A Gaming Blog! How Novel!
In Brief: Reviewers And Me
I really don’t visit Big Name Gaming Websites on my own volition. I’ll usually only go to one if someone provides a link to something very specific, or if I need to find information on a product on my own. Yesterday, many people were all “OMG!” over the news that GiantBomb was handed over to CBS Interactive. I really don’t care. I really didn’t care about the original “Gertsmann-gate” thing went down, either. The idea that someone’s opinion is more valuable because they’re being paid to give it is dangerous to rely on because it implies that the difference between your opinion and their opinion is simply a matter of dollars.
But I thought about where I do get my valuable opinions from, and those come from people I have actually interacted with, and who I have had conversations with, through which I get at least some level of comfort in knowing “who these people are, and what they’re about”. I’m not going to know intimate details about people’s upbringing just by talking with them through social networks, but I will know who likes JRPGs, who plays a lot of FPS, and who can engage intelligently in a discussion about MMOs. Most importantly, I know that these people are expressing opinions based entirely on experiences that they undertook of their own free will. They weren’t paid to write about a game that was placed on their desks, which may very well be in a genre they never play and therefor know nothing about, or which they know a lot about – and which they despise. I personally feel that no matter how “honest” a paid reviewer claims to be, they still have to produce, they have to produce on a schedule, and as much as their “opinion” may be based on opinion, there’s just too many “business” factors that I feel influence their reviews.
I’m a web developer by trade, and I used to do a lot of development for personal projects. There’s a night and day difference between the work you do for a paycheck, when it’s handed to you and designed to meet the needs of others, and just free-forming the hell out of a project based entirely on whatever you want or need it to do, with no strings attached. That’s where I see the difference between Big Name Gaming Websites and the opinions of friends and colleagues. The former is being paid to have an opinion, while the later is giving an opinion free of any strings, caveats, or asterisks.
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#2 written by Chris Smith 1 year ago
The parallel between web development and game reviewing was only applied to make a distinction between what people do for money, and what they do when there’s no money involved. It was strictly an example from my own life, meant to illuminate how _I_ feel about having to do “a thing” while on someone’s dime as opposed to doing it strictly for the fun of it.
I think that’s a HUGE distinction, whether or not you enjoy your work. When I made sites for my own projects, I could do some AMAZING things because I wasn’t beholden to “arbitrary” restrictions…we have to use THIS language because we have a support network in place for it, or THIS tool because we bought it. I don’t have the latitude to do what I want in service of the project when I’m at work as opposed to when I’m at home.
For completeness sake, sure, having financial backing, press credentials, and editorial support goes a long way, but does it really tell us anything that we can’t get from a someone who DOESN’T have those perks, but who we know, trust, and who has had hands-on time with the product? No offense to the scads of the wonderful, intelligent developers out there, but put them on the record, and you get an avalanche of PR babble.
What I really DO appreciate from pro sites is INSIGHT, which is the same thing I appreciate from people on the social networks. I like articles on thought provoking aspects of gaming, and the gaming business. In THAT regard, I believe that pro writers have a definitive advantage: they don’t really have a horse in the development race, yet have access to the resources (interviews, historical libraries, and other aspects you mentioned) to “bring it together” in ways that people close to the ground often overlook or can’t put together.
And I trust Petter as much as anyone else around here. Sorry to admit, I never read his stuff when he was writing for GR. I relied entirely on his personal opinions of subjects. I suppose if I were following these journalists/pro bloggers on networks, and they weren’t only posting things from their “job persona”, I might get to know them as people and not as pundits, and would give their opinions more weight.
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I feel the same way about not being able to fully trust professional game reviewers, but for a different reason. I fully believe that most reviews (from said pro reviewers) are done with a certain amount of heart, and by people who have a much better ability to express their thoughts about a game than I can ever hope to.
My issue is more with the difference in perspective that I we have. They are, by-in-large, not consumers in the same way I am. They don’t have to budget their video game purchases to make sure every dollar counts. Furthermore, they often don’t have the same time limitations as me. I actually love(d) Giant Bomb. I love(d) that it is a site more about community and ran by people with great personalities. But it bugs me (more like makes me jealous) when I hear them say, “Oh I played 15 or 20 hours of game X this weekend” because I have no way of doing that. They are people who are my peers as far as age and hobbies may go, but most of them don’t have family obligations like I do.
It’s why I trust people like my podcast co-hosts or twitter friends more than any website, because they are my true peers.
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#4 written by Chris Smith 1 year ago
In the interest of my new “KISS” imposition on myself, I had to excise a lot of points from the post, but I agree with your points exactly.
While they probably play games on their own time, being a reviewer IS NOT the same as being a consumer, at least in the way that it matters to the people for whom they’re supposedly serving. That’s why I prefer to go to people in the same boat as me for that kind of opinion.
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Levelcapped.com is a blog devoted primarily to the Massive Multiplayer Online gaming genre, although there's a lot of other game types covered as well.
Oooo, good topic!
I, of course, disagree with some of what you say.
First, I’m not sure you can draw a parallel between web development and reviewing games. I’ve been both a professional game reviewer and a professional web developer, as it turns out. As a pro web developer we’re often writing code according to someone else’s requirements and the project may not be something that excites or interests us.
There may be game reviewers out there who hate gaming, but I think you’d find most game reviewers love video games. Otherwise they’d be doing something that paid decently.
Or put more personally… when I was reviewing games as a job I really enjoyed the work pretty much every single day. I, too, enjoy working on web dev projects “for fun” in my own time, but there are MANY days at the office where web development is about as fun as pulling teeth.
But moving on, “pro” reviewers have access to resources that “amateur” reviewers often do not: access to the dev team who created the game, or at least to a PR person who can pass on questions. Also access to a complete library of similar titles for the sake of comparison.
None of this is intended to say that word-of-mouth reviews aren’t also important. I think they are very important. I just think it’s helpful to have both, and particularly for new releases.
If you’re thinking about buying a game that’s been out for 6 months you can get good info anywhere and everywhere, but for new releases I think it’s good to have the pro reviews (who’ve probably been playing the game for a few weeks by the time it hits store shelves) to use at least as a sanity check.
Also, any publication worth its salt isn’t going to assign a football game to the guy who hates sports. When I was an editor I had a portfolio of reviewers and I knew what they liked and disliked and I assigned game reviews accordingly.
Like you, I rarely go and read ‘pro reviews’ these days because I trust people…like for instance YOU… more than I trust some reviewer I’ve never read before. But when I’m on the fence, or when *I* am the guinea pig being the first of my friends to buy a new game, I’ll look to see what the pros have to say.
And *gasp* I even use metacritic for that. I don’t bother with the overall metacritic score, but I do use it to scan to see what kinds of scores the sites I am familiar with gave to a game.
I’ll admit I may also be out of date and out of touch. I come from an era when there were 3-4 gaming magazines using maybe 50 or so game reviewers and you could get to know most of them. So maybe I’m seeing the world through scratch-old rose-tinted glasses.
But I think of people like Petter. Did you not trust him because he was a pro?