Over the years, I’ve had many writers review for me, including one guy who’d once been a full-timer at PCG. I’d assigned him an FPS to review, and at some point I touched base to see how the review was coming along. He said it was going alright and asked how much of the game I wanted him to finish before he sent the review in. A little surprised, I told him… it’s an FPS. I expect you to finish it.
He expressed surprise in return, so I explained our policy: if a game is “finishable” – meaning it’s an FPS or action-adventure and not a thousand-hour MMO – we expected all our reviewers to play through to the end. And his response was basically: “really?” I asked what the policy at PCG was, and he told me that finishing games was never mandatory, that they simply played games until they felt they’d seen enough.
In retrospect, I guess it’s possible this guy was lying, or maybe he actually misunderstood PCG’s policy, that no one ever spelled things out for him. But it never occurred to me to question what he told me – it felt like he was just confirming something we’d all assumed from the start. Still, it was pretty disappointing to hear.
Several years ago, I was attending the DICE conference in Vegas, and there was a panel with four videogame editors, who were asked why games so often get gushing previews followed by mediocre reviews. The obvious answer, for anyone who’d been an editor for 3 months was: because with limited time and resources, we tend to preview games we’re already excited about and we think our readers care about, and don’t feel it’s appropriate to start nitpicking something that’s obviously a work in progress. Therefore, it’s natural that previews skew a little positive.
But Greg Vederman’s response, and these were his exact words, was that he felt it was part of our (the media’s) job to be “cheerleaders for the industry.” That we’re all in this together, competing against movies and music and TV, and that hyping upcoming games was an important part of supporting the videogame industry. And I can’t remember more times in the last 15 years that I felt more embarassed to be a games journalist.
There was a time I really liked PCG. But looking back, and I think it was about the time Rob Smith left, it feels like it slipped into the same mediocrity as the rest of the industry. Not that they don’t have good writers, but have just lacked a proper captain.
