Solution for reviewers: If company X won’t give you an advance copy and allow you to do an honest review, then give it a 0/10 score until you CAN give it a legitimate review.
The content of the review would simply be something along the lines of “Company X has made the decision to not allow us advanced access and/or has placed pre conditions on our ability to honestly critique this product. Therefore we must assume the product is somehow incomplete or deficient, and therefore unworthy of any higher score. We will attempt to provide a more comprehensive review as soon as we can do so with the full confidence that comes from having a complete version of the game.”
I like to review things on a scale of 13… that way I can give something a 7, and people will assume its a 7 out of 10 and not get upset, when really I’ve just given them a 50%.
Bad reviews are only allowed after this date!
That’s a bit of an affront on journalistic integrity there. They’re creating a conflict of interest by saying that the game reviewers aren’t allowed to post their reviews in a timely fashion to provide for their readers unless said reviews are positive..
Hmm…
Crafty?
Gonna have to agree with Iconic here. Reviewers have no business reviewing pirated copies of a game, if that’s what happened in those certain cases. However this whole “embargo date” thing is a load of crap.
This seems typical of the game industry becoming increasingly insular, which is, in system evolution, a frequent portending of doom.
See also Tom Chick’s review of Metal Gear 4.
Big part of the problem: Reviewers being such insider sycophants. Game reviews need to be able to attach personal game-playing experiences to some larger body of human experience and/or knowledge about human experience. If the only thing you do is review games and you have zippo knowledge about media aesthetics or cognition or philosophy of mind or cinema history (beyond, say, Tarantino) or formal literary analysis, then you are pretty much locked-in to explicating a particular game-culture context that is, ultimately, ruled by the people who make the games rather than the people who experience/enjoy/play the games. You, as a reviewer, become another brick in the game business wall; and you are judged — appropriately, if not rightfully — on that basis; and, if you inhibit sales and thus threaten the health and well-being of the game biz, then you get stomped upon. Very common.
Step one when you get stomped upon may be to retreat into your own little bloggy personal domain world, which may or may not be buttressed by all your similarly stepped upon buds. This would be, for instance, the future of the Profkynesses: an endless word-zerg of cultural explication, style without substance or influence or impact or anything whatsoever other than, perhaps, some deeply rooted but unable to be articulated desire to play. But that fades away. And then the inevitable step two is to get tired of all that dead end bs and do something else entirely.
If you don’t want to get stomped upon, you gotta get out from under da feet. Desire to play is not enough.
@Ed: As has been reported in any number of sources, the reviews legally purchased retail boxes from retailers who sold them before the official release date. Maybe Atari could sue their distributors, but please stop propagating misinformation.
The bad thing is they might succeed and putting all of us including free speech to shame. Consider one with a lot of money resources and the other have little, the lawyer fees could kill them.
“The bad thing is they might succeed and putting all of us including free speech to shame. Consider one with a lot of money resources and the other have little, the lawyer fees could kill them.”
Laws vary from place to place, but Europeans generally take a dimmer view of so-called “frivolous” lawsuits than Americans do, so assuming the sites in question have proof of their legal purchase, the suit(s) would more than likely be thrown out almost immediately.
Probably, Atari just decided to go fishing with their accusations, since the situation is a confluence of a whole bunch of things they don’t want (retailers breaking street dates, piracy, and poor advanced reviews). It’s not exactly a rare legal tactic to allege one thing, force the accused to present evidence that shows their innocence, and then use that evidence to pursue the real culprit(s).
Wizards of the Coast famously busted a bunch of people who were breaking an NDA, not by going after the NDA breakers (who they had no way to identify), but by going after the second hand source who was actually posting spoiled images of product that was in development. Basically, they used the legal threat to force the second hand source to settle and give up his sources. It’s not the same situation but it’s the same principle: you go after the public face in order to get to the anonymous sources, who are in fact the ones you wanted all along.
If Atari gets to intimidate a bunch of critical reviewers then maybe they can look at that as a bonus.
I have been a reader of this blog for quite a while, but it’s the first time I am posting a comment on it.
Much of the problem with gaming reporting is, I think related to how much time you can actually play the game before deadline. Reading gaming boards, one notices that a recurring theme when people start discussing professional game reviews (usually espousing a view opposite their own), apart from concerns over conflicts of interest or the weight of advertisers, is along the lines of “the reviewer obviously did not get to play enough of the game; otherwise…”
Which in itself is a very legitimate question. A book reviewer is theoretically assumed to have read the entire work; the same for a film critic. But how much of the game is a reviewer supposed to have played to have enough of a grasp on it to write a review? Up to the end of the game, or all multiple endings if applicable? Sometimes those questioning the playing time of reviewers are even more specific: “he must have stopped at level 20, because the game is boring past 30″ (insert game name here, but Age of Conan, based on personal experience, fits that mold). That might even be something with which some developers play, by putting all the goodies early in the game, in the hope that reviewers don’t make it past that point.
Perhaps an approach to legitimize, so to speak, game reviewing, would be for the reviewer to explicitly state how many hours, or up to which points, he could play the game before deadline.
Nonetheless, maybe the other problem with game reviewing is that, as dmyers stated, it’s being done by “insider sycophants”. Well, I wouldn’t go as far as blaming individual reviewers, as I think the outlets they are writing for are far more to blame for the cheerleader tone of much of the writing done in them. How negatively can you write about a game heavily advertised on your website or in your magazine before you start being seen as a liability? Throw in the complete absence of authoritative forums of discussion — film has Sight and Sound, books have Kirkus, video games have… PC Gamer? — and a serious discussion of games is all but impossible. I can’t avoid noticing that back in the good old days before the Internet, just about the only mainstream publication where Nintendo games were discussed was Nintendo Power, and you’d never be told in there how much Nintendo of America was censoring its games when translating them from Japanese to maintain its family-friendly reputation.
@ dmyers: As for establishing criteria for game reviewers, I am not too sure a list such as that you propose could be of much use to reviewers on a large scale. Sure, someone with a knowledge of film history might wax on Final Fantasy VII’s Hitchcockian themes, but what use would be literary analysis in discussing, for example, the lasting popularity of Tetris? (At best you could go out on a limb and claim it has to do with being a harmless reminder of Soviet rectitude, the prevalence of right angles illustrating the rigidity of Marxist thinking, but at the end of the day it’s still that little game involving rotating blocks, and it’s all that really matters.)
In the case of games involving clear plots, this type of analysis might be helpful, but what would you do with a situational strategy game with no clear plot and sometimes not even a tangible ending? I’m not saying it is not possible — I’m sure one could write volumes about that old Tropico game from a comparative-politics perspective — but in the end the use of such references would feel forced upon the material. or would be of very little interest in comparison to more down-to-earth matters such as user interface (which are valid concerns). As much as I like the Terra Nova site, for example, I’m not sure that a lengthy discussion of Baudrillard or Pareto could mean much when discussing an MMO game.
But I wholeheartedly agree with you on one point: I am tired of seeing game reviewers who got to be game reviewers only because they liked gaming. I for one would love to see a game reviewer who would not be ashamed to claim that he considers video gaming an utter waste of time (but only on the condition that he should not get contemptuous of his readership; otherwise we would just be headed for disaster and making no progress at all).
Ah, the problem of how much game experience is needed to understand/review/grok the game is a vexing one, indeed and agreed – though somewhat ameliorated by the tendency of game designers to design the SAME DAMN GAME, most particularly in the multimillion dollar realm of MMO RAT LOOT.
But is the solution then to look upon the MMO RAT LOOT with the innocent eye of the nub and therein discover MMO RAT LOOT TRUTH? I think not.
Such a precisely relevant case in point (which motivates me to post) is circa right here and now: Tom Chick versus (if you want to call it that) Ben Fritz.
On one side we have the formerly irascible Chick, game insider to be shur, and certainly by all accounts (and my own never wrong personal assessment), insightful regarding game mechanism and play. On the other side we have Ben (the who?) Fritz who has, by hook or crook or whatever (no begrudgement here, honestly), managed to snag a well-known and widely attended platform (Variety), upon which he proudly and unrepentantly aligns with the nub nation: ie., Ben sez he does not need to play the game to know (well, pontificate about at least) the game.
I think it is crystal-lite clear (and remember, I am never wrong on these matters) that Tom Chick’s adjudication of the Fritz-inspired Colonization controversy reveals much TRUTH and that Ben Fritz’s original review of the game SUCKS. Thus, we must score a victory point for experience, insiderness, and the non-innocent. It is indeed better to play the game than to not play the game. No doubt whatsoever.
But, alas, then here comes the insider sycophant part. For Brave Tom, even Brave Tom, is bound and subject to the loot of the rat. For Tom does not review Ben Fritz as a game reviewer but rather as an industry compadre. He does not say Ben, your review SUCKS. He sez instead hey, listen up, Ben is a WRITER, you see, and he is doing a JOB, you see, and his WRITERLINESS and his JOBLINESS need to be taken into account in such a way that maybe SUCKS is not entirely appropriate in this particular instance.
Thus (and remember: never wrong) Tom, even Brave Tom, contextualizes his review and his adjudication and his TRUTH within a writerliness and a jobliness and a commercial game industriliness that we all know oozes from the bottom of the barrel of the loot of the rat.
But why am I such a negative nilly. What would I rather see?
I would rather see contextualization not take place in industriliness at all at any point watsoever. I would rather the context encapsulating BEN’S REVIEW SUCKS be, say, cultural studies(li)ness. Certainly, Ben’s review represents a cultural studies approach to aesthetics analysis. Is this a valid approach? Has it been applied to other aesthetic forms (film, literature, etc.)? Did it work well there? What are alternatives to a cultural studies approach? Are these alternative approaches more insightful, more appropriate, more TRUTHFUL regarding the GAME? And so forth and so on.
In this latter contextualization, one could hope, the TRUTH would matter a lot more and the loot of the rat a lot less. And this would allow, one could hope, (in reference to my earlier post) getting out from under the feet of the stomp.
Wow.. I am impressed by the lengthy wordliness of the last two posts! Here then, is a short one, to break up the flow a bit.
The incestuous relationships between game reviewers and game publishers are well known. I think there is a simple solution (the same one I use for movie reviews in fact): read the reviews, play the games, and find the reviewer whose reviews usually agree with your own tastes and just stick with that one. Don’t patronize the sites where every game is scored between 8 and 9, if your own experience with a few of those games was a lousy one.
I don’t follow this advice myself though.. I don’t read game reviews at all, considering them mostly useless. I watch footage on gametrailers.com and I ask my co-workers what they think, and I go with my gut. I think about 9 of the last 10 games I bought using this method were well worth the money. I wouldn’t buy a game based on someone else’s opinion unless I knew that person IRL.
about 2 years ago
Way to go Atari. Hell of a way to draw even more attention to the rather poor reviews floating around.
about 2 years ago
ohnoes. we made a bad game. time to sue teh webbernets.
about 2 years ago
Solution for reviewers: If company X won’t give you an advance copy and allow you to do an honest review, then give it a 0/10 score until you CAN give it a legitimate review.
The content of the review would simply be something along the lines of “Company X has made the decision to not allow us advanced access and/or has placed pre conditions on our ability to honestly critique this product. Therefore we must assume the product is somehow incomplete or deficient, and therefore unworthy of any higher score. We will attempt to provide a more comprehensive review as soon as we can do so with the full confidence that comes from having a complete version of the game.”
about 2 years ago
I like to review things on a scale of 13… that way I can give something a 7, and people will assume its a 7 out of 10 and not get upset, when really I’ve just given them a 50%.
about 2 years ago
Bad reviews are only allowed after this date!
That’s a bit of an affront on journalistic integrity there. They’re creating a conflict of interest by saying that the game reviewers aren’t allowed to post their reviews in a timely fashion to provide for their readers unless said reviews are positive..
Hmm…
Crafty?
about 2 years ago
I can’t seem to find the post-release embargo date. I’m curious how long after release bad reviews have to wait on this policy?
about 2 years ago
Gonna have to agree with Iconic here. Reviewers have no business reviewing pirated copies of a game, if that’s what happened in those certain cases. However this whole “embargo date” thing is a load of crap.
about 2 years ago
This seems typical of the game industry becoming increasingly insular, which is, in system evolution, a frequent portending of doom.
See also Tom Chick’s review of Metal Gear 4.
Big part of the problem: Reviewers being such insider sycophants. Game reviews need to be able to attach personal game-playing experiences to some larger body of human experience and/or knowledge about human experience. If the only thing you do is review games and you have zippo knowledge about media aesthetics or cognition or philosophy of mind or cinema history (beyond, say, Tarantino) or formal literary analysis, then you are pretty much locked-in to explicating a particular game-culture context that is, ultimately, ruled by the people who make the games rather than the people who experience/enjoy/play the games. You, as a reviewer, become another brick in the game business wall; and you are judged — appropriately, if not rightfully — on that basis; and, if you inhibit sales and thus threaten the health and well-being of the game biz, then you get stomped upon. Very common.
Step one when you get stomped upon may be to retreat into your own little bloggy personal domain world, which may or may not be buttressed by all your similarly stepped upon buds. This would be, for instance, the future of the Profkynesses: an endless word-zerg of cultural explication, style without substance or influence or impact or anything whatsoever other than, perhaps, some deeply rooted but unable to be articulated desire to play. But that fades away. And then the inevitable step two is to get tired of all that dead end bs and do something else entirely.
If you don’t want to get stomped upon, you gotta get out from under da feet. Desire to play is not enough.
Only solution I think.
about 2 years ago
Nice PR disaster that Atari caused.
Some just will never understand the internet age.
Idiots.
about 2 years ago
@Ed: As has been reported in any number of sources, the reviews legally purchased retail boxes from retailers who sold them before the official release date. Maybe Atari could sue their distributors, but please stop propagating misinformation.
about 2 years ago
The bad thing is they might succeed and putting all of us including free speech to shame. Consider one with a lot of money resources and the other have little, the lawyer fees could kill them.
about 2 years ago
“The bad thing is they might succeed and putting all of us including free speech to shame. Consider one with a lot of money resources and the other have little, the lawyer fees could kill them.”
Laws vary from place to place, but Europeans generally take a dimmer view of so-called “frivolous” lawsuits than Americans do, so assuming the sites in question have proof of their legal purchase, the suit(s) would more than likely be thrown out almost immediately.
Probably, Atari just decided to go fishing with their accusations, since the situation is a confluence of a whole bunch of things they don’t want (retailers breaking street dates, piracy, and poor advanced reviews). It’s not exactly a rare legal tactic to allege one thing, force the accused to present evidence that shows their innocence, and then use that evidence to pursue the real culprit(s).
Wizards of the Coast famously busted a bunch of people who were breaking an NDA, not by going after the NDA breakers (who they had no way to identify), but by going after the second hand source who was actually posting spoiled images of product that was in development. Basically, they used the legal threat to force the second hand source to settle and give up his sources. It’s not the same situation but it’s the same principle: you go after the public face in order to get to the anonymous sources, who are in fact the ones you wanted all along.
If Atari gets to intimidate a bunch of critical reviewers then maybe they can look at that as a bonus.
about 2 years ago
@Iconic Thank you that was excellent! It make sense and shows me a whole new perspective
about 2 years ago
/sarcasm
I wonder if they would care about the legality or legitimacy of the copy had the reviews been positive.
Hmm.
Something to think about.
/sarcasm off
about 2 years ago
I have been a reader of this blog for quite a while, but it’s the first time I am posting a comment on it.
Much of the problem with gaming reporting is, I think related to how much time you can actually play the game before deadline. Reading gaming boards, one notices that a recurring theme when people start discussing professional game reviews (usually espousing a view opposite their own), apart from concerns over conflicts of interest or the weight of advertisers, is along the lines of “the reviewer obviously did not get to play enough of the game; otherwise…”
Which in itself is a very legitimate question. A book reviewer is theoretically assumed to have read the entire work; the same for a film critic. But how much of the game is a reviewer supposed to have played to have enough of a grasp on it to write a review? Up to the end of the game, or all multiple endings if applicable? Sometimes those questioning the playing time of reviewers are even more specific: “he must have stopped at level 20, because the game is boring past 30″ (insert game name here, but Age of Conan, based on personal experience, fits that mold). That might even be something with which some developers play, by putting all the goodies early in the game, in the hope that reviewers don’t make it past that point.
Perhaps an approach to legitimize, so to speak, game reviewing, would be for the reviewer to explicitly state how many hours, or up to which points, he could play the game before deadline.
Nonetheless, maybe the other problem with game reviewing is that, as dmyers stated, it’s being done by “insider sycophants”. Well, I wouldn’t go as far as blaming individual reviewers, as I think the outlets they are writing for are far more to blame for the cheerleader tone of much of the writing done in them. How negatively can you write about a game heavily advertised on your website or in your magazine before you start being seen as a liability? Throw in the complete absence of authoritative forums of discussion — film has Sight and Sound, books have Kirkus, video games have… PC Gamer? — and a serious discussion of games is all but impossible. I can’t avoid noticing that back in the good old days before the Internet, just about the only mainstream publication where Nintendo games were discussed was Nintendo Power, and you’d never be told in there how much Nintendo of America was censoring its games when translating them from Japanese to maintain its family-friendly reputation.
@ dmyers: As for establishing criteria for game reviewers, I am not too sure a list such as that you propose could be of much use to reviewers on a large scale. Sure, someone with a knowledge of film history might wax on Final Fantasy VII’s Hitchcockian themes, but what use would be literary analysis in discussing, for example, the lasting popularity of Tetris? (At best you could go out on a limb and claim it has to do with being a harmless reminder of Soviet rectitude, the prevalence of right angles illustrating the rigidity of Marxist thinking, but at the end of the day it’s still that little game involving rotating blocks, and it’s all that really matters.)
In the case of games involving clear plots, this type of analysis might be helpful, but what would you do with a situational strategy game with no clear plot and sometimes not even a tangible ending? I’m not saying it is not possible — I’m sure one could write volumes about that old Tropico game from a comparative-politics perspective — but in the end the use of such references would feel forced upon the material. or would be of very little interest in comparison to more down-to-earth matters such as user interface (which are valid concerns). As much as I like the Terra Nova site, for example, I’m not sure that a lengthy discussion of Baudrillard or Pareto could mean much when discussing an MMO game.
But I wholeheartedly agree with you on one point: I am tired of seeing game reviewers who got to be game reviewers only because they liked gaming. I for one would love to see a game reviewer who would not be ashamed to claim that he considers video gaming an utter waste of time (but only on the condition that he should not get contemptuous of his readership; otherwise we would just be headed for disaster and making no progress at all).
about 2 years ago
Ah, the problem of how much game experience is needed to understand/review/grok the game is a vexing one, indeed and agreed – though somewhat ameliorated by the tendency of game designers to design the SAME DAMN GAME, most particularly in the multimillion dollar realm of MMO RAT LOOT.
But is the solution then to look upon the MMO RAT LOOT with the innocent eye of the nub and therein discover MMO RAT LOOT TRUTH? I think not.
Such a precisely relevant case in point (which motivates me to post) is circa right here and now: Tom Chick versus (if you want to call it that) Ben Fritz.
On one side we have the formerly irascible Chick, game insider to be shur, and certainly by all accounts (and my own never wrong personal assessment), insightful regarding game mechanism and play. On the other side we have Ben (the who?) Fritz who has, by hook or crook or whatever (no begrudgement here, honestly), managed to snag a well-known and widely attended platform (Variety), upon which he proudly and unrepentantly aligns with the nub nation: ie., Ben sez he does not need to play the game to know (well, pontificate about at least) the game.
I think it is crystal-lite clear (and remember, I am never wrong on these matters) that Tom Chick’s adjudication of the Fritz-inspired Colonization controversy reveals much TRUTH and that Ben Fritz’s original review of the game SUCKS. Thus, we must score a victory point for experience, insiderness, and the non-innocent. It is indeed better to play the game than to not play the game. No doubt whatsoever.
But, alas, then here comes the insider sycophant part. For Brave Tom, even Brave Tom, is bound and subject to the loot of the rat. For Tom does not review Ben Fritz as a game reviewer but rather as an industry compadre. He does not say Ben, your review SUCKS. He sez instead hey, listen up, Ben is a WRITER, you see, and he is doing a JOB, you see, and his WRITERLINESS and his JOBLINESS need to be taken into account in such a way that maybe SUCKS is not entirely appropriate in this particular instance.
Thus (and remember: never wrong) Tom, even Brave Tom, contextualizes his review and his adjudication and his TRUTH within a writerliness and a jobliness and a commercial game industriliness that we all know oozes from the bottom of the barrel of the loot of the rat.
But why am I such a negative nilly. What would I rather see?
I would rather see contextualization not take place in industriliness at all at any point watsoever. I would rather the context encapsulating BEN’S REVIEW SUCKS be, say, cultural studies(li)ness. Certainly, Ben’s review represents a cultural studies approach to aesthetics analysis. Is this a valid approach? Has it been applied to other aesthetic forms (film, literature, etc.)? Did it work well there? What are alternatives to a cultural studies approach? Are these alternative approaches more insightful, more appropriate, more TRUTHFUL regarding the GAME? And so forth and so on.
In this latter contextualization, one could hope, the TRUTH would matter a lot more and the loot of the rat a lot less. And this would allow, one could hope, (in reference to my earlier post) getting out from under the feet of the stomp.
about 2 years ago
Wow.. I am impressed by the lengthy wordliness of the last two posts! Here then, is a short one, to break up the flow a bit.
The incestuous relationships between game reviewers and game publishers are well known. I think there is a simple solution (the same one I use for movie reviews in fact): read the reviews, play the games, and find the reviewer whose reviews usually agree with your own tastes and just stick with that one. Don’t patronize the sites where every game is scored between 8 and 9, if your own experience with a few of those games was a lousy one.
I don’t follow this advice myself though.. I don’t read game reviews at all, considering them mostly useless. I watch footage on gametrailers.com and I ask my co-workers what they think, and I go with my gut. I think about 9 of the last 10 games I bought using this method were well worth the money. I wouldn’t buy a game based on someone else’s opinion unless I knew that person IRL.