, a bad UI, but some games clearly fail at mechanics/playability to a degree that the price tag becomes unjustified. I'm sure someone out there would like to play a form of Gran Tourismo where cars fly into mountains but they should still recognize their biases when saying "buy this game for $60". I don't care much for sports games but if Madden 2017 plays like a modern update of NFL Blitz with career mode by Oliver Stone and 15 minutes of game time before a memory leak crashes the system then I should be able to identify and communicate that "football simulation game" is anything but instead of solely gurgling how great it is I can bodyslam the Miami Sharks while injecting microtransaction steroids. What I was getting at there wasn't that floaty platforming is an objectively bad thing, but something that is subject to taste. Some people like it when a platformer feels a certain way, and some people don't. I think you're discounting how much the bits about games you don't like are intentionally designed. You're also discounting the subjectivity in determining the degree to which technical flaws in games contribute to the overall opinion of the game. Some flaws can be considered minor to some and major to others. Also, If a reviewer enjoys the flying cars game, should they discount that in their review if they feel that their opinion isn't shared by the majority of the audience? Does "Objective" mean "In line with the majority opinion?" I feel like you're a little misguided in assuming that the underlying message of a positive review is "Everyone should go and buy this game for MSRP" and not "I enjoyed this game a lot, here's what I liked about it, go form your own opinions based on this." I'm also not sure what you're talking about with the Madden example. I certainly agree that reviews don't have to be entirely positive, and can discuss any aspect of the game they feel is important. I guess I'm a little confused as to what an Objective review looks like as compared to a Subjective review. Maybe some examples of both would help to show what you're talking about. Incoherence posted:This still leaves you with the same subjectivity problem: a well-meaning reviewer who focuses solely on mechanics can still come up with a variety of valid evaluations of those mechanics. There's no way for a given reviewer to satisfy all of their potential readers in this way. I think you're agreeing with each other here. Powercrazy is using the focus on story as an example of how different people can like different things, and not as a means of deriving objectivity in game reviews.
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Jun 1, 2016 14:39
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Dr. Stab posted:What I was getting at there wasn't that floaty platforming is an objectively bad thing, but something that is subject to taste. Some people like it when a platformer feels a certain way, and some people don't. I think you're discounting how much the bits about games you don't like are intentionally designed. You're also discounting the subjectivity in determining the degree to which technical flaws in games contribute to the overall opinion of the game. Some flaws can be considered minor to some and major to others. Several of the most valuable, even central mechanics in competitive games developed as accidents. Combos were a glitch in the original Street Fighter; StarCraft: Brood War has literally dozens of unintended mechanics that contribute to its skillfulness, without which the game wouldn't have had anywhere near as much longevity. Movement in the original Tribes was so unique (and so poorly understood, even by its developers) that people have literally written academic articles on how to recreate it. Quake 3 had/has a subculture built around not even playing the game as a deathmatch shooter and instead just taking movement techniques that were originally discovered in that context and experimenting to see how far you could push them. I am of course coming from a school of thought that values skill, and even outright domination. The mountain of knowledge and practice required and the possibility of running into someone orders of magnitude better than you and losing without getting the chance to do anything are positives to me. These are not neutral values, even though they're very closely bound to mechanics. 3/4 of those twitter posts someone linked earlier were dumb as hell (who cares what Kojima said personally, what does that have to do with analyzing his game?) but he was getting closer to something important with the last one. In real life I'm a borderline pacifist, but my fantasy, and my aesthetic preferences in gaming, really are about "violence directed at living things" -- it's more fun to "beat" another player, a real person. I like control, hate randomness, and I like measuring my control against another player's in a zero-sum context. Of course, I don't accept the argument that these tastes are ethically bankrupt, which is why I emphasize aesthetics. There's a bit of both, but even the ethical side is more complicated than "violent game bad" -- for instance, is it bad for someone who grew up in poverty to fantasize about being judged on their merits in an environment completely stripped of bad luck, where everyone starts out on materially equal footing? There's all kinds of stuff about masculinity, class, subculture, etc. going on there. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 15:31
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One of the major problems in games journalism/criticism is that it has a couple big strikes working in concert to keep talented people from staying in it long:
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Jun 1, 2016 19:07
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Everblight posted:One of the major problems in games journalism/criticism is that it has a couple big strikes working in concert to keep talented people from staying in it long: And this isn't quite the same problem as Silicon Valley reporting: the problem with Silicon Valley reporting is that there's a sizeable contingent of people on both sides who actually believe the bullshit they spew about how they are going to Disrupt Everything and Change The World by selling a $700 juicer that only works with its own $5 juice packs.
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Jun 1, 2016 20:12
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Dr. Stab posted:I guess I'm a little confused as to what an Objective review looks like as compared to a Subjective review. Reviews are inherently subjective unless it's merely a list of facts and technical specifications. The Avengers stars Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man and Chris Evans as Captain America as group of superheroes form an alliance to fight an alien menace, and runs for 2 hours and 23 minutes. That's objective. Whether the acting is effective or if the action is enjoyable is subjective. There's no way around this. People want objective reviews because they want to claim the things they like are objectively good. The people yelling about this are yelling because some critic somewhere said something bad about something they like, like Uncharted 4's one bad review that didn't even ding its metacritic score. There's nothing deeper behind it than dick-waving. See, I don't like bad things, I objectively have good taste. The game I like is good and you like poo poo, idiot loser. 
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Jun 1, 2016 21:13
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I can't think of an AAA game that isn't the Avatar of gaming. If the new Doom is AAA then it's probably the Mad Max Fury Road of gaming. It's the fourth one, it's a semi-reboot, action is great, story is simple but good. And just like Fury Road, the action is always in the crosshairs 
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Jun 2, 2016 02:22
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bewilderment posted:If the new Doom is AAA then it's probably the Mad Max Fury Road of gaming. yeah thats pretty much correct.
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Jun 2, 2016 02:23
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Just briefly chiming in, but separating mechanics from aesthetics is absurd. Just look at Dark Souls, every single mechanic in the game reinforces the narrative, even the combat style (slow and ponderous vs Bloodbourne's more energetic system). Dark Souls would be a wildly different experience without its extreme difficulty; dying over and over again does alot to sell the on-the-brink-of-apocalypse tension.
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Jun 2, 2016 18:35
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One problem with reviews is that a lot of people push for objectivity and such, and then get pissy whenever game they are anticipating or looking forward to gets a 8.4 or some poo poo.
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Jun 2, 2016 23:12
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Games can have artistic aspirations or elements, but there are far too many self-important critics who don't care/aren't equipped to analyze games as product. And when a large part of your job is to tell a consumer whether or not a thing is worth their $60/$20/$15/free w. App purchases, you have to learn to get right the gently caress over yourself when it comes to things like tying the latest shootman game to race riots in a "review" while neglecting to fully explore and explain the quality/lack thereof of a game's core feedback loop (which ultimately is what separates games from other mediums and is why, IMO, walking sims get the rap they do). For whatever reason, a lot of game writers can't or won't do this. More and more of them seem to think they're in line for a Pulitzer for their coverage of big stupid shooter 201X, if only they can tie it to Current Headlines. I'm not going to get into why that may be - I have my theories, but that thread is dangerously close to Gamergate talk, which I don't see going well in here. The other issue is one of basic competency, which used to be a given if your job was to write about games. Now you have things like a writer for Polygon who captured video of himself playing the new Doom like he had never touched a controller, up to and including shooting at medkits. It's like finding out the staff of a book review periodical is, to a man, illiterate. All this means that "traditional" game journalism is becoming less relevant, writing for an increasingly insular group of fellow critics and a dwindling audience of what a less charitable person might call sycophants. Meanwhile, companies are starting to withhold review copies in favor of giving access to Youtube channels, and consumers are writing them off in favor of watching streams to determine quality before a purchase. Game journalism brought it on itself. It would be like a "review" of the iPhone that told you next to nothing about features, but focused on how poo poo Foxconn is. That site would go out of business fast, but game journalism is a business full to the brim of that kind of navel gazing.
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Jun 3, 2016 01:04
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reviews and criticism are not the same thing and conflating the two is a huge part of the reason why games criticism is so bad
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Jun 3, 2016 01:12
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:reviews and criticism are not the same thing and conflating the two is a huge part of the reason why games criticism is so bad agreed. but https://killscreen.com/articles/homefront-revolution-everything-wrong-america/ call this a review(the site calls it a review and its under the review section) when its more of angry political critique. I played this game, it is an indeed poo poo. but after playing through the whole thing. i didnt see their idea of right wing masturbation shooter, just a poorly written resistance story that rips of half life 2 way to much. the ending of the review is him just quoting howard zinn. they did the same kind of "review" with the devision. if you want to make artcle critquing the games morality/ethics/"problematic" do it. don't call it a review though.
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Jun 3, 2016 01:28
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I admit that I mostly read board/tabletop game reviews these days, but I've found that the newer the product the worse the criticisms/reviews tend to be, and I'm sure a lot of that is because of the aforementioned (often real) fear that designers will stop sending free product to you if you give harsh reviews plus the need to get something out while it's hot on everyone's lips. Some of the best board game critics I can think of look at games after having played them 15+ times - which probably translates to 30-40 hours for most board games I'm interested in - and that's going to lead to a much more nuanced look at how mechanics evoke different gameplay styles and so forth. Honestly people seem to get hostile when you review something negatively despite playing it a great deal; I constantly see people respond to those sort of criticisms with "well you clearly enjoyed it if you had 100+ hours in the game." To me that makes you more able to give a thorough, honest opinion of something, not less.
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Jun 3, 2016 01:51
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Dapper_Swindler posted:agreed. but https://killscreen.com/articles/homefront-revolution-everything-wrong-america/ call this a review(the site calls it a review and its under the review section) when its more of angry political critique. I played this game, it is an indeed poo poo. but after playing through the whole thing. i didnt see their idea of right wing masturbation shooter, just a poorly written resistance story that rips of half life 2 way to much. the ending of the review is him just quoting howard zinn. they did the same kind of "review" with the devision. if you want to make artcle critquing the games morality/ethics/"problematic" do it. don't call it a review though. The same is actually true of mechanics: a lot of indie games use pixel art in part because pixel art is sufficient to convey the information they want to convey, and that doesn't necessarily make them worse than a realistic-looking AAA game, but there's a line at which the aesthetic starts to interfere with gameplay. (For me, Bit.Trip Runner had this problem.) And, again, if you didn't like this review, then find a critic that shares your opinions. None of the critics are making any money anyway, so there should be plenty of equally-broke ones to choose from. Countblanc posted:Honestly people seem to get hostile when you review something negatively despite playing it a great deal; I constantly see people respond to those sort of criticisms with "well you clearly enjoyed it if you had 100+ hours in the game." To me that makes you more able to give a thorough, honest opinion of something, not less.
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Jun 3, 2016 01:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:reviews and criticism are not the same thing and conflating the two is a huge part of the reason why games criticism is so bad I think there's a lot to this, and I think as game journalists have shown time and again they are ready to die on their chosen hill instead of make changes to the way they operate or label their work, you're going to see the traditional games-as-product reviews get shifted to Youtube types who are increasingly more trusted than the "let's discuss the implications of a lovely Homefront sequel in the wake of the American Police State" crowd. I think developers/publishers are finally getting tired of having their products dinged for baggage that game journalists (who probably don't make enough to pay for much-needed therapy) project onto their "reviews." If I'm sending out press copies for the purposes of facilitating a review, I have a reasonable expectation that the product will be graded on its merits, and not be used as some kind of intellectual wank exercise. If this isn't the case, drat right I'm pulling access in the future. We can argue all day long where "graded on its merits" ends and "intellectual wank exercise" begins,, but it's safe to say that when a writer comes flat out and says "I’ll come clean here—frankly, I don’t give a drat whether or not Homefront: The Revolution is fun," like the KS writer did, we're well over that line. In a situation like that, you bet I'd pull access in the future. This is going to leave the "traditional" game journalist types to transition (as they already have to some extent, IMO) into self-styled academic, "but what does it meaaaaaaaaaan" types. The joke, of course, is that your average Polygon/Killscreen/Kotaku/Etc. writer couldn't properly structure or, more importantly, defend an idea against criticism if their lives depended on it. If they were applying for a PHD, they'd be triggered to find there's no way to place the dissertation committee on a muted blocklist. There's also been some discussion in here about how there's no money in this, which is kind of true. It's always funny/weird to see the occasional meltdown, live on social media for all to see, when games writers don't feel they're getting what they're worth, despite this being a field with zero bar to entry, a field of increasing irrelevance, and yet a field with 100s of aspirants for every one open slot at a paid position. Samantha Allen, a transgender writer, once wrote a screed on a now-deleted Tumblr where she complained about not getting a job at Giant Bomb (that probably got hundreds, if not thousands of resumes) and compared herself to a comet that could not sustain its brilliant flash (lol). Leigh Alexander, a far better known writer, went on a Twitter rant about how she doesn't feel appreciated because not enough people donate to her Patreon. Both of these women no longer write about video games, and I'd argue both they and the audience are better off for it.
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Jun 3, 2016 03:35
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my point was more that you're making a false dichotomy and the problem is not categorically that people are doing "intellectual wank exercises" but rather that just aren't very good at it mechanics are important, content is important, and good criticism (even good feminist criticism) is about understanding first, condemnation or approval second, but that doesn't mean it's all a waste
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Jun 3, 2016 03:45
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bloodysabbath posted:I think there's a lot to this, and I think as game journalists have shown time and again they are ready to die on their chosen hill instead of make changes to the way they operate or label their work, you're going to see the traditional games-as-product reviews get shifted to Youtube types who are increasingly more trusted than the "let's discuss the implications of a lovely Homefront sequel in the wake of the American Police State" crowd. I think developers/publishers are finally getting tired of having their products dinged for baggage that game journalists (who probably don't make enough to pay for much-needed therapy) project onto their "reviews." If I'm sending out press copies for the purposes of facilitating a review, I have a reasonable expectation that the product will be graded on its merits, and not be used as some kind of intellectual wank exercise. If this isn't the case, drat right I'm pulling access in the future. We can argue all day long where "graded on its merits" ends and "intellectual wank exercise" begins,, but it's safe to say that when a writer comes flat out and says "I’ll come clean here—frankly, I don’t give a drat whether or not Homefront: The Revolution is fun," like the KS writer did, we're well over that line. In a situation like that, you bet I'd pull access in the future. pretty much this. most of the reviews i look at are on youtube or smaller sites like gamesradar, most of the time i just go with gut feeling and gameplay videos. I think its more that alot of the "journalists" realize that they are in dead end jobs with poo poo pay, so now they are trying to pretend they are something greater. they want to pretend to be muckrakers and get "triggered" by stuff in video games and write it as reviews. Homefront is crap, but this guys is just projecting his anger at the current political shitmess onto some dumb game written by brits and the dude who wrote far cry 4. its dumb and it just kinda sounds like whining. these idiots sometimes take "death of the author" to a retarded extreme.
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Jun 3, 2016 03:46
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:my point was more that you're making a false dichotomy and the problem is not categorically that people are doing "intellectual wank exercises" but rather that just aren't very good at it If an increasing percentage of games writers are more aligned with what I'm deeming the intellectual wank school of criticism, rather than approaching these things as a mass market product meant to be played until next year's release renders it obsolete, what incentive does a publisher have to keep providing review copies, or previews, or interviews with developers, or video, screens, etc.? This isn't the 90s, all of these things can now be easily delivered directly to the consumer via a website or social media, there's no need to deal with a middleman entity which is becoming more and more hostile toward their product.* Pull that access, the entire cottage industry falls apart, and the navel-gazers are relegated to e-begging on Patreon. Meanwhile, companies can deliver new info direct to customers, or via Youtube types who have a greater reach and seem to actually *like* video games. (*The one exception I can think of is Game Informer, which usually gets a lot of first reveals, because they're in every shop of the biggest specialty games retailer in the US. But why deal with Polygon or Kotaku at all?)
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Jun 3, 2016 03:59
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bloodysabbath posted:All this means that "traditional" game journalism is becoming less relevant, writing for an increasingly insular group of fellow critics and a dwindling audience of what a less charitable person might call sycophants. Meanwhile, companies are starting to withhold review copies in favor of giving access to Youtube channels, and consumers are writing them off in favor of watching streams to determine quality before a purchase. uh traditional games journalism is magazines like Nintendo Power shilling rosy reviews and merch directly to consumers. i love this idea that gamergaters seem to have that we're falling from this perfect era of unbiased games journalism. trust me i'm in my mid thirties it was always, always poo poo e: not saying you're a gamergater here but that's an argument i see from that camp often, which almost necessitates the existence of a good gaming journalism to be corrupted, when i personally dont think gaming journalism has ever been as good as something like the SA games forum where people chat about games bloodysabbath posted:(*The one exception I can think of is Game Informer, which usually gets a lot of first reveals, because they're in every shop of the biggest specialty games retailer in the US. But why deal with Polygon or Kotaku at all?) because those outlets have audiences and serve as gatekeepers to those audiences. look at stardew valley, which was stupidly successful, and marketed directly at the kind of people who read polygon (and a bunch of people who love weeb poo poo and know what harvest moon is, who would have played it regardless). a larger portion of the gaming market is going indie along with the wanks, and the mass market is just going to buy whatever is advertised most regardless because they don't necessarily care if a game is 'good' or 'bad' so long as it is entertaining boner confessor fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 04:15
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Popular Thug Drink posted:uh traditional games journalism is magazines like Nintendo Power shilling rosy reviews and merch directly to consumers. i love this idea that gamergaters seem to have that we're falling from this perfect era of unbiased games journalism. trust me i'm in my mid thirties it was always, always poo poo I think there has to be a middle ground between Nintendo Power's "ad for the company which owns it" technique and Killscreen's "I don't give a drat if the game is fun" bullshit. I can see some of these outlets surviving and even thriving by going indie-only. It's a good fit for a lot of these sites and the audiences they go after. Meanwhile, I think AAA games coverage is going to slip them by. And I think a lot of developers are probably having internal conversations about whether or not it's worth the hassle to access the Polygon, Kotaku audiences via reviews anymore. If I really want to reach those audiences, I can still do it the old fashioned way: I'll make them aware the game exists by buying ads. But why send review copies to an Arthur Gies, a man who shoots medkits in Doom and gave Bayonetta 2 a 7.5 because he finds sex to be icky? If I'm Rockstar, why should I bequeath a copy of GTA VI to Gamespot after they assigned V to the one staffer most likely to have an issue with it? (None of this excuses misgendering or sending hate speech over a game that sold a billion dollars in 3 days, I shouldn't have to say this but this is the Internet so I do.) If I've sunk 100m into a game, I can reach way more potential customers with a Pewdiepie or Total Biscuit type, and I can do it without worrying about the Metacritic score taking a hit because the game rubbed against a reviewer's identity politics. All of this might be meaningless to you and that's fine. I think we part ways anyway when you say the mass market will buy an entertaining game even if it's "bad." In my mind, the mark of a good game is one that is entertaining, a bad game is one that isn't. I think it's fair to say that people who write about games professionally and have a lot invested in their life's work not being viewed as "reviewing electronic toys" increasingly disagree with this view, but people who buy games (i.e., the ones who matter to companies) don't. As far as Gamergate, I'll confess I've enjoyed seeing game journalists get shredded for a couple of years. The whole thing has gotten very stupid on both ends though and could have been over in less than a week with a letter from the editor at Kotaku getting in front of things and assigning no blame but promising to more carefully monitor possible conflicts in the future. Instead, you got lots of sites writing about how gamers are bad, banning discussion of the situation on their forums/comments, and making fun of their audience on Twitter. I guess they expected no consequences to this? I think GG's tactics have increasingly become unsavory and a lot like those they claim to fight against, but has still been effective overall because game journalists as a group are so awful, smug, and insular. As a result they're VERY easy to dislike. A more professional group would have had a more professional response, and killed any momentum/sympathy GG had out the gate. bloodysabbath fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 05:23
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edit: you know, I don't think I want to talk about gooberglob
Magic Hate Ball fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 05:42
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bloodysabbath posted:I can see some of these outlets surviving and even thriving by going indie-only. It's a good fit for a lot of these sites and the audiences they go after. Meanwhile, I think AAA games coverage is going to slip them by. And I think a lot of developers are probably having internal conversations about whether or not it's worth the hassle to access the Polygon, Kotaku audiences via reviews anymore. If I really want to reach those audiences, I can still do it the old fashioned way: I'll make them aware the game exists by buying ads. But why send review copies to an Arthur Gies, a man who shoots medkits in Doom and gave Bayonetta 2 a 7.5 because he finds sex to be icky? If I'm Rockstar, why should I bequeath a copy of GTA VI to Gamespot after they assigned V to the one staffer most likely to have an issue with it? (None of this excuses misgendering or sending hate speech over a game that sold a billion dollars in 3 days, I shouldn't have to say this but this is the Internet so I do.) If I've sunk 100m into a game, I can reach way more potential customers with a Pewdiepie or Total Biscuit type, and I can do it without worrying about the Metacritic score taking a hit because the game rubbed against a reviewer's identity politics. Also, the whole premise here relies on people who make day-one purchases. Preorders have already given you your money, so the review has no impact on their buying decision. And outlets that don't get a pre-release copy can just buy it after its release and post a review a week later: if people wait awhile to see reviews before they purchase a game, then that may be fast enough for them, and it still counts in the Metacritic score. Even worse: those outlets can make a legitimate claim that their review is less biased because they aren't beholden to the publisher at all, or they can do what people tend to do with movies and suggest that the publisher has something to hide by not giving them an advance review copy.
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Jun 3, 2016 05:45
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I actually predict a lot of companies are going to love that reviewers are too busy navel-gazing to call their bad games bad.
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Jun 3, 2016 06:11
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bloodysabbath posted:The other issue is one of basic competency, which used to be a given if your job was to write about games. Now you have things like a writer for Polygon who captured video of himself playing the new Doom like he had never touched a controller, up to and including shooting at medkits. It's like finding out the staff of a book review periodical is, to a man, illiterate. A slight clue on what it is to make games wouldn't hurt either. A clue on coding would tell them why mounted combat in World of Warcraft would be their biggest feature ever, a clue on business would tell them why "just sell skins like LoL does" model would kill World of Tanks overnight, a clue on design would explain them why all MMORPGs have to be all about grind... Water is still wet, nothing newsworthy in there. Like the reviewer that complained that although Overwatch is not free, you can also grind-or-pay for cosmetics within the game.
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Jun 3, 2016 10:50
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Aureliu5 posted:Like the reviewer that complained that although Overwatch is not free, you can also grind-or-pay for cosmetics within the game.
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Jun 3, 2016 11:06
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Incoherence posted:This is a very old argument. It's one that anti-DLC people have mostly lost at this point, but it's a very old argument.
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Jun 3, 2016 16:33
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twodot posted:In line with what's been said earlier, I don't see how one could lose this argument. You either think paid for cosmetics in a game is good or not, both sides can buy, play, and review games as they see fit. You can lose, or at least have rendered irrelevant, your argument by having weak or faulty foundations. If I argue that game X should cost me Y dollars on Z date and refuse to adjust either X, Y, or Z then I am specifying what those parameters are and may be wrong. For an obviously extreme example, if I declare that Overwatch should only cost $5 at launch with no dlc and weekly free maps and characters of equal "quality" as those shipped at launch, then I'm making direct statements on how much Overwatch cost to produce and maintain, and probably how much it will sell, and thus could be specifically wrong - Overwatch may need to cost $10 and DLC be released monthy simply to avoid violating California labor laws. When people compare "quality" and price of, say, Fallout 4 to Witcher 3 then again you run into this problem: the cost of developing in the US is not the same as developing in Poland. And this is just a super-rudimentary way of looking at development costs - what if your head programmer gets cancer? Should they be forced to work anyway because you've declared Z immutable? What can't happen is actually winning the argument, because once you actually engage in cost-benefit analysis where you land on the curve is personal. Maybe you think Y should be $10 and Z should be right now, but you're completely flexible on what X is. I may disagree that Overwatch should be 1 map, 2 characters, and 3 memory leaks working in tandem to crash my PC in 10 minutes, but I can't say you're wrong (well, maybe on the memory leak I could figure out a winning argument) for being ok with that.
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Jun 3, 2016 17:17
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bloodysabbath posted:I can see some of these outlets surviving and even thriving by going indie-only. It's a good fit for a lot of these sites and the audiences they go after. Meanwhile, I think AAA games coverage is going to slip them by. And I think a lot of developers are probably having internal conversations about whether or not it's worth the hassle to access the Polygon, Kotaku audiences via reviews anymore. If I really want to reach those audiences, I can still do it the old fashioned way: I'll make them aware the game exists by buying ads. But why send review copies to an Arthur Gies, a man who shoots medkits in Doom and gave Bayonetta 2 a 7.5 because he finds sex to be icky? If I'm Rockstar, why should I bequeath a copy of GTA VI to Gamespot after they assigned V to the one staffer most likely to have an issue with it? (None of this excuses misgendering or sending hate speech over a game that sold a billion dollars in 3 days, I shouldn't have to say this but this is the Internet so I do.) If I've sunk 100m into a game, I can reach way more potential customers with a Pewdiepie or Total Biscuit type, and I can do it without worrying about the Metacritic score taking a hit because the game rubbed against a reviewer's identity politics. i don't mean this at all as a personal attack - but i think you're more motivated by airing grudges than assessing the state of gaming journalism, because you're trying to cook up reasons why an industry giant like rockstar wouldn't give a preview copy to outlets which you deem as unnecessarily hostile based on things like 'potential hits to the metacritic score' like rockstar actually cares about the metacritic score vs. just getting as much discussion about a game around release as possible. and really this just gets back to "the review wasn't objective or correct enough"
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Jun 3, 2016 17:28
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twodot posted:In line with what's been said earlier, I don't see how one could lose this argument. You either think paid for cosmetics in a game is good or not, both sides can buy, play, and review games as they see fit. The post I was responding to gave the impression that they think "complaining about cosmetic DLC" should be out of scope for a game review.
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Jun 3, 2016 18:10
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Incoherence posted:The argument is lost in the sense that you are never going to convince publishers that they shouldn't ever put paid DLC in a paid-for game. They may or may not do so in any given game, and there's a whole range of kinds of DLC where different people can draw the line in different places, and you can make fun of people who pay for horse armor, but the DLC genie is out of the bottle at this point. Weird thing comming from me, but i never minded dlc. if i like it, ill buy it at some point. if i dont, i won't buy it. if its just cosmetic stuff. i prefere dlc like the witcher 3 and the division. get some new clothes and maybe a weapon or two.
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Jun 3, 2016 18:14
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Pyromancer posted:People don't even know what "Citizen Kane of X" is supposed to be anymore, it originally stood for landmark separating cinema from theater by employing new techniques, so whatever was "Citizen Kane of games" was probably released 20 or more years ago. By that standard it was Deus Ex, as the first first person shooter - which is the type of game where this discussion tends to focus -- game to really embrace interactive storytelling and choice in a meaningful way. That said, the thing with DX isn't that it itself is the pinnacle of the form. Rather, as Raymond Chandler said of Dashiell Hammett, quote:. The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not "by hypothesis" incapable of anything. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the pedants will deny that it could be even better. DX is flawed and even silly in parts, but it tells a complex narrative with deep themes effectively, using interactivity and choice as storytelling tools. Once DX happened, we could imagine a game that was better. So DX is the Maltese Falcon of gaming. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 18:18
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i don't mean this at all as a personal attack - but i think you're more motivated by airing grudges than assessing the state of gaming journalism, because you're trying to cook up reasons why an industry giant like rockstar wouldn't give a preview copy to outlets which you deem as unnecessarily hostile based on things like 'potential hits to the metacritic score' like rockstar actually cares about the metacritic score vs. just getting as much discussion about a game around release as possible. and really this just gets back to "the review wasn't objective or correct enough" Metacritic scores can cost developers millions of dollars in publisher bonuses
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Jun 3, 2016 18:22
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Flip Yr Wig posted:A preset victory condition that results in some kind of game-ending screen seems like a poor necessary component of a game. Sandbox sims like SimCity or Paradox games have predefined rules for interacting with the world, limits on what can and cannot be done, and clear (if often obtuse) feedback mechanisms that tell the player what effect their interactions have made on the world. The victory condition is decided on by the player within the context of those rules, and almost all of those games lead a player toward choosing certain types of goals over others (ie, make this particularly enticing number bigger). The victory condition is an emergent property of the game and how the player approaches it, rather than a clear ending point, but it's still there. Sandbox games like Lego or Erector Sets have predefined rules for interacting with the world, physical limits on what can and cannot be built, and clear feedback mechanisms that tell the player what effect their interactions have made on the world. The victory condition is decided on by the player within the context of those rules, and almost all of those games lead a player toward choosing certain types of goals over others (ie, make this particularly enticing structure bigger). The victory condition is an emergent property of the game and how the player approaches it, rather than a clear ending point, but it's still there. Ipso facto toys do not exist.
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Jun 3, 2016 18:22
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