Review Connundrum - Part 1

As a writer, there’s one thing that I’ve personally struggled with a lot. And that’s writing reviews. Maybe it’s because it’s due to a lack of a corporate reviewing guideline, but personally I struggle because I overthink the whole process and perhaps over time I’ll get better as I find my own voice.

But it does prompt me to wonder, why have reviews become a topic of controversy lately? Or maybe it’s always been controversial but we’ve only started seeing it now because of how easy it is to get feedback from readers. Growing up reading reviews from magazines, I guess they wouldn’t really have to print out every negative feedback they get in the letters. Just those that they were able to reply to. So things were pretty much one way most of time except for a few brief glimpses of interaction in the letters section.

With a more direct and easy line of communication with content creators in this day and age as well as anonymity, we tend to be able to speak our minds more easily. Time is also a luxury as well, with so many different forms of entertainment taking up our time. We tend to be more critical or dismissive of things that “waste” our time and change the channel or turn on another device or another app to get our dose of enjoyment.

However, it’s not only do we have a decreased tolerance for things that do not entertain us immediately. We also have a decreased tolerance for things that do not line up with our ideologies. Many times I’ve seen reviews where the reviews have been less about the game and more as a personal soapbox. An unintended side effect of putting personalities first. Though I do not feel that this is a problem, as reviews of creative works are more subjective than they are objective. But it does obfuscate things a little and makes it difficult to parse where the review ends and where the person begins.

There are many other things that further complicate game reviews such as how proficient should the reviewer be, or should he or she have a thorough background or history with a certain game or genre? Would it be better to find someone who already has familiarity with a certain game franchise or someone who is new to it to get a fresh perspective? Questions that we might not ask a movie reviewer as much because it doesn’t take about 40 to 50 hours to finish a Final Fantasy game to it’s completion. A time investment that becomes a double-edged sword. The more time we spent with something, the more that we want to attribute worth to it. You wouldn’t want to say that the hundreds of hours that you spent with a single game is a worth of time and would defend it with your life.

In the end, I don’t think there’s a perfect solution, as there are still facets that I haven’t even touched on such as patches or downloadable content after release and far be it for me to change the paradigm of how games are reviewed or say that games are just games and they should only be taken in isolation as I believe games should be taken in their historical context both during their release and the legacy they leave long after that. For now, I would have to this leave this topic open for a later date to tackle it again one branch at a time.