COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Down With Print-Mag Reviews
I sometimes feel a little embarrassed writing this column because although I'm arguably one of the most vocal cheerleaders for print game magazines, my actual information consumption habits couldn't contradict that more. Most all of my buying decisions on games are driven by what I read on forums.
If I want to cheat in a game, learn more about an upcoming game, or bitch about a game because I can't cheat in it, then the Internet is right there. (I also subscribe to the local Houston paper mainly because they had a good deal for a year's delivery a while back, newsprint is great for lining ferret litter boxes with, and I just can't get enough of that Family Circus.)
Eagle-eyed readers may have noted by now that I almost never talk about reviews in video-game magazines. That's because, in my opinion, traditional reviews in game magazines should go to the same place that cheat and strategy-guide pages went -- i.e., somewhere where I don't have to pay money for them.
That's something I've found doubly true for EGM's reviews section. A three-reviewer system had its advantages back in an age when there was no other way to find out how good a game was before or at the time of its release. Nowadays, when this isn't the case at all, the flaws of the system are getting obvious. Putting three reviews on a single page gives less space for each review to discuss the game, which in turn makes the review both less useful and less interesting to read.
It's especially painful when the three reviewers share the same general opinion on the game, as was the case with the April '08 issue that just came out. What's so exciting about reading three different truncated takes on why Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed is average? I can frankly get that on Amazon if I wanted it. And when I say that, I don't mean EGM's editorial staff is just as good at game criticism as Amazon customer reviewers. Not at all.
What I do mean, though, is that while EGM's reviews can help readers make a buying decision, I'm not sure readers are willing to pay money for the privilege of access any longer when the net's full of reviews already. And that's where a lot of print mags still let readers down, I think -- just like how their cheat sections didn't really do anything that GameFAQs couldn't, their reviews often don't really achieve anything that isn't done on some Web forum. Or, in EGM's case, on 1UP.com.
We've seen a lot of game-mag evolution in the past two years along, as editors deal with shrinking ad buys and smaller books. I wouldn't be surprised if the next major evolution is doing away with traditional reviews and trying something else instead. I don't know what that "something else" could be -- maybe more critical postmortems with developers, maybe more longform Tom & Bruce-style gameplay diaries, maybe "Great Moments" screenshot montages, who knows -- but to me, a new approach would be both more interesting and give the mag more of a chance to differentiate itself from both the net and the print competition...something I worry about a great deal with EGM, given how intertwined it is with 1UP these days.
(On an unrelated note, the announcement earlier this week that Ziff Davis Media was finally filing for Chapter 11 was very dramatic, but not at all unexpected by anyone in the magazine industry. The filing has little to nothing to do with the performance or profitability of EGM, 1UP or GFW; it's all about the hundreds of millions of dollars in debt they took on when Willis Stein bought them in 2000. Ghosts from the dot-com mania period, in other words.
It's nothing short of a miracle ZD didn't go Chapter 11 until now, in fact -- as you'll read in the article linked to above, it's the worst-kept secret in the industry that ZD's debt has outpaced its net worth for years now and it never had even half a chance of paying it off any other way. That's why the upshot of this announcement is so positive; it means Ziff finally has a chance to be run like a normal publishing company and its employees hopefully won't have to worry about the future of their jobs for much longer. I've got a lot of optimism and look forward to a healthier '08 and '09 for all their mags and sites.)
[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also executive editor at PiQ magazine.]
Comments
I'm pretty sure EGM won't do away with reviews any time soon - according to John Davidson, apparently they actually tried doing away with reviews altogether in one issue and the subscribers complained quite loudly. Look at the readership of something like GameSpite compared to Jeremy Parish's work at EGM and 1up - GameSpite's more or less analytical 'reviews' as opposed to a score for fanboy fodder, and while interesting it doesn't seem to have set the world on fire as much as Parish's numbered reviews, even taking into account that 1up is a good deal more well-known.
Posted by: Merus | March 9, 2008 4:01 PM
If you don't want to buy the magazine, but still read the reviews, THEN GO TO 1UP AND READ THEM ONLINE.
Posted by: Final_Assassin | March 9, 2008 5:47 PM
In my observation the death of print (any publication type) is due to two reasons:
- bad journalism.If you can get the same copy&paste story on the internet - why pay for it?
- bad presentation. Mediocre layout, design and artwork. Cheap paper, etc. .
If print wants to survive, it must offer a distinct value over the internet. People want to see and feel value. It should have a collectors value.
One of my favorite mags of all time is the first season of Wired. They had an outstanding design, superb stories. Too bad they couldn't stay on this level for more than two years (or so) and didn't manage to reinvent their "magic".
Posted by: miine | March 9, 2008 6:20 PM
One more thought:
all those "cheap" (copy&past) magazines will go from print to online. It's obvious because they don't use the PRINTED LETTES for their advantage. Sounds funny? It isn't.
Any printed letter has 10 times more resolution than even the best LCD today. While the iPhone has a superb screen which is two times better then a normal Desktop-LCD, it even doesn't compare to a 15+ years old LaserJet print, let alone to a todays offset-printer page.
Why is that so important? Because the eye is more comfortable reading high resolution letters. This directly translates to a "easier" reading, which means that is possible for the human brain to process more textual informations.
So, if printed text has the same low information as online, then the medium is simply abused. If journalist write in a style that 100% of their readers understand it fully, than they are not doing their readers a favor. It's just boring.
And: "value" is always value of perception. What is values more: something 100% understandable reading once, or something to read twice until the full depth is understood?
In the end - when ePaper devices will gain mass - print will be a High-End niche medium and it will be treated as such...
Posted by: miine | March 9, 2008 6:37 PM
Boy, I don't know about this one. I think you're right on as far as the EGM multi person review is concerned, but I look at magazine reviews as sort of canonical. Like a talking point. If I read a review on Amazon, it's like...yeah but that's just htis guys opinion. A guy on amazon might ONLY play the genre of games that this game is and might not be clued into the history behind a game (like the fact that say a game is made by a storied developer and its a departure or more of the same, like say a Treasure game). I think magazine reviews are weightier because they are professional. It's not laughable like "pro tips", a pro review is a review that should be researched and and presented from a perspective that is aware of the genre conventions and history surronding a games development or developer.
My friends and I use "pro reviews" as a jumping off point for discussions about games.
But I guess I'm a little more aware of reviews or a magazines bent. Like if a positive review of a platformer comes out of Play magazine I simply roll my eyes.
But if someone at Retro Gamer likes a retro game compilation, I know they know what their talking about.
Posted by: Ryan Arnold | March 9, 2008 7:57 PM
"A guy on amazon might ONLY play the genre of games that this game is and might not be clued into the history behind a game (like the fact that say a game is made by a storied developer and its a departure or more of the same, like say a Treasure game)."
The problem is this is sometimes true of professional reviewers, especially in the case of a somewhat niche series like Armored Core. The bias also works in the other way, where someone too familiar with a series might be quicker to overlook flaws that someone more detached and less 'fanboyish' would pick up on.
Personally, I haven't read a print review in years. There are so many online review sites these days its easy to get a quick consensus. You don't even need to look further than metacritic to get the same size blurbs EGM offers, only they'll have a dozen of them instead of just three.
Posted by: Aaron | March 9, 2008 9:25 PM
What about Game Informer?
Posted by: Dark Sovereign | March 10, 2008 7:36 AM
I think there is value to be had in print magazines, but the problem is not so much that the web is a direct alternative; it's in fact that if you know where you look, the web simply has better quality writing about video games than print mags. The video game culture as put forth in the majority of print mags is stuck in a kind of adolescence. To take reviews as an example: They don't particularly serve as much more than consumer advice. I think this misses the larger picture of what could function as gaming criticism. The other issue is that print mags focus so much on new and upcoming that they rarely take the opportunity to look to the past, with the possible exception of the ever popular "great games of all time" kind of list.
I think your suggestion of the developer post-mortem is excellent, but I also think that once a game is released it needs to continue to exist in the overall commentary of the culture; too often print mags (and a lot of online ones, as well) are only interested in games up to the point of release, and then they vanish from their pages. VG mags suffer from the expectation of having to cover just about EVERY single upcoming release. As the market gets more saturated, they need to learn to focus more pages on specific, promising titles, rather than filling out half the mag in half page blurb "previews" that function as little more than hype pieces. I'd say there's definitely space for print mags, but the focus needs to get tighter and the quality of writing and criticism needs to increase. Otherwise, they just exist as quickly out-of-date consumer guides, at which point the myriad of web sites devoted to VGs become far more relevant.
Posted by: Robert | March 11, 2008 9:23 AM