1up goes back to school

I have to say, the news that 1up is changing their review scores to letter grades instead of numbers makes sense to me. I think letter grades more succinctly describe the range of quality that a game fits into and is, in at least a very small way, a rebellion against the numerical focus of reviews.

With that being said, I can’t help but wonder if 1up has been pressured to do this by publishers who were getting annoyed with, say, a 6 or 7 point review only for 1up to have to respond that that review meant it was “better than average.” 1up editor James Mielke says this on his blog:

“I mean, we knew a 5 out of 10 meant ‘average’ to us, but no one else seemed to get the clue. So we’re changing things around so that anyone who’s gone to school will instantly know how we feel when they see our letter grade on a game review. Feel free to discuss this at your leisure.”

Maybe that’s true because we psychologically already equate numbers to “grades”, so when something gets 50% of a score, we don’t think that’s “average”, but actually a horrible failure. But as I mentioned earlier, who’s the “no one” he refers to in this sentence? While readers could get confused, were they really the source of pressure to change this? I suspect not.

Publishers, actually gain a fair bit from this as far as 1up’s reviews go. Instead of their “average” 5/10 game going in as 50% in something like Gamerankings, their “C” game will now be weighted as 65%. As 1up is going back and re-rating all their past games, the scores for nearly all of these average or just above average games will not only go up psychologically for people (as a C at least looks better than a 5/10 to most people), but will ACTUALLY go up as far as their average scores are concerned. Despite evidence that positive reviews don’t necessarily equate to good sales, several publishers still use Gamerankings and Metacritic as a metric to award bonuses, so it seems like this most tangibly benefits them.

With that being said, in the grand scheme of things, it’s still a somewhat marginal difference. Obviously, with so many reviews factoring into things like Gamerankings and Metacritic, a small boost just from 1 critic probably won’t make a huge difference. Not only that, most informed buyers (that like to check reviews) would still likely avoid a “C” game just as they’d avoid a “5/10″ game. My guess is that this mostly benefits games in the 6-7 range, since many of these would get pushed into the “B” range, probably where a lot more people would be willing to spend money on a game. Perhaps the publishers didn’t pressure 1up, but that certainly seems like something they could live with.

Off-The-Oops

Is there a charitable way to interpret George Broussard’s comments here in a way that means anything except, “We expect the gaming press to do whatever we ask them to do, and we don’t understand how someone might do things differently?”

On a practical front, there’s no plausible rationale for why a prospective release date would be information that a journalist needed to know, but could not otherwise publish.  And from a journalistic perspective, Mr. Broussard has just discovered that many journalists don’t allow sources to arbitrarily designate comments as “off-the-record,” particularly without agreeing to that fact in advance.  If the source continued to speak, and the Dallas Business Journal happened to stay in the room, the comments were fair game.  In fact, a little Googling would have found the same warning… in the pages of the Dallas Business Journal.

You’ll parden my schaudenfreude.

Pay To Play

GameSetWatch brings up the interesting question of how to pay gaming journalists (I’ll forgo the use of “incent,” which is an abomination of the language).  The discussion is predicated on a recent Gawker memo, which informs writers that they will be paid in a combination of salary plus bonus based on the number of pageviews they receive. 

GSW rightly points out that this payment method might encourage sensationalization of news stories, although I’d also be concerned about the incentives to write stories aimed only at the largest gaming demographics (do we really want a site consisting of nothing but shooter posts?).  But that said, I’d actually suggest that this is probably the most reasonable compromise between editorial freedom and site revenue enhancement.  Salary-only payment schemes are all well and good, but I’m sure journalists would love the opportunity to make more money and site owners need traffic to survive.  Assuming that the base salary is reasonable, it seems eminently sensible to pay people for writing posts that others want to read.

 I don’t see much compromise to editorial freedom either.  If a journalist wants to write one mass-audience post for the additional income, there’s nothing preventing them from also writing another piece aimed at their personal niche interests.  If it fits the site’s profile, it will get published.  More to the point, it will also raise their eminence within the industry, encouraging people to further absorb their other writing and creating the kind of gaming journalist personalities that the industry largely seems to lack.

Identifying Progress

There’s definitely something to appreciate in EA VP Jeff Brown’s letter to Fox News, denouncing their fairly absurd Mass Effect story.  But as much as I appreciate Brown’s stand, I’m not sure there’s quite as much here as Dennis McCauley suggests.  First off, Fox directly attacked EA’s game with statements that were clearly untrue.  There’s no ethical ambiguity here of the type that prevented Rockstar from defending Hot Coffee, no need to contain the situation and avoid further backlash.  EA didn’t need to take on any risk to tell Fox that they were full of it.

Additionally, that’s what EA is supposed to do.   They’re a company selling a product; if they need to protect their image by calling out obvious falsehoods, then we shouldn’t be surprised when they actually do it.  And finally, EA doesn’t seem to have realized all that much success.  Fox is still ignoring their request, although it definitely wants to try to generate more controversy by having EA debate with some opposing “expert” who shouldn’t have their opinions validated by recognition.

Frankly, what I would really rather see as a sign of industry courage is what I indicated in a previous post: rather than trying to excuse or explain away the behavior that some idiot found offensive, have the political courage to tell them that the behavior isn’t offensive in the first place.  Confront the controversy directly.  Point out the gross double-standard applied to gaming but ignored in other media.  That’s when I think we’ll have made progress.

Revisiting Crazy Mass Effect Columnists

Ok, so I already commented briefly on the nutcase complaining about Mass Effect’s, er, “most realistic sex acts ever conceived” (one presumes he’s aware of actual pornography, which is presumably the most realistic you can get), but this GamerDad response rubbed me slightly the wrong way.  That’s in part because it reflects a critique that I’ve seen a lot from defensive gamers: namely, that games like Mass Effect shouldn’t be attacked because they’re not targeted at kids.  This is very true, but it misses the point.

The basic problem I have here is that it implicitly concedes that the core content of the game in question is offensive.  Sure, we say; these games aren’t for kids (read: there’s a lot of adult material), but we’re not marketing the game to kids.  But that’s besides the point.  The basic message we should be beating into people’s heads is that Mass Effect has no themes more mature than a Harry Potter novel or an episode of Friends.  If we pretend that the game is only inoffensive because the content is age-appropriate, then we run the risk of ghetto-izing gaming into some sort of adults-only taboo playground, at which point the games really will become what people fear they are.

Bottom line: people fear games because they don’t understand them (as this errant columnist has so clearly demonstrated), and they don’t understand them because they don’t experience them.  I realize that GamerDad did refute any number of points that were made: but taking such arguments seriously legitimizes them in a way they don’t deserve.  Let’s stop pretending we have something to be ashamed of here.

Post-script: I’ll admit that the reaction to the lesbian sex scene - and I use the term loosely - was disturbing,  but more for the prurient interest it generated among the gaming press than for any other reason.

Thinking Of The Children

Kotaku seems as bored of these things as I am, but this op-ed seems worthy of note due to the way in which it manages to confuse rhetoric with argumentation.  An op-ed is, by definition, opinion, but the Christian Science Monitor is reputable enough to understand that they nevertheless require some sort of baseline logical structure.  Even if that “structure” is nothing more complex than “some scientist says X, therefore Y.” 

Yet Mr. Devereaux isn’t even able to cobble together a single argument to support the notion that a lack of “moral consequence” is somehow psychologically damaging.  He alludes to some of the studies we’ve discussed in the past - but they’re simply strawmen, since none of them are directly relevant to this claim.  He makes a passionate plea for discussion - but there’s no indication that something which is, at best, barely plausible is worthy of further comment.  The CSM should really know better than to blindly accept a submission simply because it screams - Maude Flanders-esque - “Think of the children!  Won’t somebody please think of the children?!”

Non-Scandal?

I can’t get too exorcised about the fact that Matt Cassamassina is married to a Nintendo PR executive.  Yes, IGN should have disclosed this fact… but there’s no evidence that Cassamassina’s coverage has been affected by that connection, it’s unclear whether his wife actually works on Nintendo products, and the fact appears to be relatively widely known within the industry.  In my opinion, at least, VGMWatch should have gotten a statement from Cassamassina first, rather than attempting to muckrake some fairly thin dirt here.

Can Gamespot Recover? (Updated)

Kotaku has allegedly spoken to a Gamespot employee who states that the editorial staff is “devastated, gutted and demoralized”, and that Gerstmann’s firing may actually result in a mass exodus from the company. If Gamespot suddenly lost most or all of its editors, it’s probably safe to say that they wouldn’t be able to keep up with the need for new content. It’s probably also safe to say that finding qualified new editors may be difficult, as a lot of those that are qualified would probably be nervous about working for the company now given the current environment. Essentially, if Gamespot loses a majority of their editors now, they could be in for either a temporary suspension of updates, or in the worst case, the website being permanently taken down.

Read the rest of this entry »

Old News Disguised as New

Why does it seem like everyone is surprised to see Activision (as if motivated by the Blizzard merger) announce that their big franchises, like Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, and Guitar Hero, will have annual releases? Isn’t this what we’ve already seen?

A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that Tony Hawk has seen a new release every year since 1999, Guitar Hero since 2005 (and actually received 2 installments this year), and Call of Duty since 2003 (unless you don’t count the various expansions and other subtitled games that were made available in 2004, then it would be since 2005).

So, in other words, other than potentially the gap between Call of Duty 1 and 2 (which was barely even a gap), this was already business as usual. Fans of the Call of Duty games seemed to be most upset by this news because it meant that Infinity Ward wouldn’t be developing the next CoD game, but given that this already happened with CoD3, again, this is hardly surprising.

I do wonder, however, if Activision is sort of setting up a “Star Trek movie” curse for the CoD series, where only the even-numbered games (and the original in this case) are good because they’re developed by the original creators. It will be interesting to see what happens with these games in the next few years.

Open Thread and Mini-Posts

Just thought I’d comment on a few news pieces from the last few days:

• Is it a little strange to anyone else that there is new downloadable content for Guitar Hero II (yes, 2)? It would make slightly more sense to me if it were cross-compatible with or at least simultaneously released with similar Guitar Hero III content, but for now this seems to be the same to me as if Bungie were to release downloadable content for Halo 2 now. What’s sort of interesting is that I can’t seem to find any information on who actually developed the new content, since Harmonix was the original creator of Guitar Hero II, but Activision now owns the property. Was this new content developed by Neversoft, or perhaps it was completed long ago by Harmonix and they are simply releasing the rest of the GHII content under some contract? Either way, it seems a bit strange to me.
• Gametap is losing 70 games due to expiring contracts with EA, Interplay, Atari and a few other publishers. It actually seems more significant to me that they are actually losing a contract with the publishers (EA in particular) than just the fact that they’re losing 70 of their games, since that means the loss of several future games as well. Strangely enough, Gametap just celebrated their 1000th game making it onto their network, and they will now have less than 1000 again. Their Editorial Director says they weren’t aware that the games would expire when they made the big announcement that they had hit 1000 games, but he also explains that the contracts with the publishers had a “beginning and an end.” If that was true before, why didn’t they see this coming? Did they simply forget about it, misunderstand their contract, or is there something we’re not hearing yet?
• Joystiq has obtained an “exclusive“interview of sorts with Jeff Gerstmann, which manages to add actually very little to the current knowledge of the event. Gerstmann says that he “stands by” his Kane and Lynch review, which I think should be a given by now, considering that he was allegedly fired over it. Other then that, he denies the irrelevant rumor that he didn’t complete Kane and Lynch, and basically just says he doesn’t know what he’s going to do just yet.
• Bioshock finally gets its widescreen “fix” this week, along with some supposedly free DLC containing new Plasmids. While I loved Bioshock, this actually doesn’t interest me much at all. While having the widescreen “fix” is sort of nice, I don’t think the original widescreen mode really ended up impacting the game at all. As for the DLC, playing through the story mode of Bioshock again just to play with some new Plasmids doesn’t seem like much motivation. Maybe if there were some kind of “arena” mode where you could basically just outfit your character anyway you wanted and you basically had to survive waves of attacks from enemies I could find some use for it… but I can’t imagine the plasmids will be interesting enough to make me want to play through the game again so soon. Since it’s going to be free, it almost makes me wonder what the point of even bringing it out is. Since it’s not a multiplayer game, it seems like the people to get the most use out of this pack would be people that haven’t played the game yet, but I highly doubt it’ll really sell any more copies either.