It doesn’t matter what they are meant as or whether they are serious. They are as much reviews as anything else written under that category, and certainly in the wasteland that is gaming journalism we are not in a position to nitpick as readers according to criteria that don’t actually mean anything. That’s right, no matter how many air quotes you staple to your words to emphasize the way your shocked expression fires your monocle through your screen as the good name of reviewers is tarnished by this charlatan.
They are as much reviews or valid gaming criticism as what Old Man Murray did, just not on the same level of quality (which is a difference of degree rather than of kind). If that’s not the gold standard then fuck you. I mean we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Videogame based comedy skits look like, well, the rest of the stuff on the Escapist, from what I’ve seen. That is, where they are primarily “bits” with a videogame theme rather than criticism. You can even do both with the same tool, as Penny Arcade frequently switches back and forth on those days where they remember to give a shit about what they do. Either way, it’s rarely a binary distinction on an easily agreed-upon grand scale of the sort being suggested in this thread. Over, and over, and over.
I am very wrong by asserting that a game reviewer should play and understand the nuances of the game he or she is reviewing? Maybe I worded my post poorly, but I don’t understand what you’re taking issue with.
The thing is, sometimes I agree with this sentiment and sometimes I don’t. Yahtzee’s out to make some funny jokes and have people laugh at them, yeah. He’s good at it. I usually laugh right out loud at least once per video. But I also think that mixed in with a lot of his nitpicks and dick jokes are some legit criticisms. These usually range from mechanics that don’t work as well as they should or are fundamentally problematic to begin with. He touches on smaller moments in games that a lot of big name reviewers don’t bother to mention in their survey of graphics, sound, “gameplay,” etc. I think a lot of his reviews actually have a few nuggets of serious criticism going - they just come in a comedy package. Maybe I’m just naive, but Yahtzee comes off to me as a pretty thoughtful guy who puts a good amount of sincerity into what he’s writing/saying even if he is just forcing himself to play and rip on AAA games he dislikes for the sake of his audience.
But what about their honesty? If Yahtzee or someone else aiming to be entertaining more than accurate exaggerates or diminishes, draws an unfair comparison or forces an insincere mockery for a laugh, are they still a review? A good review?
Being a commentator and providing insights on an industry might be worthwhile, particularly if you can be entertaining while doing it, but it’s a different thing than applying your cumulative background in judgement of a product. There’s a level of cold hard facts missing from Zeropunctuation. While I enjoy it and condone it as great supplement, using it as a review is like reading an op-ed piece instead of an article of journalism. It’s skewed reality.
A tone of cold objectivity lends many reviews an air of artificial distance from their subject in a medium which lacks any formalized understanding of how it should be assessed, but it’s not inherently more valid. Besides, I have no problem filtering what I think is useful from a review from what isn’t. The cumulative background of the vast majority of game reviewers is not substantively different from my own (playing video games), so it’s really less about expertise in many cases than about a personal capacity for insight, whether in the form of humor or direct commentary. Yahtzee has that in spades, and he goes beyond many reviewers in that he has worked in game design.
In any case, an individual review is an anecdote (and one typically devoid of consistent methodology, which is fine) and that’s where you have to apply your own metacritic sensibility. That is, some games you’re going to need more anecdotes, some games you’re going to need one or two trusted sources, and some games you don’t need anyone to tell you much about them except for the purposes of thinking about the experience during or afterwards. Yahtzee’s kind of unusual in that I’m interested in hearing his pieces even on games that I have no intention of playing, but it’s also good when that’s not the case. Due to his geographical restrictions, he’s probably not an initial purchase tipping point for most people, but it’s not because he’s fundamentally unfit for the role.
Let me know when Consumer Reports can run crash test dummies through these things for objective criteria and I’ll revisit the issue. That criticism and reviewing are interchangeable in their uses for many is not particular to Yahtzee or games.
Again: where does OMM stand in the grand scheme of reviewing? If that’s not game criticism, I don’t know what is. Is being less funny than Erik or Chet a binary distinction that disqualifies you as a critic?
Quitch
4705
Comedy is the hook, not the total sum of the content.
Sebmojo
4707
These are solid points and I agree - not sure what the weird pile-on is all about.
Zylon
4709
The post you quoted is not the one that catalyzed the umbrage.
I’d say that a good review can’t be afraid of being boring. Good entertaining writing is always the desire, but it can’t get in the way of being honest. If a reviewer is swept away with what they can write (or webcast,) rather than what the game is, then they’re in New Games Journalism territory. Nothing wrong with writing that, it’s just not sober evaluation. I gained ages more insight from OMM than say, Wagner James Au, but I can’t say how often they left something out because they didn’t find it amusing or harped on a quirk mercilessly because it was (well that we can guess.)
One major issue I have with it is that he sometimes has some crits he clearly intends seriously but really have shallow reasoning behind them. Bring it up while the review is still fresh and you better believe ten people will fall all over themselves to dismiss it as a joke or whatever.
He also has some supremely questionable ideas about narrative and games. Extra Punctuation seems to be down so I can’t whale on them like I want.
Unrelated, but I also laughed one time when he called out Lord British for author insertion. I’ve played the Chzo mythos, Mr. Croshaw.
I do like his reviews generally, and it looks like I’m coming down harder than I mean to. Nature of the beast I guess?
Sebmojo
4712
Succinct.
I’d quibble with ‘good’, but it makes your point very well.
I don’t think there’s much useful comparison between what Au did and what OMM did. I have the bullshit detector that is required to safely eliminate the sort of faux intellectualism that so quickly ran its course, and it has nothing to do with what they “left out”. They were boring, limited people writing boring, limited things about boring, limited subjects, and by god if some aspect of that equation wasn’t boring they were going to summon a Dave Halversson genie to carry them to that exalted place where a big word and a monstrous clause could carry them to gibberish. I just can’t begin to frame a response to that without more information.
I don’t know what you mean by sober evaluation, and it would help a great deal if you would link the sort of writing that you qualify as unafraid of being boring yet qualitatively distinct (as opposed to just a matter of taste) from the low quality or limited use reviews that you judge OMM and its offspring to offer.
I would argue that review writing and criticism should be held to the same standards as any other creative work, and if they are “boring” it is likely there are serious structural and conceptual problems with what they are bringing to the table. Obviously, I’m defining “boring” not as some casual label but with the objective low point that Kieron Gillen (for instance) offered in his notorious Darwinia review, notable not just for the nadir it represents in English writing but also because of what a (purposeful, tragic) deviation it represents from his customary high standard of work. Not coincidentally, that is likely to be in his RPS voice which owes a great deal to OMM and is unafraid, at its best, of “leaving things out” for the sake of offering a useful or interesting critical perspective.
Ha, I had never read that before. That’s quite a piece of work.
It’s my own fault for putting OMM and Au in the same sentence, but you’re not really catching on with what I’m trying to say LK. Seems like you’re trying to put me in a position of saying boring review = good / funny commentary = bad, and that’s really not what I mean. Zeropunctuation, OMM, RPS, etc each have enormous worth. It’s part of my daily diet. But commentary is not a good point of contact for a game.
We can nod sagely as we read the opening of Alec Meer’s excellent Minecraft review and remark at how well he’s captured it (before everyone else copied him) but it’s not until he gets boring with describing the details of the game that he’s at his most sober evaluation (which is also excellent btw.) The act of trying to describe mechanics and gameplay is the heart of reviewing (yeah I’m going there damnit.) Even the long tedious five page Avault reviews of old that were walls of terrible writing eventually produced a review that imparted what the game was and how it was trying to fit into the world. And I know saying that will likely trigger a long rehash about what a review is and who it’s for, but I can’t buy into a review answering questions other than “what is this?” The rest is commentary.
We can arrive at ‘what is this’ from the reviewer’s experience because games are not as you put it, a matter for Consumer Reports, they are emotional. But I refuse to believe that reviews are only the purview of good writers. Not everyone gets what a particular game is trying to be, but eloquence isn’t a part of getting the ‘what.’ If someone has to run down a checklist of arbitrary game components in order to impart what the game is, then so be it. Just as long as they get there and I leave the review with a fuller understanding of the game. It’s not creative work, not the likes that we’d judge as creative but it’s a similar process, a similar struggle to define what is happening rather than what one is feeling. So yes, I can trudge through the waist high trash of metacritic user reviews and still eventually find a useful review, though not often. I can’t find those with Zeropunctuation simply because he’s not willing to bore his audience. And thank god for that because Zeropunctuation is an awesome, insightful and useful show.
I’m not sure where my position got turned into the narrower one. I’m fine with people writing boring, mediocre reviews if they have an audience, it just won’t be me seeking them out. The reviews and criticism I’m interested in highlighting embrace their subjectivity and do something interesting with it rather than clinging to an easily deconstructed facade of objectivity by sterilizing their work, and that still leaves plenty of space for lesser authors to toss in their two cents through hard work or just plain showing up to work when no one has stepped up to the plate or I need a larger sample size.
There simply aren’t enough straightforward criteria in game assessment for that Avault tier to be consistently useful to me, but if a pseudoscientific veneer is what it takes to make you feel like you’re making informed decisions it’s not any skin off me. Ultimately, it’s your definition that’s meandering around maybe possibly somehow proscribing OMM and its ilk as a valid review style. I think you need to make your peace with defending your boring writers without extending their work as a general standard or get on that hill and plant your flag.
Nope, you’re still not getting my meaning LK. You’re talking about the quality of articles, and there’s no disagreement there. I’m talking about reviews and commentary being two separate and distinct things. Many good articles will include both, but I’m talking about two different forms, OMM and ZeroP excel in one form, commentary, but are not particularly useful as the other, review.
If Yahtzee mocked something unfairly in the course of a review, it wouldn’t affect my opinion of the game unduly, because I can “read between the lines” - I’m familiar with his style, I’m calibrated by the fact that I’ve played games he’s reviewed, and some that he’s slated I’ve enjoyed, and others he’s liked I haven’t.
I can tell from a Yahtzee review whether I will like a game he reviews or not.
Therefore, he is a reviewer, and one of the best reviewers, at that.
PLUS he’s very entertaining.
I’d argue it’s better commentary when you’ve played the games he’s talking about. The whole ‘I know the reviewer’s tastes well therefore I can distill his opinion into a product guide for myself’ angle that usually comes up in these review discussion is convoluted. I don’t want to argue the veracity of it, but you have to admit that guessing at your own enjoyment through the feelings of someone you think you sympathize with is less than direct. And pretty much useless for those that don’t sympathize or are unfamiliar with Yahtzee. I can’t reconcile him being one of the best reviewers if there’s a requirement of being calibrated and familiar enough to read between the lines. He might be your best go-to, but how does that help everyone else?
A ‘boring review’ (to borrow your phrase from earlier) isn’t really any different. Reviewers have tastes of their own, and assigning a game an objective score that everyone’s going to agree with is an unsolvable problem. The best you can hope for is to find reviewers, whether they’re more factual or more entertaining, who you’re in tune with, and inform your decisions based on your knowledge of how your tastes and theirs intersect.
