wut? says who?

being a critic is an occupation. it has nothing to do with how many "followers" he or she has.

you're a critic as soon as you critically analyze something, and make that public. interesting. i guess you know everything about a game even BEFORE you buy it. you must have a crystal ball or something.

Then you don't distinguish a critic from journalist/reviewer.

In my opinion, those are two different things.

Of course I might be wrong, I just see a difference between literature or food critics and game reviewers. Mostly in their education, hehe.

a journalist can be a critic, too. not every journalist is one, though. a reviewer should also be a critic.

opinion doesn't equal fact...

way to generalize. pray tell, what makes you say food critics might be better educated than game critics? i'd like to see some factual evidence here...

here's what Merriam-Webster says:

OK, and for me, the one has to obtain huge knowledge about something to be a crtic. People from GameInformer, Gametrailers, or whatever, don't know much more about game industry than a typical dude who is interested in games.

Food critics have professional knowledge how something should look , taste, etc etc. Professional criticism is much more like scientifical study AND opinion , when game reviews are mostly just opinions.

but maybe you have better games journalists in Switzerland than we have in Poland.

i don't know any Polish game journalists, but i'm pretty sure that we don't. thanks to the internet, gaming journalism is an international matter anyway.

there are good critics and bad critics. what you're saying, and i'd tend to agree, is that gaming journalism has too many bad critics, more than other, more established fields of criticism.

however, i fail to see how food criticism is in any way more scientific than game criticism. both games and food can be analyzed according to similar criteria (how it looks, how it tastes, how expertly it has been prepared, etc.) and both come down to opinion, and are thus inherently subjective, which is decidedly un-scientific.

you should move away from the idea that game journalists can somehow not be critics. it's just that there are a lot of bad critics in games journalism, probably because it attracts a lot of inexperienced writers and because it's a comparatively young field of criticism, lacking a tradition and an establishment.

OK, I got your points and I can agree with them. I'm just fixed in the idea that a critic is a person who's opinion MATTERS. I can't think about a person in games journalism, who had such big impact like it has for restaurants for example (sometimes how many stars the restaurant gets is based on critics reviews, and the stars have huge impact on "clientele", if you know what I mean).

But in globalization era, a single person's opinion has became less significant than it was back in the days, so maybe my view on professional critics is outdated.

I'm actually writing on this topic right this second for a final essay. I believe the problem with games journalism is twofold. First, you have the relative low barrier of entry to get into the field, so legitimate talent can be lost in the sea of amateur blogging and video reviews. It's hard to get noticed in games literature unless you are very, very good.

Secondly, the problem with games criticism is that it hasn't caught up to the same level of academia that games themselves have reached. I mean, we have more games than ever offering deep commentary on contemporary theory. I'm talking about stuff like Bioshock and Objectivism, or Deus Ex and the Cyborg Manifesto, or (my current study) Alan Wake and the role of authorship. Film reviews did not become a truly serious field until there was studies of film theory to back it up (mostly once the Soviets began to actually study how film works). Right now game reviews need critical writing on game theory to set out a framework to build from.

Personally, I try to apply the same kind of criticism I'd use on a book or a film when I review a game, but the formats are so different that my way doesn't always work out. And modern criticism by academics on games is horrid. 50% of it is about violence and the effect on the psyche, 40% of it is on how the popularity of video games can be harnessed for learning and the remaining writing is trying really hard, but a lot of it either comes from an author with no clue about games, or is trying to appeal to an audience with no clue about games.

Example time: I know a person who wrote a really great analysis of how each player visualizes their own unique protagonist in games (as in they apply emotions and reactions that differ from what other players do), but in order to get the point across to the general audience he used an instantly recognizable name to get his point across. Of course, the game he used was The Legend of Zelda, one of the least choice driven games I can think of. His argument still made sense, but would have been so much better if applied to something like Deus Ex, Mass Effect or even Skyrim.

Sorry about the length but like I said, I'm writing about this kind of thing right now. It's something that really interests me, probably more than it should.

that's because the only university departments that even look at games are those of sociology, psychology and economics. hence you get mostly studies on the effects of videogame violence, how videogames affect learning, and videogame consumption and buying habits.

there are currently no departments dedicated to the medium of videogames. every half-decent university has a literature department, and most also have a film department. neither pays any attentiont to videogames.

the result is that nobody on the university level currently treats games the same way as books or films.

Thanks for your post PenutBrittle. It covers mostly what I can say as a reader - game analysis is still too shallow to speak about deep criticism and studies about games in general, or particular game.

Ps. I think the person who chose Legend of Zelda chose that game, because the main character is pretty much nameless and not personalized (at least in first installment), so it's easier to observe derivations on how people perceive that individual. (does this sentence make any sense? :P)

the same thing can be observed when it comes to TV series. Cinema movies are treated much more seriously by scientists than tv show, when you can easily observe the trend where it's the TV series that can tell life stories better than any movie ever made.

That's exactly why he picked it, and it comes across well in the actual article.

But man, hearing it described in the school's newspaper was painful. "The Legend of Zelda is a game that hundreds of people own, but every time the game is turned on the player experiences a completely unique world."
True. The only reason I get away with it is lax and cool profs who don't mind taking a chance on something neat. So long as I'm writing on critical literary theory, they don't really care what "text" I'm using.
Surprisingly, TV theory has come far since it started, but it has a way to go. It mostly became a big deal in the 90s, after everyone moved on from trying to tell if Transformers and GI Joe were rotting kids' brains. I've dabbled in it, but I hate 90% of current TV so all of my papers on TV theory were spiteful and full of rage. I figure video games will get to the same point in the next five to ten years, since right now we seem to be on the last legs of the rotting your brain stage.

In Poland TV shows are treated like entertainment for stupid, lazy people, who have nothing better to do. It's just lately some serious journalists and press starting to analize them, treat them as something much more complex than silly soap operas.

Mostly it's beucause polish tv is focused mainly on prodocing 1000 and more episodes of another soap operas.

They missed entirely the fact, that many real tv fans are just pirating US and UK tv shows to watch something better. They start to recognize that, thankfully.

Maybe the science will start treating tv shows fans better than as brainless mules decaying in frot of the tv.

No, just common sense. I take a look at a screenshot or two, a gameplay video (minus the annoying commentary of someone dubbed over it), and I even read the description of what the game is about, and what type of game it is. If it takes my fancy, I buy it, or if a demo is available I play that.

And then (shock horror) I play the game, and then make a decision, with my own brain, of what I think of it.

I cannot fathom how a person could could value themselves so little that they take the opinions of others in something like video games.

See, you say that the only purpose for a review of something is whether to say if you would like it or not. Which yeah, for many game review sites it is. But others are more focused on the discussion of a game.

I like to think reviews and criticism is intended for more than just simply going over whether the game is good or not, because that's just simplifying it too far. It's more intended to start discussion and provoke opinions. I like reading reviews to see what other people thought of the game and how that compares to my own opinion on it.

I always try to write reviews that are interesting for people who have already bought the game, but also informative for people who haven't. So I'll offer my opinion on what exactly the game tries to accomplish and how it does so, but I'll also talk about whether or not I think it achieves that goal as a roundabout way of saying "yes you should buy this" or not. I find it a lot more interesting than listing each bulletpoint already on the box.

I guess that's a down-side, but my honest view is that you can never have an opinion on a game, until you've played it yourself. As for wasting money, well if you use your head you won't waste any money, you can just tell these things. Reading reviews, however, is not forming an opinion, it's taking someone else's opinion and supplanting it over your own.