L.A. Times on Game Reviewer 'Playola'

madmancarman writes "Celebrity parties, target practice with automatic weapons, and free trips to spend the night in haunted castles are just some 'perks' game reviewers enjoy as described by this article from the L.A. Times. The reviewers say this has no effect on their reviews, but we've all heard politicians say the same thing with respect to their jobs. Maybe Ion Storm should have spent some more money on Daikatana junkets?"

Comments

Man, where's my payoff?

[Dark Paladin]

I'm still waiting for my payoffs.

Seriously, while there is the danger of that - and I've been to a few events (like when they brought out the models dressed like Hooters girls to promote the terrible Hotters racing game) that do offer goodies.

The problem is, both reviewers and companies know you won't last long if you give a good review to a rotten game. It does happen that a reviewer likes a game that nobody else does, or hates a game that everybody else seems to like.

But most of the time, reviewers have to be honest, or else nobody will respect them, and then you lose readership. So all that these perks is that when you say "This game fucking sucks", you say "I just didn't seem to get into it". Instead of "The AI was dumber than Cattottop on Crack", you say "The AI wasn't challenging".

Lucky for some of us who run web sites out of our own pocket (yes, I'm self promoting damn it, and sorry about it), but at least when you don't actually "work" in the industry, you're allowed to say that the best part of Final Fantasy X was Lulu's cleavage every time she bent over. The rest of the game was so-so, but that alone kept me playing.

Confessions of a (former) game reviewer

[SgtXaos]

Yeah, I spent a couple of years "in the biz". I was not paid, but worked voluntarily on an online-only game rag that has since bitten the dust. Anyway, before the speculation gets too thick on this thread, I'll throw out some info on the job of game reviewer, and how the subject of perks and such fit in.

Our mag was not one of the biggies, though we had a pretty fair readership. Aside from the publishers sending us games, and hardware companies sending us joysticks and stuff for review, there was not much else. Much of the hardware had to be returned after the write-up, but the games didn't. So, sure, I didn't buy a game for a couple years, and ended up with a few controllers and even a few sound and video cards.

The print guys definitely got more attention from the publishers, especially at E3, where they all got the special invitations to the vendor parties, and they may have even gotten some of the perks that the article implies, I don't know. The parties we did get invited to were often much like those timeshare gigs where you have to listen to a bunch of marketing hype in order to get a few chicken nuggets and two free beers, and maybe a can cooler printed with the game logo.

There was no real incentive to skew reviews. We got more games than we could reasonably play, and kept getting them from a publisher even if we had just poo-poo'd one from that publisher. One thing we tried to do, was to be objective. No game is completely bad, and we tried to point out any good points, even if the overall score was low. For instance a game might have had crappy controls, bad graphics, poor AI, and even an ugly box, but if it had good audio and soundtrack, we said so.

Then, the publisher would quote the line that said "Killer soundtrack and realistic audio effects..." on the "press" section of the game's web site and they just wouldn't mention that we thought the thing was sheer tedium to play. And they would send us another box full of games the next week.

If I had not written fair, honest reviews, pretty soon, no one would believe me. It makes no sense to lie to your readers. It was funny, I would usually head out on the web to read the other site's reviews of a game after I had posted mine. More than once I would flame a particularly bad game, only to find that some other guys were raving about it. I wondered at the time if there was some sort of "playola" going on or if my opinions were just that much different. But I never ran across any proof.

Incidentally, as for game reviewing = "vagina testing", well, allow me to dispute that somewhat. First of all, I often had been assigned two or three games per week. Which means I almost never finished a game, since I also have a day job and a family. Had this been my living, I imagine I would have had considerably more assignments, and so the result would have been the same. Also, you have to write the reviews, which takes time, writing skill, and overall, a desire to write. I dare say that not everyone who wants to play lots of games also wants to produce the equivalent of an english paper after each one. Luckily, I can spell, and write reasonably well, and so I enjoyed the writing as well as the game playing.

Of course to write a critical review, you must do more than just play. You must play while honestly evaluating the various elements of the experience, and maybe even pausing to take notes, or replaying a section just to verify some item or glitch you did not get a good look at the first time.

Often you are playing beta or even alpha quality games for previews, and so crashes and configuration hassles are not uncommon. You don't generally have time to play much on advanced levels, because you want to get to as much of the game environment as you can in a short time.

Yes it was a lot of fun, especially at first, and rewarding most of the time, but it was definitely not the easiest, sweetest gig you could imagine. Eventually, I burned out, and bid the reviewer's podium adieu. It was at least a year before I played another computer game after that.