Will Spore and LBP expose the limitations of games journalism?

Today is the first day of September and so the games rush is warming
up. After a quiet month or two where few games have been released (So
gamers filled our time with hype and rumour about those games about to
be released), there is about to be a torrent of games unleashed for our
collective gaming pleasure. Now while the old yearly updates will sell
about as well as usual and Gears of War 2 will sell about the same as
the original, the real big story of the year will be about just 2
games. Two games which could completely reinvent the industry by going
completely against what conventional wisdom would tell you makes a
blockbuster game in the 21st century. Those two games are Spore by EA for PC/Mac and Little Big Planet by Sony/Media Molecule for PS3

One thing that is true of most gamers is that at some point there has
been a review of a game that we have disagreed with and I predict that
these two games will create more arguments than just about any games
ever. The reasons for this go back right to the very beginnings of
games journalism and will hopefully prove once and for all that the
current status quo of games ratings cannot be sustained. The reasons
are simple; universality or the lack of it.

The job of a reviewer has always been to play through a game to a
sufficient degree to enable them to present a summing up of the merits
and failures of the complete package to inform the reader/viewer, often
assigning a arbitrary score to enable readers to compare scores of
multiple games. Seems simple enough I know but this is the thing which
will force reviews to change and continue to do so. I’ll start with
Spore.

In case you have been living in a cage for the past 2 years or have a
pathological hate for PC gaming news; Spore is a pretty unique game in
that it allows players to chart the evolution of a species throughout
time. The thing is, how can one review this? Spore has literally
thousands of possible outcomes, no story and the promise of a
completely unique experience for every single player. Reviewing this
game therefore will be a challenge because how can any two reviewers
review the same game? Yes the physics and graphics will be the same but
the evolution will be entirely different with some finding a evolution
which is long, humorous and full of complex social changes while others
will find a dull game with few real jumps and a species which gets
bogged down in an amoeba like state. The universality of the experience
is therefore impossible to guarantee; something so unique and
impossibly complex cannot therefore be simply given the same basic out
of 10 scoring system which was devised during the Super Mario era where
there were simple linear levels which players could complete in only
one way.

Little Big Planet is much the same. While at face value it is a simple
2D platformer with a series of levels on the disk for players to
complete, we all know that this is not why anyone is buying the game.
The incredible looking level designer software and the promise of free
sharing of user created arenas is truly a magnificent promise but its
implementation waits to be established. That is the problem though,
when IGN and EuroGamer et al get their copy to review, it will be 2
weeks or so before the united nation of PlayStation gamers get our
grubby mits on it; as a result they will be completely missing out on
the point of the game because that all important user created content
will be non-existent. How can a reviewer accurately present a picture of
the game when one of its major features will be missing. In fact, can a
truly comprehensive review be given the week before the games release,
can LBP really be reviewed until 2 weeks, 2 months or even 2 years
after release to get the best picture of the game. I am aware the same
argument can be given in criticism of every MMO or even every game with
an online mode and I agree but they do not so neatly fit into my
argument as LBP and Spore do.

You may therefore be asking yourself what I think is the solution,
where is this revolution coming from? Am I really advocating the
abolition of reviews? Of course not, that would be utterly stupid;
reviews have a place and a service to many gamers which should not be
ignored, I just think that reviews need to change their approach. The
answer comes in experience.

Presenting the single experience of a person is an increasingly used
technique in academia, particularly in social sciences and humanities.
The technique is called autoethnography and what it does is places the
writer (and in this case reviewer) centrally in the piece; the
thoughts, feelings, ideas and nuances of the reviewer to be central and
form the basis of the piece. Reviews now try to present an unbiased and
standoffish whole universe view of a game but in a autoethnographic
technique a reviewer would give their own view of a game instead; even
gamer reviews and blog opinions would then have the same credibility as
the opinion of John Doe of GameSpot. Therefore the reviewer could be
excused for missing out the largest features because they are only
reviewing what they can while recognising the limitations of their work.

I know this sounds strange and all but think about it, doesn’t the idea
of John Smith’s personal review of Spore or Lisa Jones personal musings
upon Little Big Planet sound much more interesting and rewarding to
read than the IGN one and only completely infallible review? Even if
one of them comes forward and expresses dislike about a game that you
truly love, doesn’t it seem much more palatable that it is the personal
opinion of one individual than the judgement of a corporate juggernaut?

The fundamental truth however is that with online integration, post
release patches, user created content and MMO elements becoming more
popular in the game-sphere along with the increasingly sophisticated
and expensive technology required to truly experience a game to its
full potential; the experience presented by reviewers and the
experience of gamers who are putting the money into the coffers of
publishers is becoming increasingly a very different proposition so
sooner or later the status quo will need to be destroyed to redress
this balance; why not now?

[CAPT IRISH]

ill see you on the b ball court

[kwicksandz]

All reviews are simply someones opinion, whether they review a linear game like uncharted or a open world extravaganza. The weight that you give any one reviewers opinion is up to you, but its silly to say that one game deserves to be held to a different standard to others.

You could say the same of reviewing any MMO, as no reviewer could get to the max level and experience endgame content in a respectable time frame. The reviewer simply has to work with what they can achieve in the deadlines they have.

Does this mean no MMO should ever be reviewed? No, it just means that the reader should not take another persons opinion as gospel. Plenty of users on this site have outright dismissed a game because it only got a 7 or an 8 as a review and thats downright sad. At the end of the day the only review that matters is your own.

[BlackCountryBob]

I make the point that reviews have importance to some people but not all, I also make the point that MMOs could also be seen as being reviewed without their full potential being expressed. I also make the point that experience should be used for all reviews but LBP and Spore could be the games to force the change and do not in any way say that these games need to be treated differently; I said all games need to be treated differently.

If you are going to make a criticism make sure you are actually understanding what you are criticising or else you end up looking like a plank!

[Perjoss]

"there is about to be a torrent of games unleashed for our collective gaming pleasure"

I thought that was quite funny, especially after todays news about Spore being cracked already etc.

[The Mikester]

nice blog
this is interesting