Be mean
games Two years ago this coming November, Jeff Gerstmann was fired from the video game website Gamespot for essentially giving a heavily advertised game a low review score. What should have sent a shock wave throughout the industry resulted in only a thud. Not much has changed in the last two years with video game reviewers.
Video games are picked on constantly like no other massively popular medium. Video games are constantly portrayed as for children, mind rotting, violence inducing, misogyny, vulgarity, and generally vile. While one could spend the time debating the merits of those complaints, one thing for certain is that such attacks have made video game players a prickly and defensive group. While some games try to push boundaries (GTAIV as previously discussed in another article), many in the community who play video games do not want to rock the boat. Perhaps this is why sequels are so prevalent. Moreso, the internal criticism of the video game community is virtually nonexistent.
Take for example the issue of racism in Resident Evil 5 brought up by N'Gai Croal. First lambasted as an outsider, then too mainstream of a critic, N'Gai and his topic were denounced almost unilaterally by people. This was probably just a knee jerk reaction to any and all criticism of video games and a fear that such a comment could land gaming on the evening news, where if it is ever mentioned it is done so negatively. After the dust settled, a few people brought up the issue again, and explored the issue in other games such as Punch Out for the Wii in the efforts to seem more substantive in conversation. Video games, and their general audience, vie to be taken more seriously. Perhaps this is why budgets for games balloon with movie like productions and orchestral music.
Nevertheless, video games are in an infancy still, despite existing in a mainstream form for twenty years. It is imperative for people within the gaming community to be more critical of each other. For example, on a recent Bitmob podcast, Dan Hsu, the former editor in chief of Electronic Gaming Magazine decried a recent surge of entitlement among gaming press, such as whining about standing in lines to play games to not always getting free copies of games to review (and then keep). However, Hsu did not personally name anyone involved in such tantrums. Rather than expose these people or sites so that the listeners could take heed and avoid them, Hsu remained cryptic. This was puzzling from the man who revealed in the magazine that the publisher Ubisoft would ban people in the gaming press from access to their games if in the past low review scores or negative coverage was given. Hsu had no problem confronting a major publisher directly, but failed to do so with fellow press.
Usually, when a person form another gaming website complains about a member of the press, they are usually complaining about IGN. IGN is the largest U.S. video game website on the internet. They have some talented people working there, and some very untalented people. Parody websites have been created to mock the hyperbolic nature of IGN. When someone complains that video games are scored on a 7-10 scale, it is because IGN reviews a vast majority of their games in the range of 7-10, nullifying two-thirds of their review scale. Other problems with the website exist, such as the fact that IGN will almost assuredly overrate a game if they received preferential access or if they have close ties with members of the development team. This is evident in the high scores given to Too Human, The Conduit, and Bionic Commando; the Metacritic scores for these games, Metacritic being a review aggregate site that compiles review scores from a multitude of sites, are 10 points lower than what IGN gave the games. Is this a result of money being exchanged for favorable scores? Probably not. The simpler explanation is that these people are too nice and feel a sense of obligation and politeness to not be critical to a game.
Someone on the popular video game forum NeoGaf recently discovered through his own research that the standard deviation of video game review scores is very low, especially compared to that of films. In simplistic terms, this means that the people who review video games from many different outlets tend to give the same scores as one other, while movie critics will often disagree with one another and give lower scores. Roger Ebert recently gave Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen one and a half stars out of four. The Rotten Tomato score for this movie is under twenty percent. One of the biggest and most anticipated movies of the summer is being critically bashed, and this is not terribly uncommon. I cannot remember the last time, if ever, a high profile game received an aggregate score of two out of ten.
Many reasons exist for these issues, such as a desire to model gaming scores off of the American educational scoring system (which rates a C or average at a seventy percent) or the desire to have reviews be product descriptions and detailed manuals. But, as stressed in other articles and again here, for the medium of video games to advance, change must come from within the community. The people who play video games must demand more of those in the press. And, the press must expect more from the readers and listeners. In lockstep, both must mature and give, and allow, criticism of their beloved pastime.