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Ethics and Video Game Reviews
Obiwan Kenobi continues:
The junket used in the article as an example was Ubi Soft's recent Rainbow Six: Raven Shield launch, where the writers got to dress in SWAT garb and have a paintball battle against mock terrorists and disable a dirty bomb. Things like this happen all the time, even more so in the movie industry (which the gaming industry is quickly mirroring).
Not that I was a big-time reviewer or anything. Back in 1997 or so, I ran a small website of my own (hosted on my ISP webspace) called Obiwan Reviews. Since I was just getting out of high school and into college (read: broke), I reviewed Quake mods, such as AirQuake, Quake Rally, After the Fall and others. Soon I tried to spread my wings a little and get a gig at a real gaming site, which would give me the ability to review retail titles. I found that site, frag.com, and the position was given to me by Jonathon "ZyFly" Works after many requests. Though the site itself is no longer with us, the experience was certainly eye-opening.
Technically I only reviewed two retail titles, Tomb Raider 2 and the X-Men Quake mod. I also got Dungeon Keeper and its expansion, The Deeper Dungeons, though I never got around to writing about that one.
In my first "professional" review, I lavished praise on X-Men, which deserved about 75% of it, and the last 25% was, I fully admit (now that I'm nowhere near this "industry") given just because it was free and I'd never gotten a free game before. Yes, it was unethical as hell, but I was under the deluded thinking that if you trash a free game the free games stop coming. I wish I could tell you I knew better, but back then I did not.
An upshot of that bloated thinking came a week later when I got an email from the guys who made that X-Men mod. They thanked me for the kind words and the payoff for some of their hard work.
This is not something that a biased reviewer needs to hear.
This put me in the mindset that "everything is great, just tell em what they want to hear." That way I could get in the industry and be loved by all! Or...so I thought.
After Tomb Raider 2 dropped on my doorstep, I played it for a few days and was very disappointed. Terrible clipping, clunky controls, sometimes buggy levels and graphics. Not that it was all bad, I still had a good time with a few levels, but the majority of the game was a misfire.
But this didn't stop me from hyping it up, telling everyone it was the greatest thing to come out yet.
A week or so later I got another email. Not from the developer, but from a reader. And he was pissed.
While I don't have the email any longer, I certainly remember the gist of it: He bought the game and he saw through my candy-coated review in about thirty minutes. He had trusted my words and was out $50 thanks to me.
I felt terrible and conflicted. I wasn't sure I wanted to review any more at all, considering that I knew there would be others who would purchase titles based on my words. And if those words were false, who was gaining here? The studios producing the titles or myself? The guilt was tough, but the review had ran and a retraction of my gushing paragraphs would mean that nothing I did from then on would be taken seriously. Not that those who purchased TR2 because of my review would do so any longer, but hey, I've got the rest of the readership to worry about.
After some soul searching and mid-terms, I made my decision.
That was my last review for frag.com, and my last video game review. Though I have since written hundreds of movie and DVD reviews, I still look back on those reviews for a free humbling experience any time I need one.
The points that are brought up in articles like the one at Online Journalism are very much factual. If you let yourself be taken in by the free food, games, flights, and gala of a modern-day junket, your reputation is at stake. Roger Ebert has since stopped letting movie studios pay for anything in regards to press gatherings and interview sessions, and I highly commend him for it. Everyone else would be happy to throw a few hundred loving words toward a bad movie because they got to shmooze with the stars and eat an expensive meal alongside them.
This thing happens all the time.
Trust me, I know.
The good news is, most of us are aware of the keywords in game reviews.
"Stylish"
"Action Packed"
"Best game of the year"
Are just a few of the key phrases that send us into bullshit mode. Everything afterwards ends up sounding like a grown-up from peanuts.
Unless you know the reviewer personally, never trust a reviewer that may have a conflict of interest, even Consumer Reports. Online reviews such as those at imdb.com, amazon.com, etc.. are usually the best for me. Newspapers prove this point best, it's not just the news anymore, too many (not all) writers spin the news to further their cause.
...this is one of the reasons that their user review system is actually a Good Thing(disregarding problems with abuses of the system, which in the large scheme is pretty insignificant). Game reviews can be good to read, especially if you find someone who has a history of praising games that you have enjoyed and criticizing those which you did not. But really what you need to do before buying is harvest some information from amateur reviewers. Certainly some of them will be idiots and a lot of them will have different tastes from you, but at least they have no vested interest in saying that something is good.
disclaimer: Of course, USENET is also great for this purpose and predates Amazon, but Amazon is more in the public consciousness these days than USENET is.
lysergically yours
That is one of the bonuses of living in Britain and getting games later than everyone else, i can speak to my American friends who inevitably have the game months before its out here, and they will tell me if its worth buying or not.
I generally will not trust a review unless i have read many, many others that agree with it.
If someone is gullible enough to base their decision to purchase a video game solely on how Dan "Shoe" Hsu at EGM thought of it, then that's their right. Dan is entitiled to his opinion about the game and should not be expected to alter it in any way "just to be fair".
Sometimes the reviewers do not take enough time with the game to get the full picture. A classic example is the progessive game like Simcity 4. This thing got practically glowing reviews, but come to find out it was a sluggish, bug ridden piece of junk as soon as the city got to any reasonable size. At that point certain buildings wouldn't show up and the frame rates dropped to around 1 fps - even on 2Ghz plus machines.
While most of the issues have been addressed in a patch that was released almost 3 months after the game was - it should have been panned by anyone who took more than a few minutes with it.
Chris...
It does not matter what you do, it's wrong.
I write for a mainstream, general circulation newspaper with a daily circulation of about 300,000 readers. The influences of freebies are mitigated by my newspaper's policy, as well as our shear size.
In essence, the paper's policy says that if you review the game, you can keep it. We handle reviews of music CDs the same way. If you don't review the game, it goes in a charity auction that is held four times a year.
I have never felt the need to give a game a better review than it deserved just because I knew I was going to be able to keep it. In fact, I've told PR flacks over the phone dozens of times that I thought their games were of poor quality, when that was in fact the case.
In my situation, games from the industry have never stopped arriving, and if they did, I'd simply call and say I was interested in reviewing a specific title. I actually prefer that way to the flood of unsolicitated titles, which are inevitably followed up by an annoying phone call sniffing for coverage. I'd rather just review what I think my readers will be interested in, and leave the rest for what I call the "enthusiast" media.
As a professional journalist, I am of the opinion that junkets where members of the "press" are invited to participate in spectacles such as a paintball outing are simply unprofessional. While having face time with game industry execs and developers is extremely valuable (that is what I use e3 for) I would never participate in anything that was clearly tied to covering the news, and I would suspect any journalist with any training in ethics would agree with me.
Now that being said, there are gray areas. Sony, Microsoft and other big game publishers will be having receptions at e3 this year with free food and drinks. Will I attend these? Absolutely. Why? Because it gives me access to players in the industry I would otherwise not have. Will I drink a bottle of water while attending these receptions? Sure. Why? Because I will likely be thirsty.
It's not just about avoiding impropriety -- it's about avoiding the appearance of impropriety, too.
I always love reviews of games that haven't shipped yet. Just a pile of regurgitated press releases and a few "golly-gee-whiz!"'s thrown in.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It is good that sites such as Team Xbox aren't afraid to give a mediocre game a mediocre score. But notice how harsh GameSpot can be on the same game.
Although there are a lot of "cookie cutter" game review sites out there that don't post quality articles there is nonetheless a growing number of quality sites whose opinions you should expect.
The big three (GameSpot, IGN, and GameSpy) generally have the most clout among gamers. How long will that last?
I worked for a small (6 employees) developer. We made low-budget ($150k or so) titles, but they were solid, fun to play and a good value, IMO. But plenty of reviewers felt free to completely slam us. Some reviews were positive and fair, some were negative but fair, but a good number were excessively negative to the point of being completely unfair. Some looked like they hadn't really played the game much, or had maybe only played the demo. Some had plagiarized stuff from other reviews. At least one reviewer was clearly having hardware problems, which are as likely to be the drivers fault as not. Also, many of the reviews have suggestions that would be impossible or very expensive to implement.
The reviews that are the most objective, I think, are the ones in PC Gamer, and Computer Games magazine. Gamespot is usually ok too. The rest of the stuff on the web could just be any 14 year old with an agenda.
I expect a reviewer to be honest. I know that's like expecting a three-year old not to eat the donut the minute you leave the room, but that's how I feel.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Something has happened to ol' Ebert in the last year or so... I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but there's a definate change in him.
He's telling it like it is, big time. He pulls no punches, and isn't afraid to venture into some deep and muddy waters.
As a consequence, I've found myself paying much more attention to him lately, and mostly agreeing with him after the fact too.
Ebert rocks.
BTW, hi from Windsor.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
This thing happens all the time
Well, of course it does! The only thing peculiar here is that a weepy coming-of-age story about it makes it to the front page of SlashDot!
The bar is so much lower for Game reviews, as opposed to other consumer products, because the reviewers for the most part are poorly-paid and impressionable kids with even less experience (if this is possible) than music reviewers. Does anyone read the reviews of game software, especially those on Websites, and believe for a heartbeat there is some kind of Wisdom of The Ages being levied there? Can you imagine how they must have read before the adult edited them? Yipes!
These junkets, freebies, tsotchkes, payolas, etc etc yadda yadda all comprise the grease for the wheels for a whole caste of underpaid newbie journalists looking for real writing jobs. Consumers all know this... don't they?
Obiwan, if you really felt so emotionally scarred by the whole episode, what you should have done was stuck it out and become a Trusted and Uncorruptible Force for Game Reviewing Goodness.
You've gone and let the Dark Side win, Bunky!
Then you deserve what you get.
There are two forces at play here: first, if you take a spectrum of people and have them review an item, and have a 5 star rating system, three stars will always be the least frequently given rating. Why? Because everyone always leans one way or the other, and if they don't lean far, then they just narrow their spectrum.
Second, if you don't care much one way or the other about an item, how likely are you to spend the time to review it.
So don't look at the scores! Read the reviews instead. I frequently do find them useful.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
The Konami code (used for extra lives and such in many of their games) is actually: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start.
Wasn't it "select, start"?
Actually, it's neither. Start or Select, start are not actually part of the code. But if you don't hit them, nothing happens. A good way to tell if someone has friends is to ask them what the Contra code was. If they don't say select, then they were playing it alone-- no friends. If they don't know the code, then I suggest killing them, they're probably an evil alien.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
I can't be the only one who looks for negative reviews, can I? There are too many ways that corporations could rig reviews, even at sites with paid reviewers (as opposed to reader/user reviews). My goal is to always find the negative reviews and see what they said. On any good product, you'll find that the majority of negative reviewers fall into 2 categories...people for whom the reviewed item didn't meet their need or people for whom the item was never intended, either because of the target audience or the reviewer was just plain stupid.
Positive reviews only help to accent features that I haven't read about before. If I'm already looking at a review of something, chances are I know I want it so a positive isn't going to sway me into buying it.
--trb
Bullshit. Hands down bullshit, I know professional reviewers, they won't even get stuff past the editors if they give an a-list title below a 7. You can't tell me (especially after MOO3) that all a-list titles are worth a 7.
Shadus
For their time, each of those games (with the exceptions of Tetris, Combat and Breakout) had some of the best graphics around. Really. Mega Man 2 and Zelda 1 were early NES titles and hold up quite well, even compared to later titles like Super Mario Bros. 3 (whose own graphic goodness was rarely exceeded on the NES). Heck, even Pac Man offered an impressive amount of fluidity and animation compared to other offerings at the time.
Graphics aren't everything, naturally, but few "classic" titles didn't offer impressive (or at least acceptable) graphics alongside excellent gameplay.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Good graphics do not make a game. But that does NOT mean that all games with good graphics are bad. For every Asteroids, Tempest, Scorched Earth, or Lemmings there is a NOLF 2, Half-Life, or Mario 64 that proves great games CAN have great graphics. Too often, though-- artworks seems to take precedence over gameplay.
In fact, most of a game's characteristics in this respect are irrelevant to whether it's actually fun. If it's fun, I don't care if the music is annoying and repetitive. I don't care if everything in the game is a big block of pixels.
Fun is fun. Graphics are graphics. Music is music. If they're all there, super. But mostly I just want the fun.
I'm shocked -- shocked! -- that you actually said that. To imply that graphics should not be even considered.
Tell me, how stunning a film would The Lord of the Rings (geek example here; I know my audience) be without the sweeping vista shots of New Zealand, the immersive fluidity of Gollum's movements, the piercing shrieks of the Ring-Wraithes? Or without even the swelling, well-orchestrated epic soundtrack?
The quality of a game -- or equivalently, the quality of fun -- is the sum, or greater than the sum of its parts. That includes those parts that appeal directly to your senses.
To suggest that these parts do not even deserve consideration is as irresponsible a form of journalism as the PR-influenced reviews this article discusses.
Editorial reviews are too shallow. The reviewers will focus on the graphics, the special effects, the support for 5.1 surround sound, how neato the FMV scenes are, and any glitches they can find. This makes the review worthless because all too often they haven't bothered to discuss the GAMEPLAY.
When all is said and done, the graphics and sound of a game are entertaining for 15 minutes but it is the gameplay that keeps me coming back. Just like how a movie with big-budget special effects is fun to watch once but I'll watch movies like Dr StrangeLove a dozen times. The great gameplay is the reason why I still play Doom, Quake, Starcraft, Star Control 2, Sam'n'Max, Final Fantasy 7, Galaga, etc. Admittedly those games were technically impressive when they were released but they date well because of their gameplay.
And this is why most reviews are useless. I can understand why it happens; the paid reviewers have a big stack of games and not a lot of time. The review is simply a list of the "neato" effects the game offers. I could get the same info from the downloadable demo. I expect something a little deeper from a review. This is why I've turned to user reviews; sometimes they're just as shallow but at least I can expect the user of a game to have put some effort into playing it. Maybe.
Games developers know that reviews are shallow so they produce games that have explosions and shiny things and big boom-boom noises. They know that those games will get the good reviews. So gameplay has taken a backseat to "production quality". It is exactly what happened to Hollywood. Sure, the occasional great game manages to slip through the system but it's the exception not the rule.