Who should write reviews? This is one of those questions that has raged across a number of discussion boards in a number of websites, and often drags up issues such as censorship, freedom of speech, and the difference between ‘Professionals’ and ‘Amateurs’.

Essentially, the questions being asked are: who has the RIGHT to write reviews and who is QUALIFIED to write reviews - some people put more emphasis on one or the other while some, with a particularly anarchist bent, believe anybody can have a shot.

So how can I answer this question? I can’t, all I can do is give my take on the matter and the reasons why I think that way.

Why Don’t I Write Reviews?

I like writing, but I do not write reviews. I might write articles about TV shows, or role-playing games but I do not write reviews. I may write an article about how the characters developed during season four of ‘Buffy: The Vampire Slayer’, and in that I may mention that the show suffered due to the directions the characters took, but I will not write a review. The same goes for Dungeons and Dragons, I have considered writing an article for my site on how and why I like the game and how it works for the style of fantasy game I like. I would not review it though.

Some people might say: ‘But you are writing reviews?’

The simple answer to that is, I am not. I am not writing these articles with the aim of allowing a reader to make an informed choice about the product in question, I am just writing my personal opinion on a particular facet of the product. The article would not be a complete overview, and it would not look ‘out of the box’ to give a positive review even if the product was not my kind of thing.

If you’re writing a review this should be a possible outcome.

A case in point, I was not particularly impressed with Underworld, but I would not give it a bad review. I would mention my dislikes, but I would also mention a whole load of positives because I can see the game appealing to a core set of people.

I don’t write reviews though because I don’t think I have the length and breadth of gaming knowledge to write a good review. Actually, this depends on the product I am reviewing, but more on that later. I have been playing role-playing games for sixteen years, surely that makes me qualified? No, while I can hold a gaming conversation with anyone I have one specific weakness: I am not a systems monkey. I can’t spot a gap in a system, it is as simple as that. As a result I would not be very good at reviewing the system, the nuts and bolts side of a role-playing game.

I would feel more comfortable writing a review of a role-playing product that dealt mostly with story, background and premise information, but even then I would not feel comfortable writing my views down officially as a review that may act to influence someone’s opinion on a product.

Is Being A Customer Enough?

This is a commonly held belief by many, that any customer of a product can write a review due to the fact they have put down their hard earned cash and ‘we all believe in Freedom of Speech damn it!’ As you may have guessed from my reasons why I do not write reviews I do not believe this is true - being a customer does not entitle you to write reviews.

It entitles you to an opinion, which is about it.

The number of reviews that are just pure opinion is legion, and I believe this is wrong. Are all reviews just an opinion? Of course they are, but the truth, as always, is in the detail. Even though every word of a review is just an opinion I would like a review to have two things present: (1) It is an informed opinion and (2) The reviewer makes an attempt to approach the game from ‘opinions’ other than his own.

A lot of the reviews I read miss out these two issues and you just get the reviewers opinion, which then becomes a voice for or against the game based purely on reviewer’s likes and dislikes. At times a reviewer can get away with this (though it’s still not a perfect review) if they describe the angle they are coming from, so a reader can discount or take his opinion to heart based on that. I think even this is flawed as a reviewer approaching ‘Over the Edge’, who states ahead of time he likes rules heavy systems, might as well not write the review if he going to just critique the game from his viewpoint: what point would that serve?

Who Should Write Reviews?

I am firm believer in not categorising who can write reviews, such as saying that ‘only people who have Designed Games should write reviews’. This argument does not hold water, as this would limit all reviews to those who have done it - all album reviews would be written by musicians and all film reviews would have to be written by the director’s contemporaries. A review by such an industry personage has a place, and would be very informative, but the ultimate consumers of the product are a good source of reviews.

The mistake is the belief that any consumer is qualified to write a review, as I say above, it qualifies you to an opinion which you have a right to air - but not necessarily in an official capacity in a section of a magazine or website designed to give informed reviews of a product.

A good reviewer is hard to describe, other than having a knowledge of gaming that goes beyond his particular likes and dislikes, he must understand what goes into designing a game, and a background or premise of a game. This must go beyond what he prefers, but involve a deep understanding of why certain things are done in the way they are, and if they work in the context of the game. He must be able to give relatively positive reviews to games he would not necessarily play himself; I really do think this is important. He must have the ability to review a game for what it is, within its own context and goals, not for what he wanted it to be (and therefore give it a bad review).

I have read a lot of reviews in my time, as I am sure a lot of you have, and very few of them match up to these criteria. I have also read reviews that do; reviews by Ron Edwards always seem to be reviews approached from a higher, more umbrella perspective, allowing Ron to review games for what they are and in the context of what they set out to achieve - thus allowing many of his reviews to be tinged with personal preference, but in no way destroyed by it. This approach allows the maximum amount of people to decide, from the review, whether the game might be for them.

A Conclusion, Of Sorts

Who should write reviews? Anyone. I am just asking that before you submit your review, be honest with yourself, look at what you have written and check that it is a review. Or is it just one long missive, excellently written though it may be, on why you did not like the game, possibly without a context or a context you have admitted to that ensures your review could have been one sentence long: I did not like this game because it was rules-light or because it had a meta-plot?

It has to be balanced, and informative to a large proportion of people, all of whom are coming at the game with different preferences and as a reviewer you should have the ability to ensure all these different people can decide if the game is or is not for them by your review.

Opinion is not enough.

What do you think?

–Ian O’Rourke

I used to write reviews.

I never wrote game reviews, at least, never yet. I’ve participated in several discussions about how to write game reviews, and have some very specific ideas about that. But I haven’t written one.

I reviewed record albums, back in the early 80’s when they were still pressed on vinyl.

One day someone asked me–more challenged me–what my credentials were that I should write album reviews. It was a good question, really, and I’d never considered it before that moment.

The first credential I gave was actually rather simple. I was the program director of a radio station. Part of my job was to listen–critically–to every recording which might be within our format. Thus over a period of several years I heard every record released by any major label in the field. I was also very familiar with much of what had been released before that. My knowledge of the music was part of what got me the job, and playing records several hours every day meant hearing a lot of the “oldies”. So I had probably heard several thousand records, and had a pretty good base to which to compare the new ones.

The second credential that I gave was the one most people would have expected first: I am a musician. I’m intimately familiar with what’s involved in creating good music vocally and instrumentally, and have worked in a recording studio as a musician. I studied voice and theory in school, performed with and directed a variety of ensembles, and did a substantial amount of composing and arranging. My own abilities made a good yardstick for measuring those of others.

I don’t think I gave a third credential; but I did discuss why reviews mattered. I’ll look at that again in a moment. But first, what do my credentials as a record reviewer matter to the question of game reviews?

A lot of people argue that reviews are only someone’s opinion of a game. If that’s all they are, they don’t matter and probably shouldn’t be formally published; but I beg to differ. A review is someone’s assessment of a game–and that’s not the same thing.

The best way to explain the difference is to observe that I can honestly write a glowingly positive review of a record that I don’t like and would never have in my collection. The vocals are well done, the words are very good, the mix is professional, and the musicians produce the music not only unerringly but with a vibrancy that is exciting. I might not like this kind of music, but I know when it’s well done and have a lot of respect for people who do it well. My opinion of the record might be that I never want to hear it again; but my assessment of it is that it’s an excellent recording well worth the money if you like that kind of music (and now I’ll play a cut for you so you know whether it’s the kind of music you like).

I have seen game reviews like that. I have read reviews which say, in essence, “Multiverser is a well-written and well designed game which could be a lot of fun, although I personally wouldn’t play a game of that sort.” I’ve seen the other kind, too: “Multiverser is a bad game because it has too many pages in one book and I don’t like games which come in big books.”

But I seem to be talking about the nature of a review, when I should be talking about the qualifications of a reviewer. But I think the nature of the review helps define the qualifications of the reviewer.

A reviewer must be broadly familiar with the medium he reviews. When I was reviewing records, there was a whole category of artists who did very conservative material targeted at very conservative audiences who wanted to appear trendy–the sort of people who thought Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand were cutting edge in the 70’s. (They are both superb professional artists; that’s not the point.) If you were unfamiliar with the rock and pop scene of the day and were comparing them to the show tunes and jazz bands of their own background, you might have called them radical and progressive; but if you’d heard one Beatles album it would change your perspective entirely. In reviewing games, you must first be informed about games you’ll never review. You need an historical perspective. If you don’t have it, you might think something is innovative and exciting that’s really just a retread of something before your time. How many times have you heard a new pop song which seems like a pretty poor remake of a great song you heard years before? The reason the poor remake is popular is that the new listeners don’t know the better version. The reviewer is not allowed that luxury.

A reviewer should have some technical knowledge of the medium he reviews. I don’t mean that he has to have written a game or a supplement. Some people have done that, and don’t know any more about how a game works than they did before they wrote it, while others have very keen insights into game settings and plot lines and mechanics who have never written so much as a fan letter. If you are going to assess a game, you need to understand what makes a game better or worse apart from whether you like it. “It has a dice system no one else is using,” but does it create useful probabilities or is it just done to be different? “The elves are very familiar,” but are they Tolkein’s or Santa’s, and are they integrated into the world or just tacked on? “I liked the game flow,” but did it sacrifice detail for speed, focus on technicalities or descriptives, rely on story-driven or character-driven plots? If you don’t understand something about how games do what they do, you can’t really assess what a game was attempting or whether it succeeded. You can only express your opinion about whether you liked it.

Finally, a reviewer has to be able to divorce his opinions from his assessments. If you can’t say of any band that you hate everything they’ve ever done, but they are very talented and capable musicians who do everything extremely well and for whom you have a great deal of respect, you can’t write record reviews. If you can’t say of any game that it’s not the sort of thing you would ever play but you recognize that it’s brilliant and innovative, you can’t write game reviews. Nobody cares (or at least, they shouldn’t) whether you like playing sci-fi games. They care whether this sci-fi game is going to appeal to them.

The other thing I said when I was defending myself as a record critic had to do with why we read reviews. I said that I catch Roger Ebert’s film reviews. I don’t always like what he likes; but when he’s finished telling me whether a movie was good or bad, and why, I know whether I want to see it. The reviewer is recommending something, and giving reasons for it. It is the reader’s assessment of those reasons which makes the review valuable, and not the conclusion itself. Thus a game reviewer has to be someone who can clearly perceive and describe the strengths and weaknesses of a game from every perspective, so that everyone can use his assessment as the starting point for their own.

At least, that’s how I see it. What about you?

–M. Joseph Young

Ian O’Rourke spends his time constantly trying to find time in a hectic life to write and to run role-playing games which fulfill his simple dream to tell stories. Ian has written for Arcane magazine (before its sad demise) and writes The Chimeric Files for the Gaming Outpost. He also maintains Chimeraweb his own website. Strangely, unlike most people on GO, he has no desire to write his own role-playing game.

M. Joseph Young is co-author of the Multiverser role playing game and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc in the United States. His many contributions to the literature of the Web are indexed, and include several articles on Gaming Outpost.