Editors talk to GSW about scores, state of writing

Interesting interview recently at GameSetWatch with four editors from major mags and sites. It’s a “The State of Game Journalism.” (It cracks me up that every year the summer lull produces a little navel-gazing among writers.) Among the questions are two that I find interesting as they relate to game writing and criticism:

What, if anything, is wrong with videogame journalism and how are you working to fix it?

Tony Mott (Edge): There’s so much of it out there today, especially on the internet, that it’s difficult to have a catch-all opinion on the state of game journalism. There’s certainly an awful lot of shit out there, but there are lots of people happy to read shit about videogames in the same way they’re happy to watch shit on TV or read shitty newspapers. If enough people are satisfied with that — if it’s fulfilling their needs, such as they are — then it’s serving a purpose, right? It’s just different to what we try to do. I don’t think we’re in a position to ‘fix’ anything, and it would probably be arrogant to think that it’s in any way our responsibility.

Tal Blevins (IGN): The biggest thing that I think is wrong with “videogame journalism” is classifying it as “videogame journalism.” What makes reporting on videogames any different from any other form of entertainment reporting or product critiquing? One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone compares IGN to a publication like The Economist. Compare IGN to Entertainment Weekly or At the Movies, not The Economist. Writing about videogames is nothing to be ashamed of, and I don’t feel the need to try and justify it as anything more than it is. Are we investigative journalists or war correspondents? No, but we don’t want to be, either. We strive to be just as accurate, in-depth, and compelling as any publication in existence, but we’re also very aware of our audience, and we write with them in mind.

Tom Bramwell (Eurogamer): Videogame journalism isn’t as glamorous or highly paid as film, music or literary criticism, so the quality threshold isn’t as high. Eurogamer’s popular, so I can employ the best writers and that’s how I try and fight that. I also evaluate what we’re doing and listen to feedback from our readers and contributors as well as other people who work in the games industry.

Not sure that there’s anything inherently “wrong” with what people are writing, only that it’s maturing overall and, in certain corners and to certain readers, getting better. So, what about numerical scores?

Videogame review scores: pointless or pertinent?

TM (Edge): It’s a weird one. On the one hand you want to say that you shouldn’t need to put a number at the end of an opinion in order to communicate what you think, but then you look at how people talk about your magazine and see that most of the discussion centres on the numbers that appear at the end of its reviews.

A few years ago, when I wasn’t working on Edge, the guys on the team experimented one issue by removing review scores, but the experiment didn’t really work because all of the scores merely appeared in a group at the end of the review section rather than alongside the individual reviews. Perhaps we could try something like that again in the future, but not include scores at all. I’m not convinced that the majority of readers would really go for it, though.

The problem, I think, is that review scores have existed for so many years that they’ve become deeply embedded in the commercial critical process. So it’s a conditioning thing. It can get silly, of course, when you’re trying to differentiate between things like 93% and 94%, but also 7 and 8, and 6 and 7, and so on. Actually, the other day I was saying to someone that I’d like to launch a videogame magazine called Seven, which focused exclusively on games that were 7/10s. You could have some fun with that. Well, for one issue, after which the joke probably wouldn’t work.

TB (IGN): I’d say review scores are pertinent, but they don’t live on their own. Review scores are a useful gauge for readers to compare games that are released around the same time on the same platform — seriously though, you can’t compare an Xbox 360 score today to a PC score from 1993 — but they don’t live by themselves; the text is the most important part of any review, and should do the job of explaining what a score means. I’ve seen so many arguments on message boards similar to “IGN gave this game a 9.2 when the game is clearly a 9.4,” but I rarely see the a debate along the lines of “IGN said this game fell short as an overpowering emotional experience, but I found the scene where Sir Yardley sacrifices his own life for that of his squire to be truly moving.”

Full article: In-Depth ‘Meet the Editors: The State of Game Journalism’