[...] addition to my earlier post – I came across a blog post by a Mr. Evan Stubbs where he talks about changes to games reviewing [...]

I always try to do this with my reviews of good games, I want to slip in some of the ‘meaning’ inside the product review side of it. I want people to understand a game from a review I do, rather then just want to buy it. I’m very proud of my reviews of Ouendan 2 and Zelda Phantom Hourglass (among others) for this reason.

What I’m advocating is a framework for thoughtful consideration, one that covers substantially more ground than the current norm and one that’s better aligned to the medium in which games operate. It doesn’t replace the need for narrative analysis and deconstruction or anything else.

One of the ideas for an article that I was tossing about was to go to see a film and write a review on it as a game reviewer would. I imagine the outcome would be very different from that of your average film review. A combination of a general fear of the outcome, alongside a 12 week old daughter, is keeping me from going through with it though.

While I’m aware that you’re not stating that we should be wandering around a game kicking its metaphorical tires and testing to see how fast it goes from zero to 100 etc. It does sound as if you’re advocating some sort of clear framework for reviews which to me is quite a dangerous proposition. If followed to the letter of the law, any set of guidelines decrease our ability to provide useful insight and limit us in viewing these creations on their own merit. However, I do quite like the idea that you’re pushing of moving beyond the technical aspects of a game in order to focus more on other points of differentiation. You’ve got some good points to ruminate on.

Can’t wait to see where you go with this.

@Fraser: I think you’re on to something there – there’s a distinction between critical analysis and critical review, even though they often overlap.

The last thing we need is a move back to scoring every single technical element individually; personally, I’d lump all of those under a single “Technical Implementation / Quality” metric and be done with them. Having said that, I still played Assassin’s Creed to the end, even though it was possibly one of the most boring games I played last year.

My logic behind the dimensions I’ve chosen relates back to Caillois and a lot of what Bateman’s been talking about over the years over at Only a Game – we really do play games for different reasons. Some of these are actually implicitly communicated by the types of sites that run the reviews, but as general model, there pretty much always needs to be some level of coverage across all these elements for a review to actually be comprehensive and useful. The Gamespy audience probably isn’t going to care so much about Experiential Uniqueness, but again, that’s implicitly communicated if you’re a regular Gamespy reader – you don’t expect it, you don’t care about it, and you don’t want it.

We still get the information we need, we just typically get it from 20 different sites because not a single one of them normally manages to accurately describe the game completely. I’ll bet you $10 that even when you use Metacritic, you still scan for three or four sites that align to your interests based on the seven elements I’ve described. And, after finding them, you’ll weight their opinions greater than every other score there.

Reflecting on the multiple categories that you say must be covered by any decent review, plus this line:
“It deserves recognition for technical delivery, but trying to communicate that through a single number is not only pointless, it’s actively disingenuous – it misses the entire point of the game, not to mention forcing an implicit comparison against other “similarly scored” games.”
It almost sounds like you want a return to the days when reviews gave a score for graphics, sound, gameplay, longevity and fun. I know that’s not what you really mean, but it is worth noting that this style of reviewing is so passé these days (although not extinct) and at the same time the single-number review that is so prevalent is considered too simplistic. In an ideal world, of course, everyone would read the text of a review, ignoring any number score, and come away enlightened, but you you said it yourself: even those of us who think that way use Metacritic.