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Editors Get an Earful
Gamedrool.com (via Kotaku) has the text from a letter to Gamepro from 2001, sent by then-president of 3DO Trip Hawkins. It's a hilarious look at what kind of flack you can get for offering up an opinion in a public venue. From the article: "I would hope you can recognize that I do not love all my children equally and can be objective about both good and bad features in a game as well as games that are of quality and those that are not. I do not send messages like this to you after every review. But this happens to be a game that I have played all the way through and beaten on all difficulty levels and I know the game intimately. I also have seen the profound positive effect this game has had on my children. "
This is nothing more than a CEO complaining that Gamepro didn't "return the favor" and give a crappy game a good rating. He mentions that 3DO is/was a major advertiser for Gamepro, and that (paraphrasing) Gamepro should been a "better" friend and given the game a "better" score.
I'm very responsible, when ever something goes wrong they always say I'm responsible.
... he started threatening them with cut advertising.
I was actually kind of with the guy on the whole "Find audiences for a game instead of just assuming everybody is like you" concept of reviewing, at least if it's a mainstream site. But when he cut into the threats about biting the hand that feeds you, well, I completely lost touch. The last thing a reader wants from a review site is a bought reviewer.
Of course I'm not the audience for that letter, I wonder how much their bottom line was actually affected. So the real question becomes.. how much does that sponsorship affect reviews? Is it possible to quantify it? If you compare reviews for games on sites that have ads for those games to reviews on sites that don't, can you find a coorelation that cross cuts many games? Common sense says that such a coorelation is so likely as to be obvious.
If that's is the case, that really doesn't set up the writer of this letter for ridicule. He's behaving accordingly to the climate. Who's more unscrupulous? Those that accept a bribe or those that offer it?
I used to believe this, but the more I've thought about things, the more I'm inclined towards a slightly more benign conclusion.
When I first started reading gaming mags in the late 80s/early 90s, genuinely bad reviews were pretty common. Games getting 20% or less weren't exactly common, but nor were they rare. Plenty got less than 50%. Obviously, this isn't the case today.
However, when you stop and think about it, it's rare that you actually get a genuinely bad commercial game these days. It's true. I looked up some videos of the game in question and, from what I can see, it's an average, underwhelming early-PS2 action game. Yes, it's nothing like as good as any number of other games you could have bought at the time. It no doubt had a frustrating control system, poor level design and repetative gameplay. However, if you'd never seen Halo, Kingdom Hearts, Zelda, Metal Gear Solid or, indeed, any other modern video game before, you'd probably be pretty impressed by this. At worst, you can play through the game from beginning to end and probably not want to stab yourself in the eyes with a pair of scissors.
The commercial games development world has just moved on too far to produce truly bad games. Virtually all games go through at least some QA before launch. Indeed, if you want to release on one of the big three consoles, you have to convince Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo that your game is worthy of launch and won't be an embarrassment to their system.
Of course, the occasional utter stinker does still happen, particularly on the PC. Budget developers like Valusoft don't always have the same standards as the rest of the industry. I remember there was a truck racing game a few months ago which actually made a slashdot news story just because it was so sheer bloody awful. All the reviews of this game were sub-20%.
So, where does this leave the reviewer? In a bit of a quandry, to be honest. He has to be fair to the games he's reviewing and shouldn't call them truly bad unless they actually are. However, he also has a duty to let his customers know whether the game he's looking at is worth their cash. I suspect this is why we see so many reviews where the score is in the 60% range but the review text makes it clear that the game shouldn't be purchased.
...at least, he's right when he says a kids' game shouldn't be slammed for being a kids' game.
A reviewer has to assume that anyone reading the review is at least mildly interested in the game. If the game is a niche game, then he has to assume that he's writing to a member of that niche audience. He should write the review as if he's talking to the person for whom that game is intended. Or more accurately, he should write the review as if he's talking to the person who is most likely to consider buying the game.
If it's a kid's game, he should write the review as if he's talking to parents--the people who buy kid's games.
"Know your audience" is a fundamental principle of any writer and game "journalists" aren't exempt.
I've had the bad luck of working for Trip Hawking. If you think this email is funny, you should have seen the drek he sent out to everyone in the company every few months.
I said it in the subject and I'll say it again. Trip Hawkins is a first-class asshole. Buying any product with his name on it supports his self-centered egotistical rampage that has cost people their jobs, money, and self-esteem.