Review Completists

I don’t have that much to add, but here’s an interesting Multiplayer Blog post on whether or not reviewers need to finish a game like GTA IV before reviewing it.  I lean towards no, but that’s something that I think is fairly specific to massive, sprawling sandbox games like GTA rather than a general rule.

A Brief Comment On The Mainstream

N’Gai Croal has an interesting post up about the lack of real gameplay information in mainstream game reviews.  Croal discusses the difficulty of effectively writing about games to an audience that knows little about them.  However, the implicit question in his piece is at least as interesting, and maybe more fundamental: what should mainstream writers’ goal be in writing about videogames to a mass audience?

It seems to me that that’s the most fundamental question here and one that needs to be answered first.  In Croal’s conclusion, I think he’s arguing that the major role should be that of educator - to teach the mainstream what games are all about, rather than to provide a critical analysis of their gameplay elements.  Although that seems like a fair conclusion (no point in running before you can walk), it calls into question whether or not such pieces can really be termed “reviews.”  If mainstream writers see themselves simply as ambassadors to the masses, they become evangelists for a particular viewpoint - that games are acceptable - rather than critics, which implies the ability to distinguish and critique both positive and negative elements. 

(This has some obvious downsides.  Games that might really be deserving of a serious dialogue get harshly criticized by people who know little about them, whereas mainstream writers appear to be apologists for titles they may not even think have a lot of merit.  For example, I thought Manhunt was a pretty lousy game - but I still felt compelled to defend its existence.)

Is there another option?  I’m not sure, but I do think its incumbent on the mainstream to clearly delineate for its readership what the intended audience is.  If Newsweek wants to do serious reviews, it should distinguish them from Croal’s often philosophical, analytical approach to the medium.  Similarly, I would hate to see his prose overly watered down through the need to describe how survival horror games function before commenting on the nature of zombies in RE5. 

Weekly Column - 4/28/08

Here’s our weekly Joystiq column.  It’s about the intersection of game theory and Guitar Hero (and Rock Band); not particularly complex, but worth discussing to introduce the topic.

Best Review Title For GTA IV

Goes to Slate, for “It’s Not Just About Killing Hookers Anymore!”.  Was it ever?

Impressions from both Jeff and I should be coming shortly.

An Exclusive Problem

Ignited by IGN’s exclusive perfect 10 review of GTA4 (which has also been given a 10 and a 9.8 by IGN’s regional sister sites now as well), Variety has suggested (h/t Kotaku) that “Exclusive Reviews” are ethically suspect. While I doubt that there’s a literal “quid pro quo” for these reviews, when a publisher grants an “exclusive” to a reviewer, they are essentially giving them money (in the form of page views, or sales in the case of print magazines). Does the reviewer have, at least at the subconscious level, a desire to rate the game higher than they normally would in this case?

This basically feeds into the same issues that were brought up, most visibly, by Ubisoft and Eidos recently, where the publishers have threatened (or actually followed through on their threats in the case of Ubisoft) to pull their advertising if the reviewer gives a bad score to their game. Since an early exclusive drives page views and sales, losing these exclusives would actually hurt the bottom line of the publication. It’s easy to imagine what kind of response a media outlet would receive if they actually poorly scored an exclusive review. Would it be safe to say that that particular game publisher would probably think twice before giving an early exclusive to that publication again? Would it also be safe to say that business executives for that publication would be upset at losing another source of revenue (especially one as simple as simply putting up their content a little earlier than other places), and that we’d have another sort of “Gamespot” situation? It certainly seems like a recipe for corruption.

Read the rest of this entry »

92%? Really?

I don’t want to reflexively dismiss what could be a serious problem, but I find the claim that 92% of this casual game’s users were pirates - and the related claim that ”sometimes” increasing DRM can increase sales by up to 70% - to be inherently suspicious.  My main unanswered questions:

1)  How was this number (92%) reached?  It’s a little unclear to me from the Gamasutra piece, although it seems like the company essentially looked at the titles that were obtained from the company site and then used to go online.  If that’s the case, I have to wonder about the length of time they played the game (were they just trying to see if the crack worked?  Did they get it from a friend?), and whether they represent a real lost sale.

2.)  How are increased sales and downloads measured after a fix, and in what time frame?  Frankly, the idea that doing what is essentially the same thing and getting 4 wildly different results (from a 70% increase in sales to an actual - and non-quantified - sales decline) doesn’t even seem to qualify as a correlation to me, let alone some sort of plausible causative claim.

3.)  How applicable are the findings of this one developer to other casual game developers and/or the industry as a whole?  It doesn’t much help that Joystiq headlines this with “Piracy a huge problem for casual devs,” since last time I checked a lone anecdotal story didn’t count as statistical evidence of a trend.

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.