Sunday 1 November 2009

Game Reviewing

As anything in this competitive world loads of work needs to be done in an increasingly shorter amount of time that also affects reviewers. If you think about how many games are brought out monthly, weekly gaming magazines and so on it’s an incredible amount of work and difficult to keep up with. These reviewers are there to give gamers an idea and grading on the game, graphics, sounds, game play, features and so on. They don’t have a lot of time to write about the games, not to mention playing them and so the reviews can give gamers the wrong idea about the game.

I don’t tend to look at gaming magazines or reviews that often, I would rather play the demos and make my own conclusions based on what iv seen/played. However rather than a gamer downloading loads of demos/looking at games themselves to judge, reviewers filter between the good aspects and the bad so the gamer doesn't need to.
(But reviews may be bias)

But anyway, reviewing is quite a big section involved in releasing a game and there are many games magazines produced with a huge number of games featured. The question of who pays their wages is difficult to say exactly but my idea is that the actual magazine company pays the reviewers for their contribution rather than the game companies.

For these reviews I think that having an actual ranking section for each element of the game is quite useful for a general summary for what the reviewers thought of the game. For me reading them this is one of the main points that I look at, then the main text then my conclusions brought up as I look at the screenshots/videos. This "New Games Journalism" examples are quite interesting its like typing up someone's journal of a day, reminds me of during my Foundation Art course where you are encouraged to write about everything that you thought about with research and the final pieces.

This style of games journalism is quite similar to how I written in my art sketchbooks and I quite like its style. It makes everything seem a bit more personal to the person, but for other readers it greatly depends on which person is writing it for it to affect them.

There doesn't seem to be anymore variations of game writing, its quite limited really to general reviewing as well as NGJ as I suppose its more popular to just comment on the game and leave it like that rather than having little fiddly bits scattered around. People who read things about the games generally want to have information describing it as well as some sort of system rating the elements of the game.

In my writing I prefer writing subjectively but in terms of game reviewing this isn't really fair as for someone to be bias all the time will not be to some peoples liking.

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