TwitterCrit
Let’s pick at the carcass of the standardized game review. It was born in the dry, cash-corrupt dirt of the enthusiastic press. It grew into a bloated, overdetailed and understimulating monster via the web press, flirted with a patronizing respectability in the mainstream media, and lights up, here and there, in the blogosphere. If you had to make an anthology of great games writing - and I mean, an editor is holding a gun to your head, right now, and your grandmother’s too - you could find maybe ten or twenty pieces that will survive the ages. But your editor will run out of bullets before he gets anyone to read it.
Sound harsh? Well, there are good critics out there. They just happen to work in a stillborn format. I sense a consensus from some of gaming’s best writers that reviews aren’t cutting it. We hem and haw over their shortcomings - ethical, literary, and intellectual - and pick on little logistical problems, like how someone’s going to finish GTA IV on deadline and still have time to enjoy it. But nobody faces the problem head-on.
My personal edit-hero Simon Carless recently wrote that write-ups of experiences pose a strong alternative to the standard review. The gaming blogosphere prospers here - take Leigh Alexander’s write-up today about getting wrapped up in just the first section of Fallout 3. And if you scan my reviews for the past year, you’ll see me switch from straight-up reviews to, well, whatever I feel like. Without raising the dreaded “new games journalism,” people are looking for experiences and reactions rather than bullet-point assessments. They want us to treat games as architecture, restaurant, social space, fleeting spectacle. You don’t review a rave. You don’t review baseball.
Here’s my latest obsession: TwitterCrit.
