Opinionative

Reviewers. These people seem to be stuck to a very tight schedule; from what I’ve read and heard (I don’t know any personally). They only have 19 days to put together a magazine edition, seems like a pretty stressful job there. Kieron Gillen’s blog (link here) describes them as being lazy because ‘saving effort in one area gives them more time for something that they can’t cut corners on’ which I can understand and occasionally practise. They’re perceived as corrupt by ‘outsiders’ for what was rushed and stupid decision which seems to fall in with them being lazy.

When I’m reading or listening/watching a review about a game I like i’m drawn more towards a review when the person forces their opinion on me, if it’s a game I haven’t played I will more than likely accept it so long as it’s backed up by some sort of example. So for me ‘It’s crap because etc’ is fine but just ‘its crap’ and you’ve lost me already. So in short, when I reviewed something I like to stuff my own opinion in their like a Christmas gift, even it’s one of those unwanted ones. Ultimately, I think their needs to be a balance however.

I have read a few of these ‘New Games Journalism’ and I’ll be honest with you, I like some of it. For extreme examples here; I tried this one (http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html)
and lost interest immediately. The style it’s written in just didn’t interest me at all, it reminds me of some strange crime novel I read a long time ago but can’t remember the title, I just remember I didn’t enjoy that either...

I liked this one though (http://www.insertcredit.com/features/dreaming2/index.html),
mostly because I’ve played the game but it kept me interested with its style. Rhetorical questions, opinions seeping out everywhere; it felt like I was talking to the guy.

‘The worth of a video-game lies within the gamer not the video-game’ sounds kind of epic and corny too, but I believe it. If this is NGJ I welcome it.