Are video game critics really relevant anymore?
>>319515756
They are as relevant as you want them to be man. Its up to you in the end to decide if you like a game or not. Critics are just there to give you a general idea before buying.
>>319515756
Those numbers should be switched
>>319515756
No. Look at the disparity between reviewer scores from paid reviewers and consumers.
OP's pic related is a good point.
>anymore
You dumb faggot.
The only relevant game critic is, and always has been, yourself.
>>319517663
Seconded--only if we agree the term critic in this sense is paid professional media. Plenty of contrarian YouTubers out there trying to make a quick buck by being "the most real" critic via unnecessary bitching and dunking on obviously terrible games.
>>319515756
go back to /a/
>>134534085
Funny how by looking at metacritic scores. The reverse is true.
>Trusting one guy
>Trusting an entire community.
Game critics need to get a real job instead of being a "professional opinion giver"
While critics being unreliable due to their ties to marketing departments within the industry is a valid concern, relying on consumer reviews is just as dangerous, since while the game critic knows he is repeating the statements made in a marketing email published by the developer, the consumer will say these exact same things because they have been successfully marketed to, and thus have justified in their own minds the purchase that they have made, and even if it's not necessarily totally true they are more than willing to say the game is exactly as good as advertised unless it ends up being a pile of shit.
Consumer reviews also lack detail and nuance. No single review will likely tell you all the pros and cons of a game, and will likely be hyperbolic in their description, with most user reviews either being a 100 or a 0 with an incredibly small range of scores in between.
You should definitely trust consumer reviews though, but never take a single one or small group of reviews at face value. Analyze what they talk about and don't talk about and you can pretty easily infer the pros and cons of the game in question and decide for yourself if you are of a similar mindset as those giving positive reviews.
>>319518115
They--like most occupations--exist out of the supply-demand principal. If no one visited IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku and Giant Bomb--the ad money would not be present, no money earned to pay salaries or keep servers, and eventually the death of the industry.
>>319515756
Anyone who makes money off of their opinion of a game is irrelevant.
Deal with it.
>critics
For entertainment.
I love people picking fault with games, hence why I come to /v/.
Though I mainly just watch Yahtzee
>>319518194
TotalBiscuit brought up an interesting point that, considering the glut of open world games, many reviewers are short on time to review upcoming releases. Mad Max suffered lower critic scores due to having loads of content but being rather same-old, same-old, save a few nuances. However consumers praised the game for its size, and considering the asking price now, it's probably a really good "value gameplay hours per dollar" purchase for anyone on a budget.
It's because they began as vidya game enthusiasts, but began mixing their hobby with work. I cannot imagine how dead inside giant YT let's players feel.
>>319518258
Who the hell doesn't use adblock nowadays
>>319518114
It's true both ways. Whenever critics disagree with us about a game, it's because they were paid to disagree with us. When they agree with us but don't do it exactly the way we want, they were also paid to generate controversy.
>>319518258
Where will you be when THe Hulkster SUPERSLAMS Gawker out of the industry and saves gaming forever?
>>319515756
game critics became irrelevant the day people could post their own reviews on the internet.
>>319518379
Being the target audience also plays a big role in my opinion. Fighting games for example rarely get much press in gaming media after their release, mostly because they are a very specialized genre populated by people with very specific wants and needs for their games, which are not really easily picked up on by critics who are not deeply enough involved in the genre to know what makes them good or bad.
>>319515756
>relevant
Sort of. While they're just another opinion, if their opinion is loud enough it can't just be silenced. Love him or hate him, but Jim Sterling comes to mind. Shining a light on shitty indie developers who think nothing of deleting/banning people from their Steam.
>>319518012
Youtubers are barely paid to play a they paid to play
>>319515756
They're slowly becoming less relevant. I think we have a problem, in general, with games critique. It has to do with the idea of GAMES vs high art "games". (Imagine Hotline Miami vs Gone Home)
GAMES are the games that people here seem to like. What I like to call an actual game. Gameplay and mechanics are paramount, story CAN matter, but not enough to save a turrible game. GAMES are fun, generally, or at very least emphasize the gaminess of the medium. To use Hotline Miami as my example, hotline miami has a shit story, and literally has an ending where the creators of the game tell you to play it again to see the real ending if you care about the REAL STORY, wherein they just heap bullshit on you. They want you to play because the play is fun.
(What I'm getting at here is generally called formalism by academic critics.)
GAMES can emphasize do a thing that only this one medium can do: Not show me, don't tell me, but let me do, don't show me. I don't want to watch a cutscene where a character slices the boss in half. I WANT TO SLICE THE BOSS IN HALF. I don't want to see some idiot moo at me for half an hour about why the solar confederacy is corrupt, I WANT TO SEARCH FOR AND FIND THE EVIDENCE MYSELF.
"Games" go for the story first, and often only. They generally don't really care about the player at all. These are the Gone Home's and (whatever that game about cleaning was called)s of the world. They will talk at you and talk at you, or force you to jump through hoops only slightly harder than turning a page so that you can get talked at about why Grandpa is so mad at Dad. These "games" often will completely eschew input from the user in order to try to be. There's no reason, really, for you to touch the controller. Often, the stories in these games are STILL crap, somehow, because they are trying to wrap a "game" around what should be a short story.
I've taken to calling "games" interactive fiction,(CONT'D)
>>319519510
which is an older term that was used a lot around the Myst years. If you look at, say, Kentucky Route Zero as an interactive fiction experiment, where you are encouraged to sit and think and watch things (KRZ, btw, has a great scene were you choose the dialogue of a singer in real time as she sings to music. Its amazing), they do great. But they are not games. Gone Home is a great example of this. Let me strip out every part of the game that requires skill or thought or action, and tell you what may as well be a movie that keeps pausing itself, and then dares you, DARES YOU, to press play. Gone Home is a thing to go see, but its not a game. Its interactive fiction.
What is happening is that there's a feedback loop between SF hipsters convinced that a wrapper for HTML (TWINE) makes actual games who sit around and work on "experiments" who they then show to academic games people who fellate them about how great they are BY USING THE TERMS THAT WE USE FOR BOOKS AND MOVIES. This leads them, necessarily, to ONLY be able to describe narrative. This is why ideas like game feel are ignored by many of these academics who can't actually describe that thing. Why is Sonic so fast feeling? Why does Mario feel so good on jumps. Why is it so fun to cave in someone's head in HM? A media criticism background can NOT help you to explain that thing.
What happens is that IF like Gone Home comes out, and the media flocks around them and holds them up and adores them for a bit. "Games finally grow up!" Then, other idiots look at that and think "I'M GONNA MAKE A GAME WHERE (story beat story beat story beat)". (Note that we start at narrative here, not gameplay). The game comes out and then media holds it up for a while. Why does the press hold it up? Because a lot of them have backgrounds in old style media critique, and something with a strong story can make for very, very easy articles quickly. Here's a listicle of (story) secrets Gone Home. (CONT'D)
>>319520310
Here's a story about the cinematic references in KRZ (which will be easy, because I took a lot of film analysis in my undergrad). Here's a FUCKING BOOK about the dark story to Spec Ops: The Line (which is an interesting case of this, desu senpai. You could probably write ANOTHER FUCKING BOOK about the media making apologies for how unfun that game was). This pattern will continue and continue.
So, there's three ways to go from here. We can either go back to where we were, like, 15 years ago where reviewers where giving score to games for things like sound, and are interested purely in technical things. We can continue down the path we are on now, where we just continue to fall down this fucking narrative hole, and we end up reinventing the entire canon of film and literary criticism. Or we can make a new path, come up with new language to describe the games we are playing.
We need to codify what gameplay is. We need to decide what the proper place of narrative in these games is. We need to better define game feel and what play really is. I'm asking for a whole new idea of what criticism and games even is, a whole new language. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I don't have an easy answer for these things.
Some people seem to be already picking this up. Jesper Juul as had some pretty formalist stuff in the past, in particular. But I think we need a lot of people to start thinking in very different terms if we want to save video games.
I don't have KRZ or Gone Home. What I'm saying is that there is a wall between Gone Home and Hotline Miami, or KRZ and Super Hexagon. I want to see more IF. But I want to play games even more. I want to have fun, I want to explore.
(BTW, there's an easy way to tell if you should stop listening to a critic: if they say that fun is over rated, stop listening. If they have a knee jerk hatred of FPSs that they can't explain, stop listening. If they think Gone Home was fun, stop listening.)
>>319521136
Thanks for the read, anon. You're a trooper.
Less and less due to user-created reviews but I'm interested to see what they say just as a barometer for how lib/con society is at the moment.
>>319521363
tldr: games criticism is broken, we need new ways to talk about games, fuck gone home.
>>319521695
So "safe spaces" just to talk vidya?
>>319521136
ALSO, I FORGOT TO MENTION THIS:
TACOMA (the new game by the gone home people) IS GOING TO BE SET IN SPACE AND THE MAIN CHARACTER IS GOING TO BE DEAF, PEOPLE WILL FALL ALL OVER THEMSELVES BEING BLOWN AWAY WITH HOW BRAVE IT IS, AND THEN PEOPLE ON 4CHAN WILL ASK "HOW AM I HEARING SOUND IF THE MAIN CHARACTER ISN'T".
>>319521904
No, I mean a new language. We talk about games now like they are movies or books. We need to talk about them like they are games.
>>319515756
When's the last time there's been a review disparity like this? God Hand? It's almost always "Critics" sucking AAA dick while players end up ironically far more critical.
>>319521969
/v/'s not a great area to do that, if the "tldr" wasn't clue enough.
That its a forum driven by timely responses rather than academic ones shoots any real discussion in the kneecaps. Not that I have any alternatives, mind, most traditional forums are plagued by e-dick sucking.
>>319519510
>>319520310
>>319521136
are you having an autism attack
>>319523120
It's like 7 paragraphs anon.
>>319522870
Yeah, I think that's what I'm trying to avoid. But 4chan moves too fast to really be able to spend time on long lasting conversations.
>>319523120
totes, bruv, get me a autismopen and stab it into my thigh before I start jerking it to pony porn
>>319515756
Let me fix that.
>>319523560
This desu senpai
