Posts Tagged: Reviewing

Culture / Industry — 12 Comments
12
Nov 09

Spoiler Warning

They’re not ruining your life, our country, or anyone’s complexion. Just meaningful discussion about videogames.

Admit it. You were scared to read past the heading, that ever-familiar bolded six-letter signpost taunting your trust. It wasn’t so long ago that I would have felt the same. Covering my ears whenever someone even hinted at rolling out a verbal storyboard of a game’s content. But I’ve discovered that most of the tidbits of knowledge that have dis-affectionately been labelled as spoilers, are in fact nothing of the sort. And not only that but, hiding most of this knowledge away from each other takes away from what we could get out of our games rather than holding it safe.

More than fans of any other medium, videogame players fear even the most inconsequential of information being passed on, in case their premier playthroughs are affected in even the most minuscule of ways.

If you haven’t read Romeo and Juliet you should probably tune out for couple of sentences while I spoil the ending for you. Continue reading →

Culture / Industry — 1 Comment
28
Oct 09

Self-destructive sexualism

The Madonna, the Mother, and the Whore isn’t just a construct; it’s the explicit reality of the vox pop.

I have a very young daughter:  every day I find myself spending more and more time thinking about how her life will turn out.  The gap between the girl who hides under the stairs when we play hide and seek, calling out to me to make sure I know she’s hiding, and the woman she’ll become seems immense, but it grows shorter with every passing hour.  And, regardless of what she wants to do when she grows up, the industry scares the hell out me.

Don’t kid yourself – women have it tough, regardless of whether you’re  talking about journalism, design, or the broader industry.  Assassin’s Creed was a game ripe for criticism; the design was repetitive, the mechanics were too simple, and the narrative was atrocious.  And despite all those very obvious flaws, what did the Intarwebs focus on? Continue reading →

Academic / Experience — 8 Comments
14
Oct 09

A Framework for Review

Game reviews generally suck.  But, it’s entirely not our fault.  Here’s why, and here’s why it’s important.

We do what we can.  We write, we delete, we write some more, we tear at our hair, and we make a futile effort to shoehorn our experiences into what’s fundamentally a broken descriptive system.  When you get right down to it, what does an “A” really mean?  How comparable is Pathologic, with a score of 67 on Metacritic, to Rock Band, with a score of 92? Does the higher score mean one has greater objective worth than the other or that you should avoid Pathologic because “it’s a bad game”? Where does Wii Fit fit in, and what the hell do we do with Jam Sessions?

This rampant obsession with a single number as a representation of “worth” is probably the single most damning influence in experiential gaming today; it’s our personal albatross, willingly carried around our neck despite our knowing better.  I’m as guilty as the next person of relying on Metacritic to guide my dollar spend, but I know that it’s not right.  For every Braid that slips through the system by the skin of its teeth on sheer novelty value, there’s an enclave of amazing indie games that are supposedly not worth playing. Continue reading →