I would love for you to add ideas in the comments section again.
Here are the criteria I have so far:
1. Variety. For the amount of time I invest playing the game, does the game provide enough different experiences to avoid being monotonous? One of the problems humans have with fun is that experiencing a particular fun thing too long or too often bores them. The cliché "variety is the spice of life" is true. If God of War had not had puzzles in between its mostly homogeneous fighting, it would have been boring. The only way to keep a monotonous game, one with few environment types or mechanics or whatnot, the only way to keep that from boring yourself is to play it sparingly; games shouldn't have to be played like that (not that it's bad if you do, of course).
2. Pacing: the feeling a player has that urges them to do something in a game — the consequence of inaction being some sort of loss, like player death or loss of experience or missing out on seeing something cool happen or complete loss of the game (damn Metal Gear Solid Torture Sequence of Awesomeness Because Losing it Makes You Lose the Entire Game if You Somehow Don't Save). Level design should impose different levels of urgency on players at different times in order to be varied enough (variety has a place in pacing).
One good analysis of pacing is this feature by Jacek Wesolowski of People Can Fly (Painkiller)
3. Graphics. Crysis is not the standard, and World of Warcraft has better graphics than F.E.A.R.
This is a reflection on what the visuals of a particular game do to me. Do they make me smile? Is it pretty? Is it funny? Does it strike me emotionally? Is it sublime? What does it do? Judging whether the visual art is good or bad will be based on what I believe the developers are trying to shoot for, if there visual design accomplishes it, and how well it does it. I still have mixed feelings about this because a strong effect that I believe the developers aren't shooting for may be worth assigning awesomeness to.
4. Uniqueness. In this, I look for two things. Either the game does something new (and well), or it does something old but better than all the games before. Meeting one of these criteria is important because I don't want gamers to waste money and time on a new, expensive product when there is an older, cheaper product that does the same thing, perhaps better.
5. Bugs. Perhaps shooting up a game for bugs is unfair, since most games can be expected to be patched enough to make a bug judgement obsolete. That is why I have mixed feelings about this. If I ever get a journalism job, in which I'll most likely be expected to score games, I'll use the publishing house's policy on bugs for scoring. In general, bugs are bad because they break games.
6. Fairness. In this, I dock points for two things. If I have reason to believe that the enemy AI is cheating, (like in ArmA: Combat Operations, where players who duck into tall grass can't see the enemy AI but the enemy AI, with their developer-endowed x-ray vision, see the players) than points be docked! If in multiplayer I have reason to believe that players automatically get unfair advantages over other players based on....at least one of many things (There are so many ways to give players unfair advantages over each other) than damn the torpedoes, and get to the choppaaa!
7. Story-telling. If a game has some kind of story-telling, I will talk about how it makes me feel. If the feeling the game is giving me is weak, than I dock points. Cinematics and writing count, even if they aren't part of play.
8. Sound. Do I feel the game's sound accomplishes what I think the developer is shooting for? If not, than I dock points UNLESS I end up liking the sound.
9. Flow. Does the game put me in Flow for what I feel is an appropriate amount of time during play? Does it put me in Flow too little or too often? For those who don't know or forgot, in psychology, Flow is that state in which the task you are doing is neither too easy nor too hard (although in activities such as computer gaming, the Flow state is ideally reached when the presented challenge is just above your skill level, making you put out your 110% effort); it is a state of immersion in which doing the activity is intrinsically rewarding; you are 100% focused on what you are trying to achieve in the game world. The original idea in psychology comes from the University of Chicago's Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
10. Intellectual Stimulation. Is there anything to learn about the analog world from the game. Does it make special information that I helps me understand my world or myself better? Games that do this deserve major credit. To a certain extent, all games are intellectually stimulating (even the stupid ones). Intellectual stimulation is extra credit.
11. Does the game always reward the player with something? Even when the player loses? (for example, in the Call of Duty series, when you die, you're shown an interesting/snarky quote about war) Reward in both victory and failure is important because people who like happiness don't like being punished for playing. Paradoxically, this doesn't mean there should be NO punishment; it's just that, even in the punishing, the player should get something they can consider fun or meaningful or both.
And that's what I use, as of now, to decide whether a game is good or bad for consumers.
Here are things I won't deem good or bad about a game:
1. Agency/Effectance. This is an essential element of computer games. For those who don't know or don't remember, it is the idea that you can make things happen on screen. If you can't make anything happen in a video game world, you have no agency/effectance; it might as well be a painting or a movie or a novel. If a "game" does not give you agency, than it is not a game, and I won't review it as if it is one.
2. It has Agency, but is not a game. Here is Jesper Juul's definition for the word "game":
"A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are negotiable" (P 36 Juul, half-real).
Undoubtedly, I will review non-games in my video games journalism career, (like the Sims 6, which will probably be a computer toy instead of a computer game). Maybe I will be an Interactive Electronic Entertainment Journalist.
Things I will review but won't go into detail about are the concrete details that reveal plot I feel are important for the player to experience in the game.
And that is all I can think of for now. When I restart reviewing next week, I will consider all these but not explicitly state them in reviews unless I believe I should. (And I haven't forgotten about "immersion." I'll discuss immersion in another article.)
Feel free to add ideas or dispute my definitions in the comments section. Teach me. Me like.
In the meantime, check out this old Gamasutra.com article about games that make players happy; not just provide mere, transitory fun/bliss/orgasm.
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5 comments:
You've got a lot to work with, but honestly, I feel like trying to quantify what you're reviewing diminishes the value of the review. It's a balancing issue. I wouldn't force myself to focus on each issue individually, but I would still incorporate a few criteria in my review. The problem is that rather than experience a game as one whole product, you end up diving the game into sections and examining the parts separately. Video games are a much more fluid medium than that (at least I'd like to think it is).
It's ok to have categories of things you're looking for in a game. Just make sure to explain how those parts influence the whole.
12) Awesomeness. See: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/6/19/
But like Satchamobob mentioned, sometimes breaking it down into categories isn't the best. Not only is there the 'game as a whole' that he mentioned, but many of the categories don't apply to some games. I keep thinking how you would write a review for TF2 using those categorizations, and not only do many of the categories not apply, I don't think it would be a good review unless you stood back and looked at the game overall.
So think your list works well to make sure you covered everything in your reviews, but I wouldn't constrain your reviews to just the categories on the list. Sometimes the pleasures derived from a good game can't easily be broken down into a few simple categories.
I think you are onto the right track. As Yggdrasil said, TF2 seems to be a black mark on your review criteria, but if you simplified your criteria and possibly merged some, you could come up with a more general set of guidelines, rather than discreet categories, to consider. Here's my shot at it:
1: Variety within the game -- this is a good starting point. TF2 fails on some counts (game types,maps; although they are improving this, working toward more variety) and succeeds on others (nine playable, balanced characters; bonus weapons)
2: Pace -- I think Pacing makes it sound too intentional. Valve uses critical shots and Ubercharges to alter the pacing of the match. In a multiplayer game, the pacing is inherently unstable. That said, what's your judgement on this? Is similar pacing all the way through good or bad? Perhaps tension is built through similar pacing, with the thought that something different must come? Perhaps (this is my opinion) pacing should be merged with story-telling, as I will explain later.
3: Graphics -- This is good, although the buzzword "graphics" seems to herald the dirt-and-gunmetal-grey realism of GoW and Halo. I think "Visual Style" would be a better starting point. TF2 is not realistic in many ways, but the Visual Style is used to enhance gameplay and give it a unique, refreshing look. Daniel C. plays bullet-hell games developed post-mortem for the Dreamcast, if you will. They don't have pretty graphics, although they came out last year. But the Visual Style fits the world. Again, this is a semantics change, but and important one, I think.
4: Uniqueness -- This is possibly one of the more strong points to look at. Basically, what is this game doing that everyone else isn't? For TF2, it's pretty much everything. The problem with this is that it sort of encompasses every other category. The visual style is unique, the variety in classes is unique, the story-telling is unique, etc. So perhaps this is a meta-category that doesn't belong on it's own, and should be evaluated with respect to the other guidelines. Again, my opinion.
5: Bugs -- I disagree with you here on not reviewing bugs. If a game has something wrong with it, it should be penalized. Prospective patches shouldn't sway you, as Satchamobob aptly demonstrated with Silent Hill: Homecoming. They never released a patch for the lack of inverted camera, and they never will. That said, I'm not sure you should give this it's own category. If there's a true bug, then you should mention it at the end (or in the pertinent section of the review). But, if there's something broken about the gameplay, such as the camera bug in Silent Hill, then that could be considered under a separate category (perhaps Flow?). Too many reviewers are happy to call everything wrong about a game a "bug."
6: Fairness -- I think this is the weakest category overall. Fairness is a matter of opinion. Perhaps some people like the unforgiving difficulty of ArmA or the easy ride of the new Prince of Persia. One could argue that both of those are unfair to the player. In TF2, there are no AI bots to be judged. Players getting an unfair advantage is a result of cheating and should not be considered in the game, as cheating is intentionally messing with the game design. "Fairness" should be subsumed into "Flow," perhaps, or some other category.
7: Story-Telling -- Another weak category. I think you're thinking too much about single-player games here. TF2 tells about as much story as a bag of potato chips. However, the characters are fleshed out and the worlds match the fiction of the game. Perhaps this could be renamed "Story" or even "Setting" to encompass the variety of fictions that one finds in games. The fiction doesn't have to be a story, necessarily. Other options for names include "Fiction", "Narrative". Think about this category. It's an important one, but different in almost every case. Are you going to quantify a story? Is less fiction really bad? Perhaps the visual style and story categories should be lumped into "Game World." As long as they support gameplay, I don't fault a game for not having a story. I mentioned earlier that Pacing could be lumped in here. I think that might be a good idea for some games (singleplayer mostly) but perhaps a better category for Pacing would be Flow.
8: Sound -- Another good one, although it represent a part of the game's aesthetic style. The sounds in TF2 are cartoony, with arrows whizzing by your head and crackly critical rockets and the brass riff when you're dominating someone. Perhaps Visual Style (Graphics) and Sound should be lumped into Aesthetic Style, or, as I mentioned earlier, "Game World".
9: Flow -- This is about as close to the right direction as you've gotten. I think that every category on this list should be evaluated as it improves gameplay (or doesn't do so). Flow is a way to measure the efficacy of gameplay. However, I think Flow is a fickle category to quantify, and you might be better with just the straightforward "Gameplay" as the name. You can still examine Flow in the game, but as a part of the Gameplay category. For example, in TF2, the flow is influenced by the pacing of the game (discussed earlier), but also by dying and respawning. This break in flow would dock you points, but the gameplay is still great, because of the mechanics of the game that necessitate a penalty to death. Instant respawn servers are not balanced for the gameplay that Valve wanted. So, Flow isn't the end-all, be-all of game design.
10: Intellectual Stimulation -- I'm not sure if this deserves its own category, either. I'm also not sure if you should consider this when reviewing a game. What can TF2 teach you? The value of teamwork? Perhaps. What can Bejeweled teach you? Probably nothing. That doesn't make it a bad game. What can HL2 teach you? Dystopian futures are bad? How to use a crowbar (improperly)? Teaching something about the real world is not a hallmark of a great game. It is a pleasant surprise, but part of games are learning how the game works, and existing in its world. Personally, I think you should drop this.
11: Reward -- This is your weakest category. (If I said that about another category, I retract that statement. It is now second to this one.) This mechanic could be entirely subsumed into one of three categories: Pacing (balance of risk to reward), Flow (rewarding players at just the right moment, think random drops in TF2 or health/ammo in L4D), or my new category of Gameplay, which should really encompass both of the previously mentioned categories, plus this one. All the pacing, flow, and reward are there to make compelling gameplay that is exciting, but not frustrating. I think that this one should be cut, as it's pretty much redundant anyway.
Whew.
After all that, I want you to think about what, in each of these categories, is good (and what is bad). Like I said earlier, is less story bad? Is less realism bad? Is more "unfairness" bad?
Also, use these as guidelines only. You should not rate these by numbers. Use these as starting points for looking at a game. Some games break rules. You may find that a particular game does something that you thought couldn't work, but it does. So, think about each of the categories, and if it works. Then write about it.
One last note: I think you should consider The Sims 3 to be a game. Although Juul doesn't define The Sims as a game, the third installment has a lot more in terms of goals, etc. I think his definition is somewhat shortsighted in this area.
And before I go, I wanted to make a comment outside your review criteria. I thought that the purpose of this blog was to talk about games in an academic context, not review them. If you'd like to do reviews, so be it (which is why I've helped you here), but I think a better, more unique, more insightful think to do would be to see what you can say about the game outside of a review. For example, use TF2 to talk about the trend toward brown/grey realism in games, or use Silent Hill to talk about cameras or points of view in games and how they affect them.
But if you just want to do reviews, then good luck.
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