When we first started this website, I knew I was going to be put in charge of the Ministry of Technology. I knew that I was going to be writing a lot about established giants within the geek world, and I was super-psyched about that.

However, I never really got over the fact that I wanted to create an entirely different website, one solely devoted to the tri-weekly posts by Tycho over at Penny Arcade.

I read that site religiously, or as close to religiously as Retrac will allow me to be. My favorite posts are the ones about the gaming industry, specifically as it relates to game reviews.

So, naturally, today’s post was the Gremlin equivalent of your Christmas.

The Problem

A video game costs a lot of money to make. This is the nature of the beast. Increasingly advanced hardware means more effort has to go into character modeling, better sound design and all around higher environmental detail. Higher costs mean you had better make sure that your game sells.

The best way to ensure sales is to have gaming journalists give the game a high rating. There are degrees to which good product placement and well-designed marketing campaigns will help sales, but the fact is most games need to be considered “good” by the industry publications in order to sell well.

Here are some of the things a game needs to succeed:

A story (optional, apparently)

Compelling Characters (see above)

Good Game Mechanics (running, jumping, climbing trees)

Good Interface (menus)

Good Marketing

As someone who works on complicated things that take a long time to finish, I know how easy it can be for the “wheels to come off the wagon.” When you’ve got a big thing with lots of moving parts, it’s downright likely that something will break and the thing stops working.

That sucks, but that’s the nature of creating art. But when it comes to the business of selling video games, failure isn’t always an option. Appropriately enough, the video game industry has a way to “cheat” their way to success, even if their product isn’t all that great.

Marketing and public relations are ways to “save” a game that was broken by the developer responsible for creating it. A really good game is probably going to be played a lot, regardless of whether or not there’s a huge marketing campaign supporting it. Think of this as a guideline rather than a rule, because there are going to be violations of it.

Part of the marketing vernacular has become getting good reviews and dominating forum board discussion threads. I cannot, with any authority, tell you why it is that people sift through those threads, but there is reason to believe that they do.

The Power of Reviews

Game reviewers are trusted members of the gaming community that tell others what they think of games. In theory, this is a great idea. You’re standing in the Electronics Section of Wal-Mart, staring at a HUGE wall of video game boxes. The covers all look similar, the names all sound alike and they all cost $60. Which one is guaranteed to give you an incredible experience?

We assume that the current game journalism industry is an answer to this question. It isn’t, and here are some reasons why:

Assigning a number rating to game is stupid. You cannot objectively rate “fun.” You can say “Yes, it was fun” or “No, it wasn’t fun.” But that’s not enough. People want to know why it’s good or not. They also want to know if Game A is better than Game B. How can someone who is not you tell you that one subjective experience is better than a different subjective experience?

They are too entangled with the developers. Because a lot of the industry voices are published within ink and paper magazines that need to be designed, printed and distributed every month, the reviewers require a great deal of lead time to properly render an opinion. If a reviewer gives a bad score, why would that game’s developer send them an advance copy next time around? The Internet is making this less of a problem, but developers got around that by offering “exclusive” reviewing opportunities to favorable reviewers.

We know we can’t trust them. Even if you buy into the notion that a reviewer can assign a number that reflects what your experience with a video game is likely to be, you can’t deny that there have been some shady deals taking place. When it’s reported that a game developer will tell a JOURNALIST that they aren’t allowed to release a review before a certain date UNLESS the score is of a certain, dictated value, then you cannot help but expect dishonesty.

Having never been tasked with creating a fully functioning, interactive universe intended for public consumption, there are certain things that I simply will never be able to comprehend about the video game industry. But for all the bitching I do about Non-Disclosure Agreements and ridiculous content embargoes, I feel a small stab of pity for game developers for the massive amount of work they have to do. But I don’t feel bad for long.

It Ruins Everyone

We’ve seen what can happen when the developers get pissy. Reviewers have lost their jobs for writing unfavorable reviews for games made by big developers. This is probably because there are about 1.2 million video game “reviewers” out there and the game companies know that. They know that they only need a few publications to write good reviews and all the other ones can piss up a rope

And what happens to the video games that weren’t created by a big name developer? All of the angst and frustration that the reviewers have bottled up from not being able to speak their mind comes spewing out. And those “little guy” developers don’t get the undying support of the EA-ites or the Atariacs.

Everyone who plays games, everyone who makes games and everyone who writes about games is hurt by these stupid scores. Let’s just throw them out and make way for an Espresso machine.

Everyone likes Espressos, right?