We don't "review" videogames, we evaluate them
There’s a long-standing debate in the videogame community about how and how not to write videogame reviews. I think a lot of it stems from the fact that most videogame reviews don’t treat their subject matter as products, rather than works of art.
Videogames are not films
What I see as the problem here is we live in a society where films and literature have a certain cultural validation that videogames do not, and gamers want their past-time to be acknowledged. But what would that acknolwedgement look like? We can’t treat videogames the same way we treat films, because they just aren’t the same.
Anatomy of a review
I’ve written movie reviews for newspapers, and I’ve written videogame reviews for websites. As a writer, I think the biggest difference between those two types of reviews, is a movie review has two crucial roles to play: first, the review identifies what a movie tries to accomplish; secondly, the review comments on how well the movie accomplishes what it set out to do.
The problem with videogames is, almost all of them set out to do the same thing. You drive cars in racing games. You shoot people in shooting games. You solve puzzles in puzzle games. And so on. It leaves the reviewer with only one thing to do: talk about how well the game accomplishes its goal.
Reviewing apples and evaluating oranges
What gamers sound like they want is for games to be discusses as works of art. But in order for a game to be a work of art, it has to actually set out to accomplish something. Granted, some games do actually do this, and yes, reviews tend to talk about them more a film review. But for the most part, that’s just not how videogames function.
Could it mean that videogames are still in their infancy as a medium, waiting to blossom into a rich artistic form? Possibly. But a game is still a game: a system of rules that challenge a player to overcome the arbitrary constraints therein. And that idea isn’t new it all – it’s probably older than the book itself.