I Am Not A Number

It seems to be a standard that games are to be reviewed with a score. How can you assign a number to an experience? This is standard for every kind of experience, though. We have means to review everything. Restaurants, skydiving schools, car dealerships, car washes, convenience stores. We can put in our two cents and slap a number on to whatever it was that we just did. Why is this? Why have a score? I think that it's all well and good to voice your opinion and describe your experience with something, but why do we always have to have a number to go along with it. When I see some kind of customer review, I never read it. I just glance at the rating, and make my decision based around that.

I know that my writing style is different from most other writers in the video game business, if you can call me part of that world, but I was recently looking up some freelance writing gigs and some of them gave a description of how they go about reviews. They required a scoring system. One number out of five, another number out of ten, pick a number between one and one hundred and you've got yourself a review. Sure, this number might spark an interest in reading the article, but the general consumer will only take a look at the number.

Adam Sessler, one of my heroes, would always go on about how he disapproved of the scoring system. The man is a writer, and he wants to talk about what he had experienced. At the same time, the man was also famous for the scoring system because he was on the most watched video game television show in the world. His writing style had evolved from the standard compartmentalized version of reviews to something more engaging and descriptive. I try to match that quality of writing whenever I decide to write a review, but I still fall into those standards of writing.

A basic review consists of breaking down and prioritizing the different parts of a game. Gameplay, then graphics, then story, then sound, then whatever. The fact is, that none of this does the game any justice. You can't judge a game by going of one part of it. The game has all of those elements put together for your experience of playing the game. Movie reviewers don't really seem to criticize movies by taking them apart one bit at a time, they discuss the movie as a whole. What stuck out to them, and what didn't quite grab them. I'm generalizing here, but game reviews have a very basic and sterile approach to how they analyze games. It really isn't fair to the reader, game developer, or the game itself.

I can't separate Halo's gameplay from it's soundtrack, nor can I separate Jet Grind Radio's graphics from its story. These things go in tandem, and they come at the player all at once. There is no need to break down each element. I think that we need to do away with this kind of review. Because a number isn't going to capture my exact experience.

Very Nice, How Much?

It's no secret that gaming is an expensive hobby. You have to make sure that you have the right video game console, or make sure that your computer is up to snuff. Second, the games themselves are sixty dollars when they're brand new. How is it that a hobby that is so expensive lasted this long, and why is it that it is so expensive? Truth be told, I don't know.

I always wonder how it is that movies cost so much to make, and yet only produce an experience that is only an hour and a half long. People go to see movies all the time. They are willing to pay the price of entry, eve though it has grown exponentially over time. Have movies gotten more expensive to make? I'd say so, given that most of the box office hits are all action movies with lots of explosions and special effects. Those have got to be expensive. Yet, does this have to affect the cost of a movie ticket? What about all of the movies with smaller budgets? The ones that aren't driven by action, but by character and story. Then again, even movies like that have a budget of around a million dollars. That's still considered a small budget by Hollywood standards.

Video games cost around the same to make as a Hollywood blockbuster, but they cost six times as much to purchase. I know that everyone in the world would be outraged if they paid sixty dollars to just go see a movie. If that was the cost of the DVD or Bluray when it hit store shelves, people would be outraged. Plus, when it comes to the current gen systems of the Xbox One and the PS4, users have to pay a subscription to access half of the features in the game, or of the console itself. 

Perhaps it's because these publishers, designers, and bigwigs figure that they have the corner on this market and can gauge as much money from their demographic as possible. It seems cruel, but when it comes to money, even people who have a lot already will do anything to get more. It is extremely unfair to the players. Most of the time, it isn't the players who are buying up the games, but their parents. This affects the entire family. I've been blessed, or rather spoiled, to have as many as I did growing up. I hear a lot of stories from my friends about how they only had a few games to play for their consoles. It makes sense. As I said before, video games are expensive, so it was a treasure when they would receive a video game. My friends would play the crap out of whatever game they had, and complete it to the 100%. I never did that. I've never completed a game all the way. I would blaze through the game, and never really give it a second thought. I was always saving up to buy the next game that caught my attention.

Perhaps there is value in games being so expensive. When I had enough money to make the next purchase for my Nintendo 64, I was ecstatic. I loved to buy new games. Even now I enjoy the feeling of having something new to play. I'm slowly getting into the realm of PC gaming, and I already have quite the backlog of games. When games only cost $1.25, I can buy several at the same time. In fact, just over the weekend, I bought six games, and I don't even remember the titles of all of them. Will I ever get around to playing all of them? I can't say, but I can say that I own some classic games. It's quite the conundrum. However, I think that this is a thing that happens with most people, whatever their passion may be. 

I was in the local comic shop purchasing the next issue of a series that I've been making my way through, and I had a chat with the girl at the counter. She talked about how she had a backlog for pretty much everything that she was into. She had TV shows to watch on Netflix, comics to read, games to play, DVDs to watch. It was all too much. She couldn't get around to enjoying all of her stuff. I think that it's human nature that we consume all that we do. Humans can be greedy like that. We want more, even though we have enough already. We scarcely seem to value what we have, and instead we just get bored with it rather easily. It doesn't seem very kind to dismiss the things that we have so flagrantly, but we don't care. All we want is to go on to the next thing. I'm definitely guilty of this. I didn't have to buy those games, but I did anyway. I had plenty of games to play in my Steam library, but I purchased those games all the same.

Folks, take stock of what you have, and enjoy it. Count your blessings, as they say. You have more than most others if you're reading my blog, and playing video games. Enjoy what you have. Enjoy the people around you. Game on, and play hard.