racketboy.com

dtrack wrote:The point is playing 40 games won't turn a blogger into a critic.

Gunstar Green wrote:On one hand I feel like the more you know, the better informed you'll be. I get that people want there to be some kind of official, higher, more intellectual form of game analysis that elevates video games to the same artistic level as film.

But at the same time that's not what review sites like the oft-mentioned IGN are about. They're not analyzing games in the historical context of what came before. They're presenting reviews for games to a general audience in the context of other modern games.

I think the elitist attitude towards video game journalism is unwarranted. There are a lot of brilliant articles about video games out there and a lot of talented critics who take a deeper approach to analyzing games. That kind of thing is part of the niche though, you can't expect it from mainstream sites. It's simply not their job to look at games in that context but rather from the perspective of the average modern consumer.

The point is a lot of mainstream review sources are as much marketing as they are journalism but the same goes for movies and just about anything else worthy of artistic review that's being sold as a product.