Argument: Gamers And Reviewers Will Always Be Divided

In the latest round of the Game Reviews Symposium I've been participating in, I argue that the nature of the video game medium guarantees that game reviewers are condemned to always be distanced from the people for whom they're reviewing games. Check the excerpt below.

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(This is an excerpt from the second round of the 2K Boston developer Shawn Elliott's game reviews symposium: Symposium Part Two: Review Policy, Practice and Ethics.)

Stephen Totilo, MTV Multiplayer: Circle back to Shawn's original question for this round about reviewers' familiarity with fandom and look at the subsequent excellent discussion here about the relevance of genre expertise. Now let's tweak our angle. What I think some readers react badly to is a lack of implicit or explicit empathy -- or worse, false empathy.

Reviewers and game player lead two radically and possibly irreconcilable gaming lives.

Hey reviewer, do you really know what it’s like to be a gamer? Do you really know what it would be like to own this game, at the expense of some other game I wouldn't be able to afford? Do you play games for review that way a real gamer would play them? Or are you spoiled and distracted and unrealistic?

This is the crux of it all in my mind: the mutant gaming experience of the professional games reporter and reviewer.

Envy the movie critic who may not see the new movie in the same theater as her reader but can make a safe bet that she and her reader will consume it in similar ways: in a dark room over the course of two hours. She doesn't have to worry about how much of the movie she should finish before she writes her review or whether she could give a more accurate score if she waited a week to better experience the movie's online mode. And -- this is key -- her reader never has to worry those things about her.

Envy the TV critic whose most mutated form of watching TV simply involves seeing the season premiere of "Lost" three weeks before you do.

Envy the book reviewer who might read a galley of a novel and therefore not see the finished cover and might see a few typos that will be corrected before the book reaches your amateur eyes. That's the only difference. The gulf between the two experiences is narrow.

And then back we are to game reviewing where there are a few sessions available from EA to try the online mode of "Skate 2" before it comes out and you need to appraise the game's online modes… where "LittleBigPlanet" and "Spore" are already very different games from when they were released a few months ago when you probably reviewed them…where you binged through "Assassin's Creed" even though your readers who bought it didn't have to and where you did the same for "Grand Theft Auto IV" -- and where none of these facts could have gone very differently…and where the difference between "good" reviewing and "bad" might simply have been whether you acknowledged any of this.

Nothing changes the fact that the game reviewers' experience of games is so alien to that of the gamers' that I believe the relationship between the two parties will always contain a distance. It will always contain an undercurrent of distrust not prevalent among reviewers and audience of any other medium. No reviews policy can do better than bridge that; it can't hide the broad gap or narrow it. (And it's true for game-playing beat reporters like me too.)

You can be as familiar with fandom as you want, reviewers, but you are not one of them. You don't play games the same way.

That's my thesis. Who's with me?