Towards Building Reviewer Empathy

Steven Totilo has an interesting post up positing that because reviewers don’t play games the same way a normal gamer does (with budget and interest constraints, for example), their views on a given population of titles will necesssarily diverge.  I’ll definitely buy that premise.  So here’s a modest proposal to try to get back to the sort of empathy that might be lacking here.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I’m stealing this from an IGN Comics conceit, which I actually read every so often despite having essentially zero interest in buying or reading comics - simply because I think it’s such a good idea.  The idea itself is simple: imagine you have $X each week to spend on something.  How would you prioritize your spending on what’s available, until you run out of money?  I can see this translating reasonably well to gaming, albeit on a more monthly scale.  If you have $120 a month to blow on games (adjust the amount as you see fit), how would you spend it? 

I see a few advantages to this approach.  First off, it would force reviewers to prioritize their games on a relative scale, not just on an absolute basis.  This compensates somewhat for grade inflation, because even if you think five games are 80’s, you can only get one, or two, or three of them in your picks for the period.  Second, it’s much more in line with the way the typical player thinks, because they can’t “spend” their money routinely on games which are simply interesting - they need to be truly compelling.  Finally, it forces optimization as well: thinking about whether or not they’re better served by getting 3 Arcade titles, or 2 boxed games, or a retail title plus a PSN game plus some DLC.  Games which are merely intriguing in their premise will fall off the radar in favor of those which are truly worth the limited time and effort available.

This obviously has some disadvantages as well; the latter sentence can be viewed in a decidedly negative light, and naturally it takes some sensitivity to your audience to see where their price breaks exist.  That said, I would propose this approach be taken in addition to a more traditional model, not instead of it.  Thoughts?  I’ll try to post an example from January to show what I mean.