I don't look at reviews as holding back, uh, the discourse around games. I look at reviews and criticism as two different things. And I think that's true in any medium. The way I look at a review is as a consumer guide. It's telling you whether or not you should go spend money on something that you don't know much about. Uh, criticism is to help you understand something that you've already consumed, something that you've already seen, that you've already played, or whatever. I was always more interested in criticism than reviews. I'm kind of like I can make up my own mind on what I want to go see, what I want to play, you know, all of those things. I can figure that out. Um, but I enjoyed reading Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, um, Joe Wood, you know, all of these amazing critics writing about things and sort of opening my mind up to sort of seeing more than I could see with my own eyes. And when I was writing about games, uh, that's what I was trying to do as, as well. So, it's not a matter of better or worse. You know, sometimes the same person, Roger Ebert, wrote reviews - maybe better than the average bear, but he still wrote reviews. But then he would write longer essays and books and other things and was clearly extremely learned and knowledgeable. As far as review scores, um, they weren't super interesting to me because I wasn't writing reviews. Um, you know, as a consultant, I have to pay attention to that because my clients care about what scores they're going to get. Um, and, you know, there's a - there's a fan discourse, um, that is extremely driven by the Internet. But I would argue that you see without - even without review scores, you see similar sort of fan-driven discourses now. Like, to me, the most fascinating criticism happening right now, um, uh, is, uh, TV criticism, right? TV critics used to write about a season at the start of the season. Maybe they would write about it at the end if it made it through the season. Maybe they'd do a profile of someone on the show halfway through, and that was it. Now you have - you know, TV critics have to write a recap, you know, which is sort of part recounting what happened, part interpretation, part criticism, all those things on every - you know, they try to get them out the same night the show airs, right? And so you have this like - and that's sort of taken, uh, TV creators by storm, because now, you know, they may be halfway through the season by the time stuff's airing, and they're sort of like, well, do we respond to that? Do we adjust it? All these things. So, to me, that kind of stuff is fascinating. Um, and you see certain critics, if you would call them that, as far as games, you know, like the Game Intestine. I don't know if that site's still around, but that was a really interesting site because it tried to sort of approach games from a travelogue perspective, um, which I think is a fascinating way to write about games. You take a game like Grand Theft Auto or a game like Skyrim, these massive worlds, and why not write about it like you would a travel writer, um, or something like that, or a reporter embedding in something like EVE or something like that? So, to me, um, that was something I tried to do when I write a - was writing about games, was, you know, I was one person competing with sites that had like 10, 15, 30, 40 people. Um, so, I was looking to sort of say like, well, this is how this site is writing about music and how this site is writing about movies, how this site's writing about travel or gossip. Why not try and bring that to writing about games and find fresh ways to approach this growing medium?
