that was a lot of prose to say a few things everyone with an attention span beyond that of the average gaffer already knew. yadda yadda we're not in bed with the publishers; whoa hey scores make for bad intarweb dialogue; argh i can't assign a score to something subjective. i accept this. SNOOOOOORE.
like i said -- trollishly, shokku! -- in another thread on another forum, they're ignoring the obvious pink elephant in the room: that nobody trusts videogame reviewers, given the gross inconsistency of their standards. oh, maybe we kinda sorta trust the regular byline (most likely one or more of the folks in the symposium), but we as readers inevitably turn to suspicions of bias and politics because we can't fathom why else the greater body of writers are so fucking AWFUL at reviewing, well, everything about our hobby. it's not even about scoring; it's about not being able to articulate WHY they love gta4 despite the dickslappingly obvious flaws, and why they can't meaningfully discuss a grognard wargame in a way that connects with a niche audience's expectations and demands. why should i listen to a body of critics/reviewers/commentators who can't collectively get the basics right? these accusations of bias or crookedness -- they're just the attempts by many readers to articulate a generalized mistrust.
i can open an issue of gameinformer or play or egm and find at LEAST two reviews of games where they got it fucking wrong (regardless of whether or not i liked or hated the games), and it's in three areas: an inability to dissect aaa games, the lack of desire to understand slow burn franchises, and a lack of experience with edge subgenres. the pattern match isn't pr (or the lack thereof); it isn't payola; it isn't the format requirements; it is one simple thing: reviewers, by and large, are lazy. they will not -- or cannot -- put the time or energy into thoroughly exploring every game they play, and until they address this deficiency meaningfully, they will continue to consistently earn our mistrust, rendering symposia like this largely moot outside of their own cloister. and as much as shawn and tom and n'gai and robert and stephen would like to act at some remove from the fray (and as much as they're smart enough to deserve better), they're getting tarred with the same brush, because at this point they haven't started to address the core issue of trust.
(as a sorta-aside, the one thing all of the commentators failed to note was that gamers have access to the games at roughly the same time the reviews are available. if the impressions on a forum and the review don't seem to jive, my instinct is to mistrust the reviewer, not the forum. ironically, it used to be the other way around, before the majority of my gaming diet became b-list games (having money has caused my preferences to really branch out): i'd be trying to decide if i wanted to purchase an aaa game, i'd read the unrealistically glowing impressions, and then read the reviews to curb my expectations (or have them encouraged). now, when i'm looking at the b-listers, i KNOW i can't trust that a reviewer will have spent any time with the game, or have a credible assessment of the game unto itself, much less within the sub-subgenre as it were, and instead look to forums and fellow readers to give me the straight dope.
i appreciate shawn getting together a coterie of articulate folks to chat up their problems, but man, it's just amazing that very few fingers are being pointed straight at the reviewers themselves. call some folks out! show some bad reviews! show some good ones! talk about what y'all do that fosters mistrust among your readers, and stop complaining about symptoms! (and remember that even if you're convinced your nose is one hundred percent clean -- and i'd argue in the "symposium" folks' defense that they probably have the least dirty protruberances out there -- your audience is considering the whole of game reviewing, not your individual bylines. whatcha gonna do about that?)
