If you follow Dunkey at all you've most likely seen his video "Game Critics", detailing issues he has with the way gaming outlets write their reviews. It's garnered significant criticism and praise from different people, proving very controversial and generating serious discussion about gaming media. I'm absolutely a small-time reviewer and not at all dedicated (or good) enough to write for a major site, but regardless I'd like to share some thoughts on a few particular points he made that were great and some very misguided. I've been watching Dunkey since his hilarious League of Legends videos from 2012, and his recent serious videos are really thought-provoking. I recommend you watch he video, preferably several times, before you even begin to read this blog.
My general issue with his video is that Dunkey, as a youtuber, is entitled to so many more advantages when it comes to writing and publishing his own game reviews compared to the average writer for Kotaku or IGN. He has the ability to deviate from the industry standard in ways that someone who gets paid exclusively to review games cannot. People have different expectations going into one of Dunkey's videos compared to when they check what IGN gave a game. I want to illustrate this using a few points he himself made in the video.
1. "[Gaming outlets'] opinions are so decentralized"
To illustrate this point, Dunkey shows how IGN's review of Sonic 4 conflicts with the opinions of some of the members of two different IGN podcast videos. However, Dunkey heavily edits the videos (as he is really great at doing), obscuring the fact that in both videos, there were several members of the podcast who disagreed with the people saying Sonic was never good. This sticks out to me immediately as an issue with the reader's expectations, not with the game sites themselves. Actually, this quote illustrates my main point perfectly: everyone treats gaming outlets as one big reviewer, and differing opinions of individual writers are treated as signs of incoherence. When you watch two different reviews of the same game by two different youtubers, no one would expect their opinions to align in any way, because they are individuals who are of course each entitled to their opinion. So why is it that the eight different IGN employees involved in this situation, one reviewer and seven different podcast members, are all expected to have the same opinion? What is IGN or Kotaku other than a network of different people writing reviews? Further proving my point, the comments for those podcasts often go something like "IGN is just famous for hating Sonic". This makes no sense to me; I thought the issue was that IGN was too flip-floppy about it? It seems unfair that writers at outlets are expected to have the same opinions as all the other writers there when no one would expect that in a similar situation on YouTube.
We've actually had similar situations here at GBAtemp. One notable example is Tom's review of BOTW. I'll be coming back to this review later because it applies to many of the things Dunkey talked about, but there are a few comments that stand out to me as exemplifying this particular point. My intention is not to throw shade at the authors of any of these comments, but their content proves a lot about the double standards readers have when it comes to game reviews:
Xzi uses the score given to another game by a different writer to imply that the score given to this game by a certain writer is poorly thought-out. No one would go to another youtube review of the same game and say "this site gave the game a different score" referring to a review by a different youtuber. That would be preposterous, but somehow the opinions of different writers on THIS site are expected to align perfectly?
Boomy makes the exact same assumption, using a review by a different writer to make an implication about the score of a different game by a different reviewer.
This comment tosses so much logic out the window, it's hard to read. Not only does StarTrekVoyager utilize the "consistency among multiple different reviewers with different opinions" argument, but they also state, "the obvious subjectivity of this review is more than obvious". Granted, there is a certain amount of objectivity when it comes to reviewing games, but to cite subjectivity as a negative feature of a review is to refute the existence of multiple reviews of a game at all.
2. "It's also important to acknowledge your shortcomings as a reviewer"
I agree with this sentiment; after all, everyone has their own different nags and annoyances which can prevent them from giving a completely honest review to a game simply due to small personal preferences. However, I was not enamored by the example Dunkey gave to prove this point. He goes on to talk about how he hates anime, RPGs, and turn-based combat. He wraps this section up by saying, "So when I say that Persona 5, a turn-based anime RPG, is actually pretty fun, you should go, 'Damn, OK, maybe that game is alright'." I disagree with the notion that liking a game in a certain genre someone happens to hate makes their review somehow more valid. If anything, I would trust the review of someone who reviews RPGs exclusively over that of someone who never plays them. The problem with Dunkey's supposition here is that he's flipped from describing his hatred of RPGs as a shortcoming to touting it as something which makes his reviews more trustworthy. Experience with similar games is a large factor when it comes to reviews.
3. "You don't have to see eye to eye on every single game to put your trust in someone, obviously. A critic's power lies in the consistency of their voice."
This may be the most insightful point Dunkey made in the entire video. If someone can find a reviewer whose opinions match up with theirs, then they can know exactly how they would respond to a certain title and make a purchase decision from there. This is what makes a purely honest review so powerful, and it's by far the best way to gauge how a certain game fares inside its genre. However, this is not the only value that reviews possess. It's not reasonable to expect to find someone with your exact tastes, as that is quite often literally impossible. Instead, it's entirely possible to make an educated decision based on the opinions of a certain eloquent reviewer based on how they responded to other similar games or gameplay elements. This goes beyond just looking at the number score of the review. For example, if I wanted to know whether or not a game had quality QTEs, and a certain reviewer often went into depth about the QTE system in many games, I would put a greater amount of trust into their review. Similarly, if there was a reviewer who very rarely or never reviewed RPGs, I would put little faith in their ability to weight the merit of the battle system in a specific RPG. If someone is disappointed by a game in a certain genre they mostly enjoy, I would know that the game is not worth my time, since it fails to please even the biggest fans of a genre. However, it is important to consider that the opposite may not apply, because a lack of experience with a certain genre is not likely to generate a well-informed review.
4. "[The score] is usually restricted to a 7, 8, or a 9, all of which imply the game is good. Even something as disastrous as Mass Effect: Andromeda will still get away with a 7/10."
After making this remark, Dunkey goes on to describe how gaming websites are afraid to give a game a bad score or "say something real" because of relationships with developers and advertising money. However, all of this drama only comes from the majority of readers, who base their purchasing decisions and social media reactions to games off the number that they scrolled down to see. Again, this comes down to double standards. Youtube personalities such as Dunkey are given the luxury of viewers watching their whole video, simply because it's more difficult to skip to the end and find a score, which is often given on a different scale than most written reviews. It wouldn't make any sense to aggregate a bunch of youtubers' reviews and average their wacky scales, since half of them don't even give numeric scores. However, with written reviews, it's incredibly easy to scroll to the bottom of the article and find a score. It's even easier to just skip the article entirely and look at an aggregate score of 50 different websites who all may have had completely different likes and dislikes, culminating in an inflated aggregate score that means nothing. Regardless of this ridiculous pressure from aggregates and readers (a notable reviewer was DDOSed for knocking Zelda down on the metacritic rankings with his review), people with a much higher degree of creative control over the way their content is presented (youtubers vs. a writer for a website) choose to pick on the score as some kind of kowtow to developers and the god of $$$.
These arbitrary scores are all people seem to care about, yet no one seems to be able to treat number scales with the same subjectivity as the language of a review. Dunkey talked about consistency earlier, where every critic should find their own voice, but simultaneously expects people to conform to his own arbitrary number scale. I really have no reason to care if a score of 60 is good or not for most people. How can you really judge whether a score is good or bad without knowing how likely someone is to give a game a good or bad score? If people actually read reviews instead of just looking at the score and comparing it to something written by someone else conveniently on the same site (or with aggregates, on a different site entirely), none of this would be an issue. People go into youtube videos expecting to watch the whole thing, not just skip to the end to find a score, and youtube videos aren't aggregated. There's no pressure to go find the lowest score on youtube and harass the hell out of that person because there's no youtube Metacritic to conveniently show you who it is. I hate that Dunkey feels like he has the right to pick on the scoring system of review writers when he is relieved of almost all of the pressure people face when it comes to a stupid arbitrary number you put at the end of a review. If game critics really were afraid to give bad scores, there's no reason there would be any kind of negative language in any review, which leads into Dunkey's next point.
5. "I see a lot of reviews where the language doesn't really align with the verdict."
Again with the scores. Who knows what arbitrary number scale X site is using to grade their games? Some sites use numbers out of 100, some out of 10, some out of 5, some use letter grades, and some don't even give a final grade at all. How could you possibly converge all these conflicting systems with no clear standard into a number which, by your standards, matches the language? There's also the fact that people are more inclined to mention parts of a game that they didn't like. There's no reason that if you give a game a 9/10, 90% of the review has to be positive and 10% of it has to be negative or some ridiculous ratio like that. This is just due to human nature. A reviewer is going to mention small flaws that may not seriously detract from the experience of the game, but regardless deserve recognition. That doesn't mean that someone hated the game because there were flaws in a few mechanics; there's so much more than that, and you have to read a full review to get the picture. All of this stems from a reliance on score which just isn't present in an equivalent youtube review.
Anyway, that's about all I have to say. I've been mulling these things over for a while and it feels good just to have them written down. Leave a comment or shoot me a message if you want to talk about any of these things more.
