A review on Reviews

Ugh, finally I get the mental clarity to write about this, and all thanks to Extra Credits, a series dedicated to the serious discussion of games and game culture. It's a video series but very worth watching all of the back history for the series. Trust me. As a well dressed person, you know this can be taken as fact, or law. Yeah, we'll stick with law.

So game reviews. I tend to find the system faulty in their traditional format. Assigning a number grade to determine if a game is worth your time is not really a valid way to present the information. And here is why: they are grading an experience. Can you place a value on the first time you went to Disneyland to your friends, or held the hand of a love interest, or played Super Mario Bros? You can tend to express if the experience was "good" or "bad", and you can try to say "On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give it a 7", but this doesn't really represent anything. It just says how you perceived the experience in an active way.

In contrast, movies and books, even music, are all passive. Regardless of genre, you can express the fundamentals of what each experience brings to the table, because everyone will be hearing the same song, read the same lines, and watch the same film. Though interpretations may be different, fundamentally there is an agreement on what is considered "good". Ipso facto, why "pop" music is called just that, because it's "popular".

Grading an experience is different. It's much closer to explaining a piece of art and it's relevancy. People will interpret their experience differently. One person may talk about how they took out a horde of Covenant with a needler and one plasma grenade, another my have sneaked around the same horde with a sword and assassinated them all. Game experiences are based on people's play styles, so for a reviewer, it becomes more of a "does the game work and play with minimal problems" and "does this seem 'cool'". Also, it doesn't help that much of game culture is viewed as having a juvenile sense of understanding.

This is where we need to demand more from reviews. Sitting in an office and having to write about Halo "X" and what it's like is a very different experience versus sitting at home playing with 3 other friends. While Duke Nukem being panned is not a shock, but the game might have scored higher if it was played with a friend, or the confines of a comfy couch and a cold beer nearby. Splatterhouse may not be the reboot of the decade, but I must confess, I enjoyed what I played in bed when I rented it, and though it's not a $60 game, it is still fun.

But rest assured, you can always trust the reviews here from the offices of Dressed as Lawyers. We're not lawyers, but we dress like ones. Making everything we say here information you can trust.