There are many issues that game reviewers face, through a little research i discovered that many game reviewers find it difficult to keep some of their reviews none- biased, for example; writing on a games that they may have found to be the best game they’ve ever played, this being the case, they would unconsciously make the game sound excellent, whereas it doesn’t live up to the many readers views. Other issues include the sources of the games; maybe the developers do not send a copy of the game, or even a demo, to the reviewers, making their life harder in trying to get a hold of the game so that they can get a more of a hands on experience of the game under review. Similarly, if an issue should appear in the game then they must get to the source of the problem and try and feed back to improve the quality of it. Reviewers also have some critics that explain that the reviews seem half- hearted and not of the highest standard, this, i found out, is because they have such a small amount of time to complete a full review that what they produce can, obviously, not be perfect as the next assignment will be undergo also.
I believe that an objective ranking system is not necessary in order for the reviewed games to sell, this is because i have witnessed such a thing happen, where a game, for this instance, has been bought purely on the likeness of it’s counterpart movie, the game being pirates of the Caribbean, due to this fact, a link was made between the movie being good, and the game which immediately was being anticipated as an awesome game. The fact of the matter was, that the game sucked, it was poor to say the most and could have easily been surpassed by the likes of another Barbie episode in that bizarre saga. So this brings me to my point that sometimes subjectivity trumps objectivity. However, objectivity is an essential part to a game review, as a game could be good in terms of objectivity but it could have the worst ideas in the history of games, but, the review would have done the job of persuading readers to purchase the game because of the review, so in that sense the system is feasible, and is essential for the powers of persuasion.
The NGJ provide an insight to games that are released that necessarily are not well known, giving it press which could boost the popularity which makes it good in that way, however, if they give a bad review then that could be make or break for someone like, a small time developer.
I found a few other forms of games writing two of these were: reviews on popular games and descriptive writing on story plots and general likeability of the game.
After all these findings, i thought about my own writing, and asked myself, do i value objectivity or subjectivity? Well, i think that i value both when reviewing a game but i going to say that in most cases objectivity tops subjectivity. Subjectivity can be vital as games are mainly bought for their status and likeability, call of duty, for example, a game where not every one of the new releases is, arguably, better than the last. They are again, bought on a basis of genre, if a genre is preferred to another, then that one will sell, due to the subjectivity factor. Finally, to mention objectivity, in a review, the game in question might not be known at all upon release, this brings in objectivity to give the reader the information that he/she needs to decide whether or not to purchase it. My final conclusion is that, yes, both play their respectable factors but objectivity comes out on top in a review as the basis of said review.
