One of my favorite blogs, MTV Multiplayer is having a “Review Week“. Where a normal (read: shitty) blog would do reviews on Review Week, MTV will actually be doing journalism regarding the subject of reviews: Do they matter? How hard are they to do professionally? What are the behind-the-scenes shenanigans? I’m excited because Multiplayer has earned my respect and I can’t wait to see if they will talk about some of the great Untold Truths of the game reviewing industry. As a developer, I have some very strong opinions on the subject, so we will see how it unfolds. In the explanation, Tolito says:

I learned that many developers are deeply suspicious of the qualifications of many game reviewers.

Oh, really?!

I’m of two minds on the subject. On one hand, being a gamer should be credential enough to review a game. After all, they are trying to explain what the experience will be to you sir or madam gamer in as close of an approximation as they can. Sir or madam gamer is not privy to some of the tricks of the trade and may make unfounded, rash and unfair judgments, so shouldn’t the reviewers as well?

On the other hand, I’ve found most reviewers while well-meaning to be absolutely unqualified in technical knowledge and subject to herd-think prejudices. If they are just echoing the common knowledge available as the zeitgeist on any online forum or by playing the first ten minutes of a game, then what the hell good are they?

So when the correlation between Metacritic and sales is echoed time and again (which is a premise I debate the casuality of), for one (or many!) numskull reviewer(s) to sink an otherwise accomplished game to me is nearly criminal. I see people here in my studio who should damn well know better say that they will pass trying the demo for game XYZ because it is “only Metacriticing in the seventies”. Bah!

So here’s hoping for an excellent series on the old Multiplayer blogotron.

Timely. Apparently, Gamespot’s editor has been fired ostensibly over a negative review of Eidos’ Kane & Lynch. This dovetails nicely with yesterday’s post on why you can’t trust reviewers or the major game review sites. Is this enough evidence for you to throw the validity of IGN/Gamespot/1up/GameInformer/etc. into question? How can you trust a game review from any of these places?

Now, I’m not entirely on Gerstmann’s side. A look at his contributions shows 1048 reviews since 1996. If you do the math, it is 1048 reviews over 4014 days or a period of 3.83 days between reviews without rest for ten years. How much depth could he possibly be gleaning from his products? He is like the fortune teller machine at the carnival that prints you out a fortune when you put a quarter in. I guess it can be informative if you hold it up to the light just so. Gerstmann was part of this reviewer/publisher circle-jerk and he got burned. Does Gamespot have an ombudsman? I don’t know. But these sites aren’t going to survive if they just ignore the conflict of interest problem any longer. Good riddance if they go.

Gamespot serves a purpose in that if you don’t actually want to play a game and judge its merits yourself, you can read the site and have a totally uninformed opinion. Many do. With so many games coming out, especially in November, you need to have some kind of filter that whittles the releases down to something digestible. For some reason, people trust these big media sites to do that for them. That’s like going to the car dealership and saying “I have this much money. Find me a car.” Wise idea.

Edit: Apparently, he’s the guy that gave Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 a perfect score. That is actually the watershed moment where I started distrusting game reviews. Fantastic how it comes together.