I've been writing
reviews for an adventure gaming site for a while now, and I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on how I think they ought to work. This post was inspired by my own experience in trying to write reviews, and a particularly pretentious
review I read recently. (in case you're curious, the main reason I wanted to read the review was to learn how well the movie worked as an adaptation and a movie in its own right, and since the bulk of his commentary was expressing his dislike for the original story, I didn't find it informative to someone with my interests)
First of all, I'd just like to say that I hate reviews that feel like their main point is to show off, and prove that "they get it" while no one else does. This can be done by heaping praise on a movie or game that no one else seems to get, or scoffing at a popular work as being shallow and enjoyed by less cultured minds. I want to read a review to find out if I'd like something and what makes it stand out. I don't subscribe to the idea that there is an inherently "good" notion of taste in terms of what people ought to like, and that reviewers and high culture are meant to guide people towards the better things in life. People ought to enjoy what they find enjoyable, not what someone else tells them they ought to like.
In games and movies there's frequently a gulf between what is critically acclaimed and what is popular. There are a couple possible reasons for this: the people who write reviews could have different tastes from the general public and be looking down on what's popular, or the people who write reviews could be better informed than the general public as to what's out there, and often end up preferring titles that didn't get multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns supporting them to make them successful. If someone were to ask me why my tastes often range outside the mainstream, I'd tend to prefer the latter explanation. I'd like to think I'm capable of enjoying the latest blockbuster as much as anyone else, but I might be aware of more obscure titles that didn't get as much attention that I might prefer. Of course, it might also be true that my tastes are slightly off from the general public's to begin with: there's a component of ego involved both in having different preferences from the masses and being better informed, to the point where some people may claim to like something until it gets popular and no longer confers upon them the special status of liking something obscure.
In an ideal world where I was capable of putting ego aside, my own tastes and reviews would reflect as accurately as possible how inherently enjoyable something is, regardless of popularity. And when exposing anyone else to the things that I like, I wouldn't do so by criticizing the things they've found that they like, but by suggesting that there might be some other stuff out there that they're missing out on. Perhaps the most important thing I want to emphasize is that I don't have high hopes of changing people's innate preferences: if someone doesn't like adventure games, I doubt I can convince them to like it in the space of a conversation or review. Taste is certainly adaptive, in many cases the more you get exposed to something the more you learn to appreciate it, particularly in games where being unfamiliar with the basic concepts can make a game frustrating and awkward to play. But I don't want to force my own set of preferences onto other people. The best I can do is describe how well a movie, game, or other piece of art does what it was intended to do: I may not be the world's biggest fan of romantic comedies but I can recognize when one is done well, even if I may cherish more secret glee at seeing a psychological mind-bending flick. To a certain extent any reviewer is tied to their own tastes and preferences, but a particularly bad reviewer is one who is incapable of appreciating something which other people might legitimately enjoy. And my ultimate goal as a reviewer is to answer that basic question: "Would you enjoy this?" by describing my own experience with it, and trying to recognize what it does well in areas that other people might enjoy.
Movie and game reviews could be measured with a two-dimensional metric, a score of how much enjoyment you would get out of it dependent upon your personal preferences in taste and genre. The reality of course that reviews usually get boiled down to a single metric, a star rating, and even these are frequently getting summed up in a
meta-metric like Rottentomatoes or Metacritic, which describes what percentage of critics liked something or what the average score is that it's getting. This is subject to a few limitations, a few publications may have very strict standards and hardly ever give out five star reviews, some publications may grade-inflate, the metric may weight popular blogs alongside serious publications, and it may lead to the unfortunate phenomenon that the body of a review, which provides the most detailed information about how enjoyable it might be, would mostly go unread. It's almost an attempt to replace analysis with raw data; rather than relying on a single expert who says whether something is likable, you survey a sufficient mass of experts to see how likable it is on the whole--such sites often even put a summary of what their users thought of something alongside the critics. Works of art and enduring quality can now be evaluated on the basis of how they're received rather than what any one person says, although the jury is still out on if it's better for a movie to be enthusiastically loved by a few or simply enjoyed by everyone. The popularity of review aggregation could diminish the role that experts play and the influence they individually wield, but I still think reviewers serve a purpose in being more readable than the average forum post online, less prone to a selection bias where people only bother to review things they like, and hopefully being a better informed source.
The last point I want to make is in regard to taste is a factor that complicates our ability to know what we like. People often get confused as to what they actually enjoy as opposed to what they think they enjoy, or worse yet what they think they should enjoy. According to Malcom Gladwell's Blink, if you give samples of various jams to people and ask them to select the best ones, the ones they pick will generally correspond to what experts say are the best. But if you ask them to select the ones they think are the best and explain why, they'll get it wrong. People are fine at understanding what they like, until you ask them to explain it, in which case they're likely to get it wrong unless they've trained themselves in understanding their own reactions. A lot of times our internal models of what we think we like bear little resemblance to our own actual reactions, and we can convince ourselves we had a different experience than we did based upon what we thought should have happened. You can have situations where someone enjoys something at the time but underrates their experience later on and declines to try again. Add this on top of the fact that someone's enjoyment of something like a movie may be influenced by a number of factors that have nothing to do with the work itself, such as who they saw it with, and reviewing anything becomes even more subjective.
Having said all that, in describing what makes something enjoyable I'm not necessarily referring just to the immediate visceral experience you get from something, my own taste lies to the intellectual as well as the immediate. I would certainly rank highly works that are particularly original, leave you with something meaningful, or make you think on top of the emotions you directly experience, even though I recognize that that isn't what everyone is looking for. Reviewing and evaluating art is a complicated process that's necessary because getting into a book, movie, or game requires a lot of investment before you discover whether it was worth it for you. It's a tricky task, and frequently very subjective, but I still intend to try.
