It's an interesting question. I've recently heard some reviewers make the ludicrous claim that games shouldn't be rated on value - that a good 5 hour game for 60 dollars is qualitiatively identical to a good 20 hour game, for 60 dollars.

However, I do think that episodic content should be reviewed in the same way as everything else. After all, we're not talking about a full game for cheap, we're talking about part of a game, for cheap. Since the value and the cost even out to roughly the value/cost of a full game, I'd say it all evens out.

My worry with episodic material and micropayments is that publishers and developers would take a normal $50 game and split it into 4 parts at $20 each. Artificial, arbitrary inflation of prices. I mean, does anyone really think $2.50 is the right price for a ring tone? 'Cause that is the business model that Microsoft and ilk are shooting for. It's fine for Gameguru to say that we expect to much for our money, but I for one do not support the hyperinflation of game prices; there are too many good, used games out there. In fact, I will kick and scream like a little girl if they try this (and they are). I do not see that money going towards making a better game, or making the lives of individual developers easier. I see that extra money going to all the wrong places and lining all the wrong pockets.

I think that's the primary concern, and if I see that kinda think in SiN or Half-Life, I promise I will chime in.

On the other hand, I like experiencing more games, not less. This might be just the thing to allow me to do that without blowing my budget.

There will be NINE episodes of Sin.

I dont' think that's a good comparrison. The SS games were full games in and of themselves.

As it stands right now, if there are going to be 9 episodes of SiN, I'm not dropping $180 to play it to completion. The story just isn't that important to me. I can get "great FPS" gameplay somewhere else.

But price aside, I think every episode should be reviewed as a stand alone game, including the story. Do re-reviews is a slippery slope. Star Wars Galaxies is a very different game today than it was when first released, but you don't see Gamespot changing its original review.

Reviews are a buyer's guide, and not (necessarily) criticism. The fundamental point of a review is to give the reader enough information about the game so he/she can decide if he/she wants to buy it or not. As such, they should be made available as soon as possible. When games have as short a shelf-life as they do, waiting for all episodes to be released before reviewing it would be pretty useless.

And since reviews are buyer's guides, I don't see a problem with the price of a game affecting a review. If a game's among the most glorious half hour of gaming ever concieved, but that half-hour is all you get and the game has no replayability, you're going to feel ripped of at full price, but be perfectly happpy if you paid 5-10 bucks. A review bloody well better acknowledge that.

Thank the Lo'. Someone who understands. A lot of reviewers these want to prove they can write creatively. They seem to be failed novellists rather than successful reviewers.

*stands out from behind Lobo's shoulder*

Yeah!

Leave it to the online publications. A constant re-evaluation of a game as new episodes come out beyond the first one wouldn't be worth a print magazine's trouble any more than a re-review of a game that's been patched would be. An online magazine can give you updates as often as the episodes come out, as soon as they come out, avoiding any sort of arbitrary waiting period like 6 months. As far as the practicality of this, I'd say it doesn't factor into the issue. Sites like Gametab have become the C-span for gaming, with 24/7 news, and I don't think that constant reviews would have much of an effect on the saturation point of the information available. I mean, look at what headlines can be pushed to the top, goofy sh*t when Joystiq or Kotaku are having their slow news days and post National Enquirer level misleading stories.

With that in mind, I say both ways. A television show has good and bad episodes, and each can be given an independent rating that has nothing to do with the a series overall value. What I think will be interesting about episode content (and what will either liken it or distinguish it from television, besides the economics of charging on a per episode rather than subscription basis) is whether or not games will require you to purchase all the episodes in order, or allow you to pick and choose if the general opinion is that they dropped the ball on one or two of them, and how that would affect the game in terms of gameplay and story.

As for whether or not games should be rated on value? I say absolutely. And I think that a 5 hour game for $60 can be worth every bit as much as a 60 hour game for $60. In the end, it's whether or not that 5 hours is worth the money as much as if that 60 hours is. And I will absolutely disagree with Lobster's comment about something good being good at any price. That's why the concept of "Buy it, rent it, wait for it on t.v." exists for movies, and I think similar parallels can be drawn to any consumer product, including video games.

And as for the concept of literary criticism and reviews being separate, look at books. Many (not all, just as not all video games are worth the extra words) books are too dense for a simple A+B=Value! equation, and book reviews often walk the line between being a critique and product review. I'm not sure if this means I'm agreeing with Lobo and ALG and Legion at the same time, but I think that reviews should be allowed a little leeway depending on the game, but that yes, it should answer definitively (if possible) the question of worth.

And bugger with comments like "but things like entertainment are subjective, and you can't...blah blah blah". Sure you can. That's part of what reviews are, and that's why we read them. When I read the paper, there are certain film critics that I have come to trust based on past reviews, whether it's because I feel they are fair or informative, or merely just brutally honest, even if I didn't always agree with them in the past. So maybe Jimmy's middle school essay review on his site, "www.rpgsblowmygoats.com" shouldn't carry as much weight with you as say, Greg Kasavin's review of the same game, but there are definitely certain qualities that come into play regardless of what the game is, such as "is it fun?"

Note this has nothing to do with what the best or worst way of assigning a numerical or letter value to a product is, or if another system entirely is preferable, just that things like entertainment can, and are, graded all the time, and not without merit.

I think Lobo's description actually allows more for the mentioning of all qualities of a game, good or bad, than yours or ALG's does. And nowhere does he mention that reviews should be skewed or propaganda. It's the shorter, bottom line value reviews (which are becoming more common in print publication as costs go up, and their space becomes more limited) that gloss over, leave out, or ignore important factors. And if a reviewer overlooks certain flaws, then maybe he didn't feel it was a flaw at all, or in the context of the game's good points, not worth mentioning. Which has a lot to do with building up trust with your fan base. Look at Ebert. I probably disagree with him roughly half the time, but he makes good points, presents his arguments clearly, and is almost always fair, which is why 9/10 other reviewers could rate a movie a piece of sh*t, and if he likes it I will give it a chance anyway.

As for anti-reviews, fantastic. Make up a zine of them, or an entire site. But they won't belong in review magazines or on review sites, because the whole point of both of those is, oddly enough, the reviews. I've always considered GWJ more of a community than review or even information site, and view the front page articles as just regularly provided catalysts for worthy discussion.

Indeed.

In that article, I actually made a much stronger claim than I have made in the comments to this thread: I said that we should not only encourage reviewers to put on their critic hats, but expect that they should do so.

In the comments that followed, I later backed down from that claim just a tad, when Jolly Bill pointed out that many games simply will not withstand this kind of approach, any more than the typical action film would withstand critical assessment within that field. But I'm half-tempted to say of such games, that we shouldn't bother to review them in any formal way at all. Better to make a quick forum post or somesuch. This is generally how things work at GWJ already; we only review the games that show some promise. And it is certainly how things work in the well-regarded literary-review magazines, which rarely trouble themselves with mass-market tripe.

As I said to Legion, I believe that there is a contradiction at work here. Sometimes, in order to explain the worth of a game--to say why it is worthwhile--we must delve into matters of criticism. If part of the definition of "review" is that a review cannot address these deeper issues (and I would note that this definition seems only to pertain to reviews of games, and not of other narrative or artistic media, for reasons that I do not understand), then I say that that definition does us more harm than good. This, to me, is roughly the difference between saying that Planescape: Torment has "a good story," and explaining in detail how it subverts the traditional notion of the protagonist through a careful combination of plot structure and play mechanics. If I am debarred from telling you about the latter, then I am also incapable of explaining why I think the game is worthwhile.

A review is an opinion on a product's worthiness of purchase. Just because a feature can stand to critical evaluation does not mean it needs to or should be put to such in a product review. If the reviewer wants to write an essay, he can write an essay. He should not write an essay dressed as a product review.

If it is absolutely necessary to offer a critical perspective of something very specific, it should be done as briefly as possible. That's not the situation that exists in game reviews on the whole.

Not nearly as much as game reviewers seem to think.

There's the problem - the "why". Reviewers seem to insist that the "why" is important in a review. It's not. WHY one vacuum sucks better than the next is not important. I don't care about its patent pending SuperSukk3000(tm) technology, though I don't mind it mentioned in passing or for a little color. In a product review, the reason why you think a particular feature or aspect is worthwhile is MUCH LESS important than the simple fact that it (and the game) IS worthwhile. Certainly, it helps to sprinkle a little "why" in there for clarity and detail. The problem is that far too many game reviews aren't sprinkling. They're writing essays. And that's plain, flat out, bad reviewing. Great essay writing is bad reviewing.

There's no need for it. Nothing is stopping anyone from writing a great essay on all the why, why, whys of any game. More power to anyone that wants to do it! DO NOT do it in something you're calling a review. Compare critical analysis of movies to plain ol' movie reviews. One goes into the depths of blah blah, and the other serves the singular purpose of telling me if I should consider seeing the movie or not.

Book reviewers, movie reviewers, music reviewers, TV reviewers, reviewers of every other kind of art and entertainment form get this. Game reviewers do not. Unfortunately, 1Dgaf's comment about failed novelists rings too true. Product reviews aren't the place for a writer to pat himself on the back for his oh-so-clever writing. A good writer knows what NOT to write and when NOT to write it, too.

A review may be an opinion on a product's worthiness of purchase; but different people consider different things worthy under different circumstances. Should a reviewer ignore her own honest opinion of the game's worth in order to conform to this notion of style? To do so would seem to contradict the very definition of "review," as a person's opinion on a product's worthiness of purchase.

Whoa there! You now seem to occupy the peculiar ground of arguing that reviewers should not endeavor to justify their beliefs, or to explain them in any way to the reader. Do you really think that reviewers needn't concern themselves with providing evidence for their claims about a game? I wouldn't describe even the most formulaic, basic IGN-style review in such a harsh light as this! Even by your own lights, I should think you would agree that reviewers ought to explain why they like or dislike the game in question.

Are you concerned, then, only with the methods of certain writers, whose reviews seem clouded by irrelevant talk? If so, then would it be fair to say that you think criticism is okay in reviews, so long as it does not interfere with the review's capacity to describe the product and persuade the reader as to its worth? (Note that, if you agree to it, then this would constitute a less radical position, on your part.)

So then, are we facing nothing more than a problem of mere semantics? That is, does your argument rely only on what you feel the word "review" means, and not on the way you feel people ought to judge the worth of a game? If so, then I shall gladly yield the word "review" to your use, and adopt an entirely new word, "shmeeview" to represent the conception of that writing which I feel to be superior, on account of its not limiting those who evaluate games to a narrow mode of expression.

Here again you have erected a dichotomy, which need not always hold true (and one which certainly does not in, for example, the reviews of Roger Ebert), and insisted that it must. As I said earlier, some people think that a film's value (or a game's, etc.) is in part dependent upon how that film responds to critical analysis. The question of a film's worth, and the question of its critical significance, are, for some people in some cases, inextricable.

Actually, books have enjoyed a centuries-long tradition of reviews which dabble in criticism; and even today, many book reviews are still written by scholars active in the appropriate field, or writers whose own experience lends them a critical eye, etc. Picked up a copy of the New York Review of Books lately? I also mentioned Roger Ebert as an example of a movie reviewer who frequently extends his scope to deeper analysis of the things that make good movies tick (as well as the things that may sabotage them).

Patting oneself on the back for oh-so-clever writing? I sense now that you are expressing disdain, not for the mistaken act of placing criticism in reviews, but for engaging in criticism at all--as though critical analysis were some kind of pollution, in and of itself. If true--and also, if you really detect no difference at all between a game and a vacuum cleaner, as you say, in terms of how we should judge their value--this sentiment would make me sad. I think that games have proven themselves worthy of higher esteem than that.

(Note that I was editing my last post, when you posted yours. It may appear different to you than when you last examined it.)

In response to your last post, I believe that you have now adopted a much more moderate stance: you say good criticism is a matter of degree, and of not straying too far from the point of the review itself; and that critical analysis is good for some games, not for others; and that you yourself are interested in shorter, more targeted reviews, owing to time constraints (which is fine). This all seems very much in line with what I have said from the beginning. Are we reconciled?

That's fair, you replied as I was editing mine.

I didn't realize we weren't.

Actually, I enjoy good critical analysis of art, when in the right time and place. Much as I enjoy listening to metal, but not when trying to sleep. When someone tries to force a "superior" critical approach into a product review, it's a big red flag of pretention. A good critical writer knows when it's appropriate and when it's NOT appropriate. When I talk about "patting oneself on the back", it's not a condemnation of criticism on the whole, but of writers who apparently feel they're too good to write a mere lowly "product review".

I don't know who said it, but it's been said that "truly great musicians know when NOT to play". The same applies to writing.

(I'd also like to point out that post #2 was written in the wee hours of the morning, so if it appears that I am taking a "more moderate" stance, I assure you the truth is no change in stance, but perhaps a better explanation of the stance when not encumbered with drowsiness)

Sorry, should I start another thread?