I think Shakespear would have made a lousy games reviewer. I'll get back on this topic somewhere down the line.
SupremeAC said:I think Shakespear would have made a lousy games reviewer. I'll get back on this topic somewhere down the line.
Please do. I think Shakespeare would have acheived anything he set his mind to. Except erections.
The problem with Shakespeare's quote is that, in fact, very rarely does something summed up in a sentence contain profound insight, even if it demonstrates quickness of mind...but if you've achieved this impressive intellectual feat, then no one really gives a shit if it stands up to any serious criticism at all.
Random dudes Gagan links me to sometimes make interesting videos for YouTube. The interesting videos are never shorter than half an hour, unless they're essays of that length broken up into smaller parts. They're also often incredibly verbose and could be cut down to ten minutes, but that's beside the point...
SupremeAC said:I think Shakespear would have made a lousy games reviewer. I'll get back on this topic somewhere down the line.
By this I hope you mean you will elaborate on why Shakespear would have made a lousy games reviewer, because it's the crux of the entire subject IMO.
A sentence of profound insight is, in the late 20th century, referred to as "...a catchphrase"
"Did I do that?"
"WhatchootalkingboutWillis?"
"Don't have a cow man!"
"You talkin' to me?"
"hooters!"
The precursor to the meme.
Wit, which I will define as, the concise turn of phrase that encompasses a simple fact that reinforces the known truth, is not present in anything I see outside of some of GG's news decks and everything Tom Towers says on the gameunder podcast.
Everything else just parrots the twittercensus.
Foolz said:The problem with Shakespeare's quote is that, in fact, very rarely does something summed up in a sentence contain profound insight, even if it demonstrates quickness of mind...but if you've achieved this impressive intellectual feat, then no one really gives a shit if it stands up to any serious criticism at all.
Random dudes Gagan links me to sometimes make interesting videos for YouTube. The interesting videos are never shorter than half an hour, unless they're essays of that length broken up into smaller parts. They're also often incredibly verbose and could be cut down to ten minutes, but that's beside the point...
I agree. Rarely can something be summed up in one sentence. A good design however, you should be able to draw on a napkin. If you can't fit it on a napkin, it isn't a good design.
Foolz said:SupremeAC said:I think Shakespear would have made a lousy games reviewer. I'll get back on this topic somewhere down the line.
By this I hope you mean you will elaborate on why Shakespear would have made a lousy games reviewer, because it's the crux of the entire subject IMO.
No. I would rather show myself to be capable of tremendous wit, having condensed a huge essay about Shakespear in correlation to videogames reviewing into that one statement, than actually invest the time and effort in writing this out only to prove myself to be the lesser man. Shakespear would have approved.
"Tom Towers: countless hours of unending brevity devoted to the one subject." should be my catchphrase.
I have not really actually read a review in a LONG time. Back in the day, as in over 10 years ago, I used to know reviewers on numerous sites and magazines by name and trusted their opinions. Now, its just a bunch of random people I don't know from Adam and cannot take them seriously because I don't know if they really feel the way they say, or if they're just on the take.
My method of getting around this is to check out clips of games on youtube, and to look at the gamerankings average for each game. Sometimes I also look to see exactly which sites gave a game the best reviews to see if I should take it with a grain of salt.
I used to trust the opinions of guys from EGM, or guys like Greg Kasavin and Matt Casamassina. There's nobody like that anymore IMO.
Realizing I only ever read reviews over at EG, I looked up IGN's Halo5 review as a form of research. It was a horrible experience. 
At least it made me re-evaluate my appreciation for EG's writing, even if the site has seen better times.
Yeah I have to agree that rarely can something be summed up sufficiently in one sentence. I don't think brevity equates to one sentence though, I believe that it means not relaying repetitive information. As for reviews I still use them, mainly from GameSpot and Metacritic.
Reviews are dead in some fashion as people buy games based on them being the next big thing which looks cinematic and what is heavily marketed. But also the collected review scores are so readily available you can just look at a list of scores and tell what's worth picking up.
EGM was my place for trusted reviews. It's a shame what happened to that mag.
If reviews are dead, so are the scores they're attached to. Regardless, I'm not interested in playing something a group of idiots think is good. When people could write reviews, you didn't just get whether someone liked something or not (a score), you also got some vague idea of what the game was like. I've read quite a few negative reviews that made me think a game sounded great, and a lot of positive reviews that made me think a game sounded like utter shit. This is useful, a score isn't.
It's a mixture of things.
Game reviewerrs were and are to this day fucking awful, they have awful taste, they are easily blanded by hype and not to be short fucking spectacle and "OH MYGOD THAT IS PRETTY". Because I don't see how you come out of a generation that had classics like the Snes and genesis, and then praised some of the games on the PS1 and n64. I get the revolutionary aspect for some of them (some of them), but the amount of bad controls and straight awful game design that was celebrated, because "oh my god this is pretty" is ridiculous. Because going back to PS1 and 64 games is a struggle. A struggle I don't have when going back to would be classics for the Snes or Genesis (even with this recent round of 2d indie games improving upon a lot of that design) and certainly not for the gen that followed (gen 6 is beast).
There very limited in terms of their range, both in terms of vocab thus struggling with how they articulate their thoughts and their knowledge of other fictional sources. The latter doesn't sound like it should matter, but it should. If I am well versed in film, television, or literature, a lot of video game stories are hilariously bad. Some of the devs that get praised for making what is obviously pulp, and game writers present it like it's this great exploration of the human condition, and it's like bitch you fight space squids as commander shephard. Please fuck off.
I also think writers for whatever reason got taught too many things, that they think is 100% rule. Like less is more, because a lot of times less is less. I think if you want a more detailed insight, you need detail. The issue with being a writer who writes long shit is you need to actually be able to write and engage the reader long enough to make it all go. I can read Towers stuff no problem, they are long as shit, but he does a good job getting to an idea after another. Half Life 2 review is super boring, that was too meta and he got cute aside.
Throw in business models and how tight these devs are with marketing people, indie devs, devs in general, and you get a lot of conflict of interest.
The review isn't necessarily dead. Certainly not when Giantbomb could clearly not do them, but get enough hits that they say fuck it why not. And given how many YouTube reviewers are out there that do draw decent sub counts for channels, get review codes, and get E3 passes, yeah I would say the market for them is still there. It's just shifted. Game reviewers sucked enough at their jobs, that someone else could come in and eat their lunch. Because I would rather watch a SuperBunnyHop video or a MatthewMatosis video over any game reviewer.
The 1up crew? Never liked them
Giantbomb? Entertaining as all hell, but their reviews were hardly all that insightful
Gamespot's new crew? who cares
IGN? I don't hate myself
Gametrailers? They might be as bad as IGN from a standards standpoint, and that's when Shane Satterfield was there, and they somehow got worse.
"Shakespeare wrote that brevity is the art of wit, which is true. Wit can mean both having humour,and quickness of mind, and in this context I think that Shakespeare was talking abut the latter. If you can sum things up in a sentence, you are demonstrating profound insight."
"Like less is more, because a lot of times less is less. I think if you want a more detailed insight, you need detail."
Gagan's done your work for you, Supreme.
Foolz said:Gagan's done your work for you, Supreme.
Good, then I can finally come out of hiding.
I've been pondering the issue of reviews, and to be frank I really don't think I'm qualified to speak out on the matter, as I just don't read enough of them, and certainly not from enough sources. But I'm not going to let that stop me.
I think that, as with many things, the internet basically was the downfall of the media press. This would be the case as a review of a form of media will always be, for a large part, an opinion. When you're reviewing a car or a blender, you can talk about a lot of the technical aspects, the craftmanship. In media, we have come to a stage where craftmanschip is a moot point, unless something is inherently broken. So what is left to discuss is the subjective side. How much 'fun' something is, how something 'feels'. In the pre-internet era, we turned to the written press for stuff like this. I'm not saying reviews were, as a rule, better written back then. But they were held in higher regard. Now, with how the internet has opened Pandora's Box in regards to the public's sense of self-esteem, which some here have referred to as the narcissism of the millenials, the general concensus has become that a review is just someone's opinion. And while that has always been more or less true, the fact that this is now publicly accepted has resulted in this idea also nesting in the heads of reviewers themselves, in turn leading to a skewwed sense of professionalism, of moral duty to deliver an informative piece of writing with a semblance of objectivity.
So basically it is due to the democratisation of the written word by the internet that reviews have lost their authority, leading to a change of mindset in the heads of reviewers themselves, the end-point being that reviews have lost any semblance of objectiveness and thus, raison d'être. Note that that was only one sentence.
The whole games journalism industry gets away with this because they have aligned themselves with the contemporary idea that everyone's opinion matters and is equal. And we're having this topic right here because we're all old and resilient to that idea and find it easier to moan over that which we deem lost than to adapt to this new mindset of a younger generation.
Gagan said:Like less is more, because a lot of times less is less. I think if you want a more detailed insight, you need detail.
I wish people would stop saying 'less is more'. This only applies to spatial concepts, where it embodies a countermovement which saw the design of private and public space move away from the ornamental language that had dominated design for well over 2 millenia and towards a renewed appreciation of materials and proportion. Furthermore, if said catchphrase hadn't been uttered by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe at that exact point in time, where due to modernity and the rise of the middle class, the price of life and the cost to have anything physically constructed had started to rise, neccessitating a more sober design language, no one to this day would have remembered those 3 words.
Applying them to the written word is foolish, as it is by any means difficult to correctly communicate an idea from one person to another through writing, regardless of how eloquent the writer is. Written language is a crude tool that lacks the bandwith to adequately convey an idea from one person to the next.
Yeah a lot of reviews are too long, I scroll to the last paragraph usually.
Reviews could be a lot more concise.
Are we talking about video games reviews or are we talking about remapping the human DNA sequence?
I don't need 4 pages of fancy words and phrases for a game. I just need to know what kind of game it is, how long is it, and is it fun.
edgecrusher said:Are we talking about video games reviews or are we talking about remapping the human DNA sequence?
I don't need 4 pages of fancy words and phrases for a game. I just need to know what kind of game it is, how long is it, and is it fun.
Read a press release and look at Metacritic, then.
Marketing won. Twitter won, YouTube won.
Shakespeare wrote that brevity is the art of wit, which is true. Wit can mean both having humour,and quickness of mind, and in this context I think that Shakespeare was talking abut the latter. If you can sum things up in a sentence, you are demonstrating profound insight.
But when you look at reviews today, they are the amalgam of press release, twitter response, play through informed by publisher provided guides and sample pull quotes from focus groups.
If you are lucky.
Where is the thoughtfulness? The insight?
I'd be interested in this community's thoughts on this topic, for inclusion in the next game under podcast.