I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I figured I’d share my thoughts on it, but – what exactly is the point of a review?
Sure, it seems like an obvious answer – to share your opinion with others, such that it may help them make a decision on whether or not they will purchase a game for themselves. That’s what it’s supposed to be on paper. But what about in practice?
For example, I myself rarely actually rely on reviews. I’ll occasionally check one to see if the game’s performance is up to snuff on the Switch, but that’s usually about it. Digital Foundry usually has me covered there, but they’re hardly reviewers. They cover the technical aspects with very little time spent on the moment-to-moment gameplay experience outside of that. Meanwhile, if I decide to watch, say an AVGN video, I’m usually not really interested in whether or not the game’s good but really about how funny the video itself might be.
But there’s also the issue out there where game companies will withhold bonuses, based on poor review scores, or people who get severely upset when someone dares to give The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild a seven out of ten – an above-average score, an admittance that the game is good, though flawed. Not an unreasonable opinion, but you’d think they’d shot a thousand people’s dogs with the uproar such a “measly” score can cause.
Surely none of those people were actually reading the review to see if they should buy the game or not. If they were so convinced the game was already a perfect ten-outta-ten, why would they need to read reviews? (This is also why I avoid using scores in my reviews – it invites this sort of mentality where you take the score and the score alone and miss all of the context behind it, and compare it to other scores which don’t necessarily use the same metric, or even start comparing apples and oranges, and it’s just not conducive to any actual discussion about the game.)
So why do people read reviews, well, there’s a few reasons I can think of definitively. First is, well, the one I listed above. Sometimes you really just don’t know if you’ll like a game or not, so you read some reviews to see if the general consensus is “good.” People do occasionally actually do this.
The second is you’re actually interested in the reviewer’s opinion outside of your own. You play a game, you like it, but there’s somebody whose opinions you respect who either agrees or disagrees and you’re curious as to why. Perhaps you missed something that this somebody didn’t, but point is – you wanna know. This is the realm of the retro reviewer, the YouTube reviewer, checking out old games, ones they grew up with, or ones they missed, and people like to see their favourite or not-so-favourite games get a bit of the limelight.
The third is you’re looking for a laugh. Zero Punctuation, the Angry Video Game Nerd, while they do have a kernel of actual criticism in their videos more often than not, you’re not typically viewing their content to see if a game is actually good. You’re wanting to get a funny rant that blows the game down and mocks it for all it’s worth.
The fourth is a hypothesis, originally founded by Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame. That perhaps, the viewer’s opinion is actually quite fragile, and they need to find proof that the object of their affection is actually as good as they think it is. They need to convince themselves that their time with the game wasn’t a waste, and they easily get angered over the simple suggestion that the game isn’t as good as all that. Perhaps there’s just a little bit of doubt, deep down, that they try to quash with the opinions of other, “more professional” people. They don’t read reviews because they’re interested in the other guy’s opinion – they want to see the score they want to see, and will riot if they don’t.
The articulation of an opinion in a review format is a skill, for sure, that not everybody necessarily has. Everybody has an opinion, but not everybody can articulate it well. Of course, “it’s just my opinion” has become the ultimate defence, and it’s something I’d like to disabuse any current readers of. While, yes, your opinion is yours, if you lack the ability to explain it beyond “it good” or “it bad” then I have no reason to give it any critical weight whatsoever.
So what’s this whole thing about, then? It sounds an awful lot like I don’t want to write reviews anymore and, well, that’s not necessarily true. But I definitely want to take a step into some slightly different content. Not a review, but more of a… critical look at particular aspects of game design. While I’m just an amateur game designer with very very very few finished projects under my belt, I feel like doing some more longform analysis would be fun, and interesting, and help me break out of just being some guy who writes 2000 words about why Metroid: Other M has a bad story.
… It does, though.
Kirby's Review Blog 