The Wall Street Journal: "Videogame Reviews are Stuck in the Pac-Man Era"

Every eight months or so, an article appears in a mainstream periodical along similar lines to a November 3 column by Kevin Delaney, printed in The Wall Street Journal, in which Delaney makes the assertion quoted in the title of this article. His column may be found here in its entirety. (Registration is required.)

You'd probably expect someone like me, who spends a large percentage of his time reviewing games, to feel threatened or insulted by Delaney's stance. How dare him!

But that's not the case. While I felt Delaney's specific examples and arguments weren't entirely convincing, by and large, I understand and, in many ways, agree with his perspective. His article left me wondering whether my work is part of the problem or part of the solution, but that's neither the point of this reaction nor something that's up to me to decide.

Academics have apparently noticed this thing called "gaming." How curious!

Delaney writes about how a demand for writing about games that goes "beyond jargon-filled reviews and advertorials...is being heard from a growing cadre of academics around the world who themselves have begun serious research on videogames." The key word here is "serious." Games are an interesting and big enough phenomenon right now that some highbrow academics have finally sat up and seriously taken notice.

Imagine me making the following statement with a straight face: If The Wall Street Journal declares something to be serious, it must be serious.

I understand precisely why an article in The Wall Street Journal has more influence in the matter of games being a serious thing than, say, my review of Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand. I understand precisely why it would be easy to lump virtually all gaming publications, including the one I work for, into a neat little category that could altogether be dismissed as being amateurish, improper, and base. My own career in this industry--I could call it a career by now since November 1 marked seven years since I joined GameSpot--has been one person's effort to try to bring more legitimacy to this field. I completely understand that there's a long way left for us to go and for me to go, and, ultimately, we need more help.

Games like ICO are proof that many gamers, and many game critics, are more than willing to get behind games that offer more than just headshots and health packs.

Delaney writes, "If the games industry is ever going to get beyond its current fascination with heavy ammunition...the public has to hear from reviewers who can call the game makers to task or applaud loftier offerings--and do it for a new, bigger audience." I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Lately, I've enjoyed reading comments about some of my reviews being "too harsh" or "too critical." When I look at myself in the mirror every now and then, I ask myself whether I'm growing too soft or too lenient in my critique of games, and these sorts of gripes about me help bolster my resolve that I'm still able to dole out the tough love.

GameSpot constantly faces pressure to be less critical of games, both from game publishers as well as from members of its audience. As you may know, this is a large publication, and many game publishers have good reason to think that it has considerable influence over a good-sized percentage of gamers. Hence, when we give a game a "bad" review--say, anything below an 8.0 or sometimes even higher than that (I even had someone in the industry complain to me over a score of 9.0 recently)--game publishers tend not to take it lying down. Our reviews can and do affect the success of a game.

It's never been my business to berate games, but it's always been my business to be explicitly critical about them.

My reaction to complaints about our reviews is always similar: We take great care to cover games thoroughly in the first place. I am ready and willing to fix any factual errors in any of our content and to publicly acknowledge these changes. However, if all you're doing is simply disagreeing with our reviews, I can't help you.

Whatever level of influence GameSpot has managed to achieve over these years, I'd like to think, is expressly due to the relative consistency of our coverage. We do not cater to people looking to validate their pointless biases--these are the people yelling on message boards, whose minds were already made up long before their flavor-of-the-month game even hit stores. We do cater to people trying to make intelligent decisions about what games to play and what games to spend their money on. To that end, I'd like to think we attempt to do, and at least occasionally succeed at doing, what Delaney describes: We attempt to "call the game makers to task" and "applaud loftier offerings."

Delaney has a comment about "jargon-filled reviews." Our reviews tend to be fairly dense with technical detail about frame rates, system requirements, clipping issues, and whatnot. You don't know how much I wish we could ignore these things and just focus on describing what, precisely, it is about the game that's entertaining, or interesting, or not. But, unfortunately, such things remain indelible qualities of gaming.

Delaney, like many critics of the gaming industry, draws a comparison between the mediums of gaming and film: "Matteo Bittanti, a researcher in Italy, says games are still judged on graphics, sound, longevity and playability. That would be like film critics writing only about a movie's audio track and special effects." This is a fallacious example and the one specific assertion of Delaney's with which I strongly disagree. I suspect that you, as a reader of an editorial on GameSpot, have a greater level of interest in gaming--one that may well be as lofty as that of any of the academics suddenly paying attention to this medium--than that of the average person. I also suspect that you, occasionally or often, use our reviews to help you make decisions. I also suspect that you appreciate the particular level of detail offered by these reviews.

Look at it this way: Would you prefer for me to wistfully tell you how Final Fantasy XI made me feel, or would you prefer for me to tell you how it works, what about it works well, and what about it doesn't work well? I expect it's the latter option. For that matter, when was the last time you decided to see a movie based on a movie review? Film critics write to each other. I still make every effort to write to people with limited time and money to spend on gaming. What drives me is the notion that my work is of some real value.

I may have a different perspective on what constitutes an intelligent critique of a game than Delaney does, but then, I'll bet I play a lot more games than he does. At any rate, Delaney makes a good point, and I appreciate seeing it in a respectable publication like The Wall Street Journal. I know for certain that, soon enough, there will be any number of intelligent, capable critics in this particular field whose own work is of similarly high quality to what can be found in some of the extraordinary games being released these days. All I can do in the meantime is try to grease the wheels.