Do you think video game reviewing will become as specialized as other ways of reviewing art?

yes

I sure as hell know a lot of gamers (many of whom like my b/f work in the game industry) who take it really seriously. They have fun as well obv, but they're extremely nitpicky and expect a lot.

Then again, we might start to see more "artistic" games that cater to the indie-film sort of audience.

Yeah. I know. Needs work...

and sort of related:
http://www.gamestudies.org/

(full disclosure: i'm a paid game semi-reviewer for a site, one that will hopefully be running more comprehensive reviews in the future)

The video game Ebert should surface sometime in the mid '20s.

remember that media culture in our modern age is far more accelerated than it has even been. I woulnd't be surprised if we had a gamer Ebert within 5 years.

also, i like how the diff between "casual gamer" and "hardcore gamer" involving only the obscurity of the game being played. Somebody playing "Seiken Densetsu 3" for a hour or two per day is a hardcore gamer; someone playing Halo or Madden for 12 hours per is not.

Also, what happens when obscure games get popularized? at what point does something like Katamari cross over into the "casual" side?

You're right. Someone who listens to every "MTV-type" album every week is just as much a hardcore pop music junkie as someone who listens to lost Aztec Camera demos that were never transferred past cassette or something soemwhat osbcure for an hour every day.

But wasn't that the same for music criticism (and every other criticsm, incl film criticism)? If it doesn't exist, it'll be invented and/or borrowed.

I really like the magazine Edge - especially the look because I don't really read it. :-) I only read one or two articles but it seemed as though they are trying very hard to create some serious discourse or whatever.

All reviews scores are contextual anyway: a racing game could be a phenomenal example of its craft, and I still won't want to pick it up.

You could even have the gaming equivalent of "rockism" where a game that is "fun" for various reasons would be condemned for not following the traditional way of thinking for how games are "supposed" to play.

I have seen a related for of rockism in Edge Magazine (which is U&K to this thread), where they game Rome: Total War 9/10 and basically admitted that it was a complete blast but they weren't giving it a perfect score because it didn't push anything forwards, it was just made up of the best bits of other games.

The audience for video games is much more broad and general, and probably somewhat less literate on the whole (though there are certainly very literate people who play video games.)

WTF? How many movies do you think someone who's illiterate or barely literate can enjoy, vs how many games?

The idea of difficulty has to factor in to any critical vocabulary built up around games, I reckon. So you not only have the 'traditional' criteria by which we talk about art (emotional impact, profundity, whatever) which obviously videogames can fulfil, you also have the idea of interactivity which as pr00de says is new, and then you ALSO have this idea of personal challenge kind of like rock-climbing, which again is something fairly new to 'art'.

(Practically speaking btw, I don't think games should be easier, I have accepted my lot, but I do think an 'easy' difficulty level would be nice on big games for people who get off on exploration more than challenge.)

??? You enjoy digital cycles of effort and reward, you're a video gamer. You don't seem to be as interested in the adolescent boy side of things, so I'd say that we need (roughly) 15-20 million more like you, to offset people that think the X-Box's general product line is a good idea.

Thanks :) The only reason I made that aside is cos a few times on gamez threads I've made comments you've replied with "??" kind of responses and to be honest I thought "oh poo. I said something silly". I'm in an arena I'm new to, and very interested in, but compared to say, my IT/networking knowledge I'm a dolt, so I'm open to corrections =)

we need (roughly) 15-20 million more like you, to offset people that think the X-Box's general product line is a good idea.

ie we need MORE FEMALE INPUT. Seriously.

It's sort of funny watching the guys at Penny Arcade talk about how they don't like having to unlock multiplayer content in the single-player game, because hey they paid they money, where's their stuff? I mean, they have a point, but then they are the hardest of the hardcore: it's hard to read their list of all the stuff that the Xbox 360 will absolutely have to have and still consider them to have any relevance to my life.

Oh, totally. I was just wondering where it might come from or what form it might take.

At any rate, 1UP.com has moved the bar up another level for the mass-market industry coverage, there are about 5000 guys blogging here and there looking for a piece of the pie, and The Escapist has an article about Bungie's old Mac FPS series Marathon that made me curious about Halo, for christ's sake.

The question in the thread title is a matter of time, and more importantly, I think the "become as specialized" is the part that's inaccurate. Reviewing Art is becoming diffuse, not specialized. Everybody writes about music and film nowadays, I mean for fuck's sake Phil Two got a job as the video games editor on some website, I heard.

That all being said, when is Freaky Trigger getting a game section?

of course, this was pre-McGriddle IGN, so all bets are off now.

hell, even my brother knew one or two guys on his college football team who got addicted to that game.

There are games that don't require you to be "good" at all (some of which are my favorite games -- The Sims or Animal Crossing, say).

(what would a geek rockist be? A nerdist? A viddist?)

"hardcore gamer" usually suffices.

from what i gather, some folks here are not too keen on the action parts, which i can understand. it's like playing one of the Space Quest games, and getting bent out of shape by the stupid fucking mini-games that Sierra put in there. Here, look, let's race Roger Wilco to town! oops, you'll have to try again for the 17th time! Isn't this fun!

The second problem is that, for the most part, video games are not meant to be analyzed to any great degree. Grand Theft Auto is one of the best video games I've ever played, but the plot of the game is basically an amalgam of many of my least favorite films (Scarface, etc.). Most video games operate in a realm outside of criticism, and as thought-provoking as Black & White might have been, it simply is not as fun as Burnout 3 or Alien Hominid, imo.

The best avenue for video game criticism that I see is in the big picture approach. What is the future of gaming? Will programmers find a way to create games that operate outside of linear plotting that aren't goal-less wanderfests? Will they be any fun? Will someone write a game that offers true literary possibilities? Will THAT game be any fun?

I doubt any song was written with that intention either. Of course it's not meant to, but you are still able to. Or maybe I just misunderstood you.

Its funny, because if you were reading the mags up to that point when they "maturized" Game Players into a magazine for the older kids/adults, everything else didn't even dare take on the subject matter they did. Gamepro was busy trying to sell itself with its cheap cartoon character reviewers and garbage articles, and while EGM was better back in the day as well, it was chock full of boring fluff and still sort of "streamlined" against the more mature content. Now EVERYONE does the Game Players format with the wacky articles and all sorts of random pop culture garbage. Hell, EGM's old review team is completely gone and replaced with hacks like Seanbaby.

(luckily for me, I have the entire Game Players run from 1992 till their death in '98. and I do still occasionally flip through them. such a fantastic mag)

Also, i do remember when EGM was like an inch thick, but i never read it since it covered stuff like the SNES or Genesis which i didn't have.

Yeah, EGM during its days when they were running nearly 300 pages an issue was a high point, because they were able to touch on things no one else did. Plus, their review system with 4 reviewers all doing each game for the month was additionally helpful. The "inside info" and various game previews (especially for the foriegn games) was great too. Somewhere around 96, it began to change a lot. And by the turn of the century, it was a glorified Gamepro that wanted to be Game Players...but wasn't.

my favourite bit in Edge every month is where they cast another eye over an old classic. The Yoshi's Island piece and the Tempest 2000 articles, for instance, were great.

was something i saw on slashdot a while ago about a quarterly fanzine that was available for download as a pdf. wonder if it made it to issue 2? ha, yes: http://www.gamersquarter.com/

this year, they're doing a crucial classics series, covering games like Elevator Action, Civilization, Monkey Island, Bionic Commando, Oregon Trail, etc.

also, i like jeremy parish's work over at Toastyfrog. his thing on Western Religion in Japanese Games was great, including the whole "Xenogears on Golgotha" bit, too.

http://www.1up.com/media?id=1143241

would make a good t-shirt.

Also, since this entry covers all LucasArts games, Grim Fandango is only given an "honorable mention" in a two paragraph sidebar write-up. Seems a bit of a disservice to what's pretty much the creative apex of what LucasArts could do, before all the creators split(Tim Schafer, Steve Purcell, et al), and it just became a mediocre Star Wars gamedev. It's going to be a long time before we get another game with Robert Frost jokes, beatnik skeletons, and Glottis.

Then again, perhaps that's too much to cover in a single entry.

http://www.nonzerochance.com/index.php?p=buypage&design=nethackroom&ref=lbc&style=kshirt

http://www.nonzerochance.com/images/nethackroom-bigkshirt.png

I remember somebody once reffering to that site as "the pitchfork of videogames" and it's sort of accurate, even if it does do the insert credit writers a huge disservice.