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Great Gamers Not Always the Best Reviewers
An editorial posted on The Adrenaline Vault posits that talented gamers are not always the best reviewers because of the necessity for those with elite skills to care as much as they do about their performance. The best reviewers, on the other hand, are generally somewhat detached from the subject material. From the article: "Spending 50 hours playing an offering when you are focused exclusively on trying to win certainly would yield very different insights than spending the same 50 hours trying to evaluate the title's strengths and weaknesses to help inform the general public about purchasing decisions." Kyle Orland's Video Game Ombudsman has further analysis on this subject.
The best gamers are those who spend most of their time playing games so almost by definition they lack certain interpersonal communication and writing skills. This is nothing new. Great football players are not the best sport reporters either. Great politicians are not the best journalists. Not because of their inevitable bias or the lack of insight but because an expert in one field is not necessarily an expert in another. As the story goes, there is no jack of all trades.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
there are inherant issues in having a super gamer reviewing games is that the challange rating for them may be MUCH lower than it would be for your casual gamer. Which may caus frustrations or misconseptions and caus' otherwise great games to fall through the cracks becaus of the super gamer saying that the game was too easy and a waste of time... But that's just my $0.02
I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on disk somewhere.
Game reviewers do not review games accurately at all. Sure someone who blows through a game is not a good reviewer (skim GameFAQs reader submitted reviews and you'll see some stating they beat the game in a short time so it must suck) but someone who may not even reach the end of the game (or simply stop as a short time) is not necessarily a good reviewer either. If someone reviewed MGS2 based on JUST the Tanker chapter, they probably would've called it game of the year (which is what most reviewers stated in their previews). But once the full game came out and people saw the Plant/Big Shell chapter, there was an uproar. Same thing in games such as GTA3 or VC. First time through, its the greatest damned thing you've ever played! After you've beaten all the missions and you're logging your hundredth hour trying to fly the airplane, the game is shallow.
"How articulate are avid successful gamers? Well, judging by blogs and forums and reader responses of all types posted on the web, I would have to say the communication skills are not generally very high."
You know I just don't see blogs, forums, and reader responses from kiddies pretending to be l33t as a clear indicator of the communication skills of successful gamers.
While I do agree that good game players *might* make pitiful reviewers, there are probably quite a few that could be good reviewers. Gaming and reviewing can be seen as two completely different jobs in related fields. Some people will be good at both while some will not.
Take the example of sports boradcasters. Some people are good sports announcers but not good athletes (ex. Gumbel). Some are good athletes but are terrible broadcasters (ex. Deion Sanders, who obviously can't read very well). Then there are the people who are good at both (ex. Howie).
I argue that a hardcore gamer makes a good designer though. A hardcore gamer can't spot imbalances, and thusly change statistics on stuff to bring things to balance. Without balance, some routes in the game just aren't worth taking. Balance flaws especially show up in competitive play. Also a hardcore gamer can 'play out' a game faster than a normal player as been said in this thread. When you 'play out' a game, you can see things to add that aren't in the game. Of course, this doesn't automatically make you a main game designer, more of a game-tester with ideas.
God spoke to me.
Personally, I only read reviews by people who I know have been around the block with videogames and also play along the same level as I do if not better. I know what they have and have not played so they can make judgements based on experience with past titles, which is especially relevent with remakes or games that claim to be revolutionary. I want an actual real-life gamer's opinion (and remember, reviews ARE opinions to a great extent) of a particular title. Move along. Nothing to see here.
"Apparently so, but suppose you throw a coin enough times. Suppose one day, it lands on its edge."
To some, it's being "uber l33t killah doodz", gankers, griefers, pk'ers; which may or may not be a good thing depending on the game. Being good a twitch games (FPS) is just one kind of good.
To others it might be finding and completing every quest/task/mission, or exploring every map/structure, and finding every drop/treasure; regardles of how many monsters/players you kill.
In an RTS, 'good' might be resource management and strategy. To a pure RPG'er it could be great role-playing skills and character development, having a respected guild, etc.
I think it goes back to the socializer-achiever-explorer-killer categories. How you define 'good' will largely be based on how you fit into that.
But even if you say you're 'good' in all the above examples -- one person's 'good' is another person's 'annoying jack a*s' (I'm talking mainly in a multiplayer context). People have different playstyles and goals when they game, so 'good' is highly subjective and relative imo.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
The casual gamer who plays the campaign on easy and occaionally skirmishes with the computer is going to want a review based more on 'is it fun to play' which is what you get from some one who is a journalist first and gamer second. Does it look and sound good, is it entertaining and are there any major techincal issues.
however a serious (die hard) gamer gets a very different experiance from a game.
Often issues like linear missions, minor balancing issues, cut corners on AI and pathfinding do influence the 'fun' these guys have.
When Empire Earth came out, it got solid reviews from most everyone. Great fun, epic scale, yadda yadda yadda.
As a die hard RTS fan, I was dissapointed to find about 1/2 the campaign missions were made with painful linear design, most of the ages (epochs) were terribly unbalanced (in one gameplay mode or another) and the AI was worthless, it cheated on every difficulty and had no concept of strategy.
Needless to say what the reviews were looking for a what a 'gamer' was looking for were quite different.
The exact same thing can be said about movies. It depends on the movie goer...what genre they like, whether they want to be mentally challenged, etc. And just like game reviews, most people think movie critic's reviews are crap as well. The best thing to do is find a reviewer you like (i.e. someone who has similar tastes as you) and read their reviews (for games and movies). There would be no difference if Penny Arcade put stars or not...it's the fact that they know games, and are able to express their strengths and weaknesses in ways their reader's understand. It's not as if Tycho through up a few stars his reviews would suddenly turn to crap.
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Reviewers often apply scores to games, while completely ignoring the game's replayability factor. Others do talk about that, but often say junk along the lines of "the game lets you be good or evil, and gives you two endings!!". Wow! It doesn't make me want to play through the whole thing a second time, but that sure is neat! I won't pay $50+ for a game that only lasts a few hours and it done. Similarily, games I play need depth (contributing to replayability), usually some sort of modding ability, and a good replayable multiplayer, skirmish, or sandbox mode. Quite often I find reviews ignoring or downplaying things like this, talking about the game as if it was a movie that one could pay $7 and watch at a theater or rent. I can rent many games, but that doesn't work so well on the PC.
I think both of these articles are a little off the mark. Rather than one type of gamer or another being "the best reviewer", I think the best reviewer is someone who is as much like the reader as possible.
The Adrenaline Vault article scoffs at the player who "brags" that they beat the game in a few hours and that they always play games in Hard Mode. Well, you know what? Unless I know a game is already very hard, I usually set the game to Hard Mode before I start playing. I also like a good, long game, because when I like a game system, I like to actually spend some time with it. So if, for instance, a reviewer says that he almost always plays games in Hard Mode, that his favorite games are Shinobi and Devil May Cry, and that the action game he's reviewing is too easy, too short, and generally sucks, then I'll probably think it sucks too. And if you generally like a short, easy game that you can just kind of relax to for a few hours, someone that likes those sorts of games is probably your perfect reviewer. That sort of reviewer would be useless to me, but then again, my kind of reviewer would be useless to you. Different views for different audiences, no different than getting your movie reviews from a daytime talk show or SlashersBloodDen.com.
Another poster under this story really hit the mark. The best type of review is the Penny Arcade style review: Here's what I'm playing, here's what I liked or didn't like about it, and these are the other games I liked. Rather than having three writers print three very generic, sterile reviews that are nearly identical to each other and make the readers wonder what terms like "too easy", "too hard", "too long", or "too short" mean for them, maybe gaming magazines should get three reviewers that actually like completely different kinds of games review the game from their own perspective.
The Adrenaline Vault posits that talented gamers are not always the best reviewers because of the necessity for those with elite skills to care as much as they do about their performance
It's not their performance they care about, it's about being rewarded for performance. A casual gamer plays for fun, and competitive one plays to be reward for skill. For example:
Casual Fighting game fans love killer instinct, the graphics were nice, and the combos were easy to do. The "elite" players hated it, played at it's highest level the game was nothing but a turtlefest and didn't reward players based on "skill".
FPS players tend to gravitate twards counterstrike. Why? Because spamming for the most part, isn't effective. Casual gamers may love the fact that they can grab the flak cannon in the original Unreal tournament and spam it around corners in hopes for a kill, but 'elite' players hate it, because it isn't skill based.
If a skilled player wants to review a game, they have to realize what their main audience would be playing the game for, which most often is fun.