Right now, the gaming press websites that get the vast majority of traffic (IGN and Gamespot) have a horrible review structure in place that needs to change dramatically.
Both sites run huge reviews that usually span multiple pages. They advance through several categories such as graphics, sound design, and gameplay. They thoroughly evaluate every major aspect of the game and usually have a paragraph or two for closing comments. Gamespot puts the game’s score and a brief “pros and cons” at the top of each review. IGN ends every review with a point score for every single category, and then an overall score, which is not an average. If its not average, why the hell do you need to give every category a score in the first place?
Overall these reviews tend to be unnecessarily in depth. Most of them are bloated with overly lengthy evaluation and pointless nitpicks. If you get to the point in a review that you are saying things like “my only complaint with the graphics is that once or twice I noticed some tearing on level three” simply throw your review away because it is worthless and you have totally missed the point.
Whatever Roger Ebert may say, crafting gameplay is an art, and its time people started reviewing games as such. I’m sick of reviews that read like consumer reports. Focus on the experience of playing the game, the core of what makes it successful or not. Put the game in the context of other games the developer has made before, and other games like it. Touch on graphics and length or whatever if the game hinges on it. Thats it. Thats all you need. Not only would you get a much cleaner and clearer picture of whether the game is good or not, you wouldn’t need 4 pages to accomplish it.
Also get rid of the brief “pros and cons” crap. Having that sort of thing diminishes what the reviewer has to say, and panders to the sort of idiot that bases their purchases on those bullet points and wouldn’t think of dedicating 5 minutes of their life to actually reading something. Then again, they might be more willing to read if the reviews weren’t so stupidly drawn out.
Video Games are products of professional creativity, no different than books, music, or movies, so let’s get our act together and start thinking about them like art before we start asking for our industry to be taken seriously by everyone else.
[Also, there are some people that are forward thinking about game criticism, and I’ll talk about them at length in a future post]
