Old games journalism reviews, I tend to think of the game as a product, and they tend to review it like you’d review a car, like oh, you know, this one has better traction, there’s more steering, it feels pretty good, the smell’s nice, things like that. And, you know, you get these um, these kind of ridiculous scoring scheme, as where it’s like, oh, you know, the graphics are 8 out of 10, and the-the sound effects are 4 out 10, and the gameplay is 7 out of 10, and you know, it’s marked as Innovative, and all this kind of stuff. And the reason I like, the reason I dislike that kind of viewing is, it feels incremental, and it feels like it kind of treats what games could be as something much smaller and meaner than it is. I have a particular problem, for example, with um, a lot of the YouTuber coverage that’s sort of, um, has arisen around games in the last two years, because it’s very like that. It tends to be very, uh, it doesn’t treat the games as art works, it treats them as, like, I guess, consumer burger choices, or something like that. You know, you watch - I won’t name names, but you watch a YouTuber go on to look at a game like Evolve, and spend 30 minutes whining about why he doesn’t particularly like the way that the gameplay works, or whining about he doesn’t particularly like the way that the DLC system works, and those are all, those are all valid complaints, but in context of how they’re approached, they make games seem like so much less than they actually, sort of are. And so, I want, I want to fi- I really prefer to read the emotions that sort of come through when a journalist has discovered a game, and really wants to sort of, if you like, unpick why they seem to like it, or what it is about it that’s kind of changed their day, or what it is that’s made them rethink about something, or all those kinds of things.I think that we still have, 95 percent of our reviews tend to be that product-y type. I don’t read them. I used to, maybe, when I was a kid, but I couldn’t care less anymore. I only particularly read certain writers who um, who feel like, treat the game as what I believe it should be, which is sort of like an artistic expression, rather than just a sort of logic box, you know. So, for me, I want more of those. I don’t know. The rest of the world might want the other, but I want more of those.
