QUOTED FOR TRUTH(-ish) - Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins: Twofer [October 19th, 2011]

I mostly agree with what Jerry has written here, but I disagree on one point. I think you know what it is. And yet I shall keep typing anyway! What am I like, eh readers?

A lot of fuss has been made of EA’s attempts to massage reviews of Battlefield 3. I don’t particularly care. Some of the stuff PR reps get up to bother me (case in point: Hello and Welcome to the Last Three Days of the Blog™), but they are ultimately doing their jobs. Their jobs, as Jerry correctly points out, is to sell their game, to make their game look as appealing as possible to the masses so that these masses might exchange their hard-earned dollarpounds for a studio’s latest blend of 1s and 0s.

The problem arises when press outlets - ostensibly people whose goal is to help readers avoid the minefield of videogame releases by highlighting the good games and warning us of the bad ones - decide that, actually, the support they get from the PR people is actually more important than the people they’re supposed to be writing for.

Every now and then the occasional journalist (and, if we’re lucky, press outlet) will remember that it’s their readers whom they should be serving, not the publishers or their PR folks, and we end up with fantastic, honest and, if need be, brutal critique of games. Amiga Power understood this way back in the 90s, and if they were blackballed by a publisher they’d buy the damned game at an actual shop and then review it anyway. They’d be honest about it, too - despite their ongoing feud with Team17 Software, the average score given to a Team17 game was 73%.

Jim Sterling is a key example of a reviewer who puts the readers first and who knows how to use the 0-10 scale properly, but he’s maligned for it because readers have grown accustomed to press outlets using 9s instead of 8s, and 7s instead of 4s and 5s (unless it’s an indie game, of course, at which point the outlet in question suddenly remembers that there are numbers lower than 7, and decides to use the first one of the bunch they can remember how to draw in crayon). If there were more game journalists like Jim, we’d probably have more reliable and trustworthy review scores. Of course the corollary of that is we’d have absolutely abominable news coverage, so, y’know. Swings and roundabouts.

Their job is to express their honest opinion of a game. When they start expressing someone else’s opinion, however, perhaps in exchange for a continued supply of shiny discs or advertising revenue, we have a serious issue.

Ultimately, of course, whether or not you enjoy a game is determined not by the words of some stranger with an opinion a platform to disseminate it, but by your own experiences with the game itself. But reviews - well-written reviews free of the muddying influence of the folks at PR - serve as a decent barometer.

Traditionally we have participated in this arrangement because how else are we to learn when a new game that might interest us is coming out? This is becoming less and less the case as advertising for videogames creeps more and more into the mainstream - it’s becoming more and more common to see videogames advertised on network television, on billboards, on the side of buses and in theaters.

I like Jerry, and I respect his opinion. I even understand where he’s coming from - I’ll be the first person to tell you that game journalism in general is little more than thinly-veiled PR. I’ll also be the first person to tell you that this shouldn’t be the case. If you ignore the cracks in the wall they’ll only get bigger. Keep pointing them out, and maybe someone will call in a plasterer.