Interlude From Africa

As you might have surmised, I’m on vacation (in Africa for several weeks).  My internet access is slow, periodic, and unreliable, but I did have a quick thought on the rebirth of EGM.  I guess I just don’t get how an online magazine solves the central problem that EGM had, which is that magazines are periodic by nature, whereas many sites (like Joystiq, which reported this) update continuously with new content as soon as it’s available.  I don’t see how any kind of periodical can compete unless it takes a dramatically different approach with its content - more editorial, less reporting-focused.

Wii Are The Audience

I have a problem understanding how reviewers’ misunderstanding of the core Wii audience is relevant to games’ success, as Eurogamer reports that David Braben believes.

Reviews are either important to the large majority of Wii gamers or they’re not.  If the latter, then reviews aren’t important by definition.  If they are, then they read Metacritic or they don’t.  If the latter, then again, the reviews don’t matter.  If they do, then poor reviews are again, definitionally important to the main Wii audience. 

I tend to agree with Peter Moore in that core gamers pay attention to reviews, but the majority of the Wii gaming audience does not, and therefore that reviews are fairly irrelevant because of that.  But there’s no condition in which Metacritic scores will impact Wii game sales unless Metacritic-aggregated reviewers are also important to that audience.

Bye, MTV Multiplayer

I was a little shocked to find out that Stephen Totilo is leaving MTV Multiplayer for Kotaku, effectively shutting down the blog.  After N’gai Croal’s departure as well, this has been a tumultuous period in gaming journalism.  And although no doubt both are moving on to bigger and better things, I can’t help but be a little disappointed that some of the more unique voices in the genre are being subsumed into larger enterprises. 

I am sure that Totilo will continue to have a strong identity at Kotaku, and obviously this is a sign of success rather than failure, but Level Up and Multiplayer Blog were fairly different entities and the fact that the gaming sphere was able to support both for a time was a sign to me of increased maturity in the industry.  (I love Kotaku, and wish it well… I just think the more the merrier.)

So congratulations, Stephen, but I hope you impact Kotaku a little more than the reverse.

Reuters Interpretation

Reuters reports that gaming is set to continue growing, despite the recession, this year, but that gamers are “spending more carefully” on higher-quality titles./

I puzzled over the meaning of this for a while, because there seem to be one or two possible interpretations: one is that there are more gamers buying the same AAA titles (if the number of “high-quality” games is roughly the same), or that the same rough number of gamers are buying more AAA titles (because there are more AAA titles to buy). 

Logically, you might suspect that a little of both is an issue, because in the same article, it points out that the average age of gamers is rising.  This is because people who started gaming in their youth are aging, while new gamers are continuously being added to the mix.  Unfortunately for Reuters, this really has nothing to do with a flight to quality and everything to do with simple demographics and a willingness to keep buying games in roughly the same proportion as before. 

Similarly, I think we would generally agree that there are more quality games on the market now than in the past.  That said, I don’t see any evidence in the article that people are actually buying more games on a per-capita basis than they did before (nor is that claim made in the article).  That would be an argument that people are willing to spend during the recession as long as new games are solid: a contention that may be perfectly valid but which is unsupported by evidence… most games in the February NPD top sales charts, aside from SFIV, are actually fairly old games like Wii Play and Wii Fit, Mario Kart and NSMB, which people are probably either snapping up at a discount or finally getting around to buying.  In either case, it’s not because of a flood of new, higher-quality games.

I’m picking on this Reuters article not necessarily because it’s wrong (we certainly can’t know that from the article), but because the idea that gamers are seeking higher-quality games in a recession seems like a plugged data point - someone figured out that revenues were rising, and so analysts rely on some pat, logical, and as yet unproven response to try to explain why.  (Indeed, the fact that people often lament the poor quality titles that sell well seems like an obvious counterexample.)  They may have reams of real data behind it, but it’s certainly not presented in the news piece.  This is a journalistic problem as well as potentially an analytical one.

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.

Peer Pressure

What would possess an otherwise normal reviewer to give a game of the year nod to a game they didn’t like all that much?  This is an industry that takes perverse pleasure in hating things that other people like, after all, and you’d have to imagine that - when you’re not evem in a room with other people - the “pressure” you’re under is pretty much non-existent.

I can’t take a guy whose main complaint with the game is the marketing all that seriously to begin with, but to then blame other people for his problems takes a ot of chutzpah.  Offering this type of opinion up front would be of far greater use to the gaming community.

IGN gets its GOTY right, but its ratings wrong

IGN has released its console-specific GOTY awards and Fallout 3 has come out on top with the top honors for the XBox 360, which is something I can fully agree with.  What’s odd about it, however, is that Fallout 3 received a 9.6 from IGN just a couple months ago while GTA IV received a perfect 10 when it came out earlier this year.

Now, I’m sensitive to the fact that “better” games can come out later and receive worse scores than earlier, lesser games.  Certainly, game reviews are but a snapshot in time and the context of when something comes out is certainly going to color the rating.  This actually can happen all the time when “clones” of originally innovative games come out… they’re typically “better” than the original because the developer was able to build on top of what came before it, but will receive a lesser score simply because it’s no longer innovative.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with that.

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Redefining Mainstream Media

The mainstream press has a poor reputation in gaming circles; the games it covers are either the subject of controversy or extreme banality, GTAs or the latest Wii title (covered more for its console’s success than its own merits).  I was surprised, then, to look at the New York Times buyer’s guide list for video games and discover that the list is pretty much as any gamer might piece together.

Sure, there are some oddities - Civ Revolution, Wii Fit - but each can be argued for inclusion and all the hallmarks of greatness are there: Dead Space, Fallout, Fable 2, Gears of War.  Whether this matches a merging of mainstream and hardcore interest, or whether the press is simply getting better at reporting on games is anyone’s guess, but something seems to be shifting.

The Kids These Days

The Brainy Gamer opens a new post on quality and E-rated games by asking what someone might do if they wanted to find a good game for their kids.  He suggests looking on an aggregator site like Gamerankings and notes that only two games have been well-reviewed recently by at least 20 publications.  Quite reasonably, he wonders if we should reassess how much attention we’re paying to these types of games, lest we ignore good titles in favor of “shoddy, cynical efforts to squeeze money out of the least knowledgeable segment of the game-buying public.”

I actually disagree.

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Skepticism You Can Believe In

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mike Fahey. Fahey is appropriately dubious of a study whose methodology is to ask a number of MMO players about their weight and exercise regimens and then… take their word for it. Survey respondents are notoriously averse to telling the truth about any number of issues, and there’s no reason to believe MMO players would be any worse. Since their answers are counterintuitive, I suspect Fahey is right to doubt them: do we really think that MMO players are 10% leaner than the average? I don’t mean that it’s impossible that they could be healthy - plenty of gamers don’t fit the slob in his parents’ basement stereotype - but to think that they are in general significantly more fit than the average seems to be implausible.

Good job, Mr. Fahey. Everyone else, more of this, please. I don’t often see this level of analysis in gaming pieces, especially those related to scientific studies.