As someone that dabbles in writing about games, I have a great respect for reviewers and feature writers. Further still, as someone that dabbles as an artist, I would want nothing more than for every piece of work ever, to get its full scrutiny and appreciation as something that's been crafted for perusal. Even further under that, I'm an aspiring game maker and I hope that what ever work I do that merits a review will get its fair shake from what ever reviewing entity decides to stamp their opinion onto my wares.

Even with all that under consideration, the first thing I look for in a review is a score. Plain and simple.

I could blame Game Spot for being so about the score, at least 10 years ago when I was really into them for reviews. Maybe even blame GamePro and EGM, for assigning scores to game reviews in the first place. But for whatever reason, honestly and truthfully, the score is the first and biggest indicator of what a publication or writer thinks about a game, and its a value that I allow to have a lot of sway on how I perceive a game and its place in the social mindscape.



But who really cares about all that? Apparently a bunch of people, considering how much of a funk was mustered up about not only Jim Sterling's reviews in general, but about reviewer responsibility. Maybe its my old manitude coming through, but seeing so much time spent on the rhetoric of reviews, from ethics to fairness to how many negative descriptors per paragraph Jim Sterling used in a string of tweets about a review he was thinking about writing after a bad breakfast... Are we really spending so much time worrying about how video games reviews are affecting the world of a righteously diggable hobby like video games? What is going on?!

In caution of becoming hypocritical, I think there isn't much more I can reasonably write on the topic that hasn't been said. Find your preferred voice and method, whether as a writer or consumer of that writing, and apply your own filters. History will sort out a thing's place in history. If not, then it probably wasn't worthy of history. But consumers or games writers calling for official and non-official opinions, or watchdogging a writer for questionable content: Well as ManaSteel88 has writ well Its ridiculous for you to do so. As evidenced by the low accuracy of even the most celebrated of games industry analysts, nobody really knows anything about how the games industry works.

Make your mark, and let that be the thing.