This article was originally posted just before I took my first crack at reviewing games. I wasn’t ever really happy with the way it came out, even then. I’ve been reviewing games for about two years now, so it’s probably time to update and repost, if only to remind myself what my goals were. Consider this a slightly more seasoned crack at the same topic.

It’s prudent to spend some time reflecting on what a video game review is and what makes a good one. This means identifying the audience and their needs, and then evaluating the common elements of reviews to see how and if those needs are met.

Who Reads These Things Anyway?
Consider these two (brevity-edited) posts from the site this past year:

…None of the Xbox Splinter Cell games were crap. Metacritic shows a 94% for Chaos Theory… Every SC game is rated higher on Xbox or Xbox 360 for a reason and it’s not that the PS3 sucks or anything. I actually don’t know why but at least check your facts before making a statement.

i’m very much looking forward to playing this one soon. the multiplayer aspect is attractive for me because it means i may be able to convince my girlfriend to play…

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who posts to the site (except the spammers). It’s nice to know that the Internet isn’t just a black hole from which words can’t escape. Second, these posts represent two broad types of people consuming game reviews: opinion affirmers and information accumulators.

Affirmers are interested in validating subjective experience with a game or its surrounding media. These are the people who criticize or praise a reviewer’s position on a game’s features. In contrast, accumulators read a review to learn something about the game and therefore post about the features themselves.

These two probably represent extremes on a continuum where most people fall in the middle. Both have needs to satisfy, but in the interests of keeping the blog from deteriorating into Fox News, I prefer pander to the accumulators.

What Are Reviews For?
Video game reviews serve two related purposes: to communicate which games are worth playing and which games are worth buying. Though similar, these two issues are conceptually distinct.

Playing a game represents an opportunity cost. That is, gameplay is a commitment of time and energy that could be directed elsewhere, and possibly to better purpose. Different gamers rate the hobby with different priorities, so it would be helpful for a review to communicate some information about what a game asks of its player before the rewards start flowing.

This IS distinct from buying a game, though I do not condone piracy in any of its naughty forms. Alternatives include rental, borrowing, abusing a friend’s hospitality, or just delaying a purchase until a game is cheaper. Games cost quite a bit of money, so it’s nice when a review can spare you from wasting any. This broaches the thorny relationship between value and its evil twin, bloat. However, that topic is an editorial all to itself, so I won’t belabor it farther.

A review relates the worth of pay and play in two ways. The first is through impartial delivery of vital statistics. Vital stats are, generally speaking, objective facts that the player could read on the back of the game’s box. They cover basic descriptive information including genre, number of players, online functionality, developer, publisher, release date, ESRB rating, and the platform. You sometimes see this sort of information in the body of the review, but it’s more often a supporting table. The table is generally preferred because it’s conducive to quick reference, and it makes a salient division between fact and criticism.

When presenting vital stats, there is some question of style. It’s always important to remember that the reader is human, and humans have pretty low tolerance for information clutter. A table with eight entries is a sizable chunk unto itself, and it can be tricky to sort through that pile of information. Add a score to the mix, and the search for information gets tougher. Information clutter is nothing a little effort from the reader can’t cure, but adding kludge to your review seems like a great way to lose readers.

The second type of information is a critical evaluation of the game’s features. Movie and book reviews provide a starting template, because games share production values in common with their antecedent media. So graphics, audio, and voice work in games are all relevant. If any are unusually excellent or poor with respect to a developer’s historical achievements or the performance of the developer’s contemporaries, those merits and flaws are relevant to a consumer’s time and money.

At the same time, however, the review must deliver information about the unique properties that separate games from other media. In particular, it is important to assess the human interface design, the stability of the software, and the overall sense of agency the game provides to the player.

Critical evaluation of features typically constitutes the bulk of the review. If the reader wants to know about Halo 3, then the reviewer should point out and explain that the single player game is shorter than previous iterations, the multiplayer no longer supports clans, and there’s been a significant feature expansion in the form of Forge and file sharing.

Moreover, the reader needs to know if these are good things and why. A critical reviewer might describe the single player campaign in Halo 3 as “just Halo 2 with fresh paint and nominally tweaked AI,” but a more favorable reviewer might comment that, “Halo 3 delivers the same balanced and compelling combat as previous iterations in the series with a focus on influencing the course of larger scale battles.” Though both statements communicate that there is a great deal of similarity between Halo 2 and 3, each uses distinct features and implied emotional valence to communicate the reviewer’s (dis)approval. It helps develop the reviewer’s identity so a reader can evaluate whether it will be worth remembering this particular reviewer.

The Score
The score is the intersection between the quick reference from vital stats and valence judgment from critical evaluation. Typically a number or letter on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale (letter grades are just a 5 point scale with unpleasant repeating decimals), the score is supposed to carry the reviewer’s overall impression of a game’s quality.

Given that a review is trying to communicate whether it’s worth spending time and money on a game, a score should offer a similar summary. However, an arbitrary number between 1 and 10 really doesn’t carry that information. If only there were some universally recognized way to equate an arbitrary number with worth.

That’s right, I’m driving at cash value as a viable scoring system. It’s not unprecedented. Publishers implicitly estimate a game’s value via the manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP), and the games depreciate on the resale market along with customer esteem. That esteem is based on the game’s production values and interactive appeal, which you’ll recognize as the primary topics in a review. The neat little bow that ties them all together is cash.

Reviews posted to this site score the games first with the MSRP (as a baseline) and then an adjusted price based on the critical evaluation of how well the game justifies those entertainment dollars.

This approach circumvents problems matching arbitrary numbers to meaning. You don’t need an unspoken “five-ness” to foster interrater reliability, because most people will have an idea of what $20 means. Even review aggregators can integrate this kind of scoring into their existing databases. You can compare a game’s adjusted value to its MSRP to extract a percentage score, and from there the descriptive statistics should be a breeze.

There is a problem that people at different levels of socio-economic status will regard the same cash quantities differently. However, those same people are confronted with that exact problem whenever they shop for anything. In effect, a game’s MSRP actually normalizes the emotional valence of cash value by imposing an external standard.

There is also a problem that monolithic scores are usually big, bold, at the top, and eclipse the text. They can mislead a hurried reader to believe that one score fits all when a casual gamer actually values different features than a hardcore gamer.

To solve the problem of the monolithic score, it must be broken down to be more specific. Some reviewers choose to provide individual scores for different aspects of the game (i.e. Graphics: 5, Sound: 7), but this division doesn’t make much sense in the context of cash reviews. Instead, consider that cash scores intrinsically communicate a game’s reasonable monetary cost, but don’t account for opportunity cost. However, grouping gamers by their interest in the hobby and tailoring the cash shores to each group can shore up this weakness. The three groups I’ve identified follow.

The Hardcore: The hardcore gamer is a gamer first and other things second. Some are skeevy basement-dwelling stereotypes and others are educated connoisseurs, but all share significant disposable income, high attach rates, and long tails. They tend to have eclectic tastes (you can only delve so deep into a genre before you punch past the cream) and are accustomed to some of the nonsensical conventions that can break a game for less invested players. At the same time, the hardcore are more likely to be jaded and less interested in a well-crafted derivative game than a more questionable innovative game.

The Genre Fan: Genre fans are willing to dedicate time and money to particular genres of games, but are less enthusiastic about others. As games blend features from multiple genres, the divisions become somewhat outmoded, but they remain a useful heuristic for describing dominant gameplay themes and conventions. Genre fans are distinct from the hardcore insofar as a game’s worth is partly determined by its relationship to the genre archetype. However, they’re also more knowledgeable and tolerant of kludge than the casual within their bailiwick.

The Casual: Video games may not play a significant role in the casual gamer’s life, but they still have money, some time to kill, and they like some video games. Casual gamers value accessibility, portability, rapid rewards, and easy exiting. Sometimes this means a low-commitment experience like Bejeweled, and sometimes it means a more substantial game that can be played in small bites like Animal Crossing. Either way, causal gamers may be turned off by lazy or cruel game design decisions like steep learning curves, unnecessary barriers to entry, and unrewarding padding that solely lengthens gameplay.

So, by offering a cash assessment of a game’s worth for each of these three types of gamers, hopefully the scoring system for this blog will make the score a meaningful and accessible construct.

Style, Briefly
A final general issue to contemplate is the issue of style. Game reviews come in a variety of styles, from the ultra-brief reviews at somethingawful.com to the long reviews at IGN to the visual simplicity of gamespite.net. Generally speaking, reviews fare best when they are visually simple, concisely written, and entertaining (unlike this analysis). The reader may be interested in learning about the game, but teaching is storytelling and nobody wants to read a lousy story.

Visual space should be minimally cluttered, with a simple table of vital stats above the review (or in a side column) and a brief table of scores at the end. The impenetrable wall of text is easily broken with screen captures from the game reviewed. Hopefully these general style guidelines can make the review as accessible as it is informative.

Closing Thoughts
If this review of reviews has missed any critical points or you just hate my review model, your comments are welcome. The same goes for praise and general musing.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags:   reviewsNo Comments

Trackback to this article.