When Reviews Go Bad, con't.

The Incoherent Review

These are the reviews that you can’t classify as unjustifiably harsh or unbelievably gushing, because you can’t figure out what on God’s green earth the writer is trying to say. Some sound as if the writer had run the article through a poor language translation program a few times. Some examples (all examples used are pulled from actual published reviews, and were far too easy to find– no names are used to protect the guilty:)

"The player takes a role of a medieval Japanese ruler on a mission to gain land, and in the process, make the conquered territories hail his mighty rule through good management. Shogun combines the Risk feature in such a way that it provides 3D, real-time battles in place of dices and cards, but it also adds the elements common to RTS games like, resources management and units development. Our readers should realize that the mix of different elements represents an unequal balance, since the gameplay accent lays mostly on turns and battles… "

Here’s a hint: if a reader has to read your sentences two or three times to understand what you’re trying to say, it might not be a candidate for the Pulitzer. Another example:

"NHL 2001 is hockey the way hockey is meant. You can’t see too much of graphics like these! At least I can’t! This isn’t some air hockey game, just because it’s on a computer. No sir – when you hit a person in NHL 2001, you’ll know it and if you shoot a shot in NHL 2001 you will feel the power that you can’t get in a computer game, not these days, and even the skating is like skating on ice, if you know what I mean."

Um – no. I don’t know what you mean, and no one else does either. I could fill pages with chunks of reviews that boast prose at least this bad, and you can probably think of a myriad of reviews in which you wondered how anyone could allow this crap to go public. And frankly, even when you move away from the extremes that such drivel represents, into the realm of the "average" review, the writing is no great shakes. Why is the bar set so low in computer game reviews? Why is it that so many game writers wear their dangling participles like medals on their chest and wouldn’t know a gerund from a gerbil?

The root cause is the proliferation of gaming sites (even as many good gaming outlets are shutting their doors.) Do you want to be a computer gaming writer? No problem, and precious few requirements. If you are willing to write for free, there are web sites that would love to publish your work (and if you can’t get anyone to accept your writing, just start up your own web site!) And unlike the top professional sites, the editors who run many of these outlets wouldn’t know the Chicago Manual of Style if it fell on their keyboards. Just as the expansion of pro baseball teams results in .500 pitchers getting $10 million dollar contracts, so the multitude of places that publish game reviews makes it easy for anyone, with writing talent or not, to be a geen-u-ine game critic.

Does that mean that the level of writing professionalism is directly proportional to the amount that an outlet pays its writers? No sir. There are sites that pay low or nothing and maintain a high degree of quality, and there are places that pay well that allow the occasional stinkeroo. The real key is the people who run the site and edit the articles, and there are some folks who are good editors and good writers who run low paying sites. In general, however, the major paying websites and magazines will rarely (note I didn’t say never) be guilty of allowing incoherent reviews, with regard to style and grammar, for a couple of basic reasons. One: the competition amongst writers to capture a place in the writing stables of the higher paying outlets is fierce enough that a writer with poor basic writing skills just isn’t going to get in the door. Two: the editors at the major sites and magazines are pros. While freelancers love to gripe about editors changing their precious prose, the truth is that a good editor makes your work better and a great editor can make minor changes that turns a good article into a great one.

So, that means that you just need to stick with the high priced web sites and the major mags and you’ll be treated to nothing but high quality reviews, right? Heh heh… yeah, right. While the language in the reviews may more closely resemble the Queen’s English, no site or magazine is immune to the errors that result in crapola reviews.

Why do some bad games get good reviews?