Off to a great start in this thread - a bunch of people complaining about journalism with lame anecdotes, faded memories, and generic references. I thought we needed to get to at least 5 pages before the hypocrisy set in so thick!
Hey, I contributed! Now we have blindness as well in the thread!
;-)
That sounds sensible… in theory. In practice, even in games which are qualitatively the same in mechanics (say…the game is a fps, it consists of shooting aliens in the face in every level) at the end of the game and at the middle point, they are other issues to consider. Maybe there is a plot twist near the end you couldn’t see coming. Or the pace improves or decreases. Or the end part is unbalanced, it’s too hard or too easy. Or there is content unlocked when you finish the game. Or maybe the end is totally sweet, even if the game seems the same at surface, the execution of the ‘fun’ factor can change. Or the game clearly have not anything more to say and the end is full of padding, actually skipping that part improves the opinion in the game from the reviewer pov, unfairly. Etc
You can never be sure at 100% if you leave the game unfinished.
I played games where my opinion would have changed, both for good and for bad, if I left them at 65% instead of playing until the end.
I don’t read Kotaku in general, and I had completely forgotten about Tim Rogers. I used to read him back in 2004 or 2005 or whenever he was writing mostly about living in Japan and weird video games I’d never heard of, and eventually he just wandered a bit too far off the tracks for me. And he hasn’t changed in the last seven years! Amazing.
To be clear, I think the reviewer should say how long he or she played the game.
Chris
Thanks for the well wishes, I do lurk once in a while. It’s always nice to hear that we’ve got (or had even) fans scattered about in just about every community out there.
Ohmwrecker here btw. I registered with the MrRyan nickname back when I was in talks about opportunities with Stardock a couple of years back, and that’s what Brad and the SD community knew me as.
To weigh in on this a little bit, I think reviewers should absolutely finish a game that they’re reviewing, unless it’s a product like an MMO that simply is not structured in a way that supports completion. In my opinion part of the job is to consider the work that you’re evaluating as a whole. I wouldn’t get myself into reviewing movies and bail half way through some flick just because that first half was garbage. I expect the same out of anyone that reviews games.
It especially bugs me when I suspect that reviewers are being lazy with games that are especially easy to review, FPS games for example. Anyone that has reviewed a variety of games know there are some culprits like RPGs that take upwards of 80 hours or more to complete in a respectable way. If a reviewer can’t even handle getting through a story or campaign that can be experienced in full in under twelve hours (or sometimes even half that), and later factor in multiplayer along other features in available, then how can you trust them with any other more time intensive projects?
I actually got in some trouble early last year with IGN (and many others outside of IGN) for calling out an editor from another publication that I suspected hadn’t spent enough time with a FPS. In fact it caused enough of a ruckus amongst the journalism scene that it still causes me grief to this day. Lessons learned obviously, but it’s a touchy subject especially if anyone openly suggests that any respected editors or outlets may not have spent enough time with a game.
I’m almost equally against rushing a review btw. As in, only focusing on primary plot quests in an RPG for example. I’m not sure what you guys think about that.
But how do you pay the reviewer fairly for all that work?
I am a gamer. And wen I read a review of a game that I have played, I can tell if the journalist have played a 2 or 4 or 6 hours of the game.
A lot of games generate the initial wrong impression that things will change, or things will not change.
In my very humble opinion, theres nothing wrong on reviewing a game on the first 4 hours, but It would be a good idea to inform the readers about that. People like me will known anyway, and I don’t see any harm in revealing that… but I can be wrong.
- removed a part here that look way too much like a random rant *
But if you can get a monkey to write a review for free, who’s buying?
Thats another debate. All I am saying is that if you write “This is everything everyone need to know about game X” after playing 4 hours of it, you block yourself from re-visiting the game to say something else that you think can be interesting to read.
Also, I am saying that I can be wrong, because I am just a random gamer.
note: I have removed the random rant about XML that included the line you quote.
I think the work load just comes with the territory, much like other work in other industries. You hear about crunch time in game dev, it’s not like developers get overtime pay for staying 80+ hours a week. When doing reviews some games take longer than others, that’s how it’s been for as long as I can remember.
Regardless, pay in this industry is almost always based on salary, flat rate monthly freelance, or per word / per character / per article freelance. I’ve never really seen time factored into compensation.
I think one way to help keep the hours required to reach completion from feeling like a tedious chore is to link the right review opportunities up with the right people. If you know that someone on staff cannot stand strategy games, but they enjoy action titles like Uncharted, then try to link them up with Uncharted because it’s more likely to be a game they’d normally play on their own time.
I’m sure we’ve had this debate before, but if they’re hourly, they should be getting overtime. If they’re salaried, then they should get some kind of compensation. Ideally, they shouldn’t be doing crunch time at all.
And my boss shouldn’t pass me over for promotions because Jimmy Brownnose comes in at 7:55 instead of 8:00 and stays till 5:15 instead of 5:00, but hey, companies exist to milk people for every cent that they can and pay them as little as possible. The few that don’t should have low enough turnover that I’ll never get a job at one, and they’ll go out of business when a Southeast Asian firm starts doing the same thing they do for half the price, anyway.
Honest to God, I’m too young to be that angsty about it already. Let’s pretend I agreed with you pleasantly and move along.
So in the end, what do readers really want from a review? Are they looking for gameplay details to differentiate a title from its competitors? Do they want an aggregate score so they can prioritize purchases and time spent playing? That is, how much does a review serve as PR and how much is it intended as an actual critique?
Last I checked, reviews were pretty formulaic. They talk about system requirements and difficulty curves, with a few descriptions of specific game mechanics used to highlight the best and worst bits part of the experience. In theory, a third-party review is unbiased, but more often than not the review ends up reading like an apologetic press release.
Why, they simply want you to reaffirm an opinion they already have about the game.
Naw, I get it. Reality does not equal the ideal. I just get weirded out by how accepted (and even lauded, in some cases) crunch time is in the gaming industry.
One thing I like about Tom Chick going rogue is that he’s free to get rid of the pretense of having to finish every game he reviews.
Another site I like that does this is gamecritics.com which, at the end of every review, includes a breakdown of approximately how long was spent in the single and multiplayer modes as well as some issues about accessibility for people with certain disabilities. Multiple reviewers can review the same game, seemingly at their whim, so they often post reviews for months or years old games, and different writers often give divergent views. They have no pretense of their reviewers having to finish every game, but they always disclose it when they haven’t. To me, this should be the baseline standard for every big game review site or magazine, and any place that claims that all their reviewers finish every game is not only misguided but also suspect in my book.
I agree with you 100% on the disclosure part. If a outlet isn’t going to require that reviewers finish the games they’re working on then I really believe the reviewer should at least share how much time was actually spent with the title. Going beyond that, data on how much progression was achieved in multiplayer would help as well.
I think Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Revelations are a couple good examples of how significantly the multiplayer experience can change when there’s some serious progression.
Games are unique, though. What other reviews might take 50 hours to complete? Not books, movies, or theater. Even automotive reviewers don’t spend 50 hours driving a car. The available pay for game reviews can’t ever match the time spent. Reviewers have to do it because they enjoy it.
Sure, I agree with that. I don’t think there is really any way to pay freelance reviewers with a scale based on time spent with the game. (If they’re on staff, then that’s another thing, right?) Everyone would want the juicy MMO review jobs if they got paid by the hour.