Koki on 18/4/2012 at 08:33
Out of curiosity, what was the deal with the ME3 ending?
You don't need to post spoilers(I probably won't get them anyway since I didn't play the games) but what was the schtick? "It was a dream all along"? "And then everybody died"? "No John, you are the demons"?
Thirith on 18/4/2012 at 08:56
Apparently, it was pretty much the same as with Human Revolution - after one of the devs had said, explicitly and publicly, that they wouldn't pull a Three Buttons ending.
faetal on 18/4/2012 at 15:44
Metacritic is a mixed bag. Firstly, people review in anger, so a person can get pissy with something and immediately go there and give it 1 out of 10, which could well be a very unrealistic score when their rage subsides. Also, people rate perfectly good games 1 out of 10 for having DRM they don't agree with, which fair enough IS a contentious issue, but ought not to reflect on the game's score.
My preferred method of reading reviews goes thus:
1) Choose my top 10 games (or even just 10 games I love that come quickly to mind)
2) See which game site rates them all highly in metacritic
3) Do the same with 10 games I thought were bad
4) Cross reference the sites which seem to most overlap with my preferences
5) Read reviews of said games
6) Settle for whichever site adequately captured my feelings of the games
7) Use said site as a first port of call for reviews / previews to see if I ought to give a game a try (though realistically, I take most of my game recommendations from this lovely forum and its hype machine, but the reviews do make for a useful second pass).
Oddly and I'm sure some people will bombard me with WTFs for this, I have found that Gamespot do a decent enough job for me to supplement TTLG. I come here for the tweed jacket, pipe-smoking, creaky leather armchair summary and I get my mainstream journalism take from GS and that seems to give me a fair idea of whether I'll get on with a game or not.
june gloom on 18/4/2012 at 18:48
Why is it, in the entirety of this terrible thread and the stupid argument and CCCToad's trashing a profession he knows nothing about to obfuscate the fact that he's a paranoid crank and a habitual liar, nobody has ever mentioned the journalist's greatest enemy: DEADLINES.
You know why none of the reviewers didn't finish Mass Effect 3? THEY DIDN'T HAVE TIME. They got through as much as they could in about one or two days, then had to stop to write the review because deadlines. Not to mention they often had other reviews due as well.
Deadlines are murder, for everyone involved, especially at a newspaper or a major TV news network. From the reporter who needs to get the information and make it into a sensible story, to the editor who needs to make sure the story has everything, to the copy desk who need to make sure the damn thing reads okay (as well as picking up on stuff the reporter's boss missed,) to the slot editors who need to go over the copy editors' work and then shoot that shit over to the printing press, which sometimes slammed the big red button as early as 11pm...
Journalists don't die of natural causes. We get deadlined.
It's why CCCToad's frequent claims of bias are so off-base. Journalists don't have time to be biased. Especially in mediums with short cycles, journalists have to make snap judgment calls on what's newsworthy and get the story written quick as possible. For example, in a story about prison chain gangs, a reporter was told to get more pictures of white prisoners otherwise the story would seem racially insensitive. Too bad there was only one white convict in the group! Nobody bothered to ask why there were more black prisoners than white ones, because there wasn't enough time allocated to this!
Despite all this, obvious bias rarely makes it to print. It's less obvious bias that good editors have to have a good eye for detecting, and most of the time it's caught. The problem is that editors are human, same as everyone else, and they may not see bias because what they're reading, on a subconscious level lines up with their own views, shaped by their experiences, and as such they don't see bias. But you have to remember, a lot of claims the news media is openly and intentionally biased are equally skewed by the fact that to the people making those claims, "bias" means "anything they don't agree with."
faetal on 18/4/2012 at 19:09
If bias isn't intentional, wouldn't all journalistic sources be essentially alike in terms of polarity due to bias being random? Or are you saying that the bias lies solely with editors?
june gloom on 18/4/2012 at 19:28
Every journalist struggles with bias, and often second-guess themselves because they're aware of the phenomenon I described. It's why we often have so many people going over the same story -- someone's bound to notice if something's out of place. Worse is the fact that no matter what they do, the perception of bias will persist, because some people just can't be satisfied unless they're snug in their fucking echo chamber. It's why we have Fox News, to provide an echo chamber for people who weren't happy with MSNBC.
faetal on 18/4/2012 at 19:32
But for example, here in the UK, we have the Daily Mail, a paper which pitches itself at right wing xenophobes, The Guardian which aims at liberal types, The Sun which pitches at the working class sensationalists - in order for a publication to secure its demographic, it MUST have bias, else people's choice of what they read would fluctuate too much.
I could be wrong (hence I'm asking the journalist), but my perception was that a publication has a mission statement, a target demographic and the bias is infused into the hierarchy so that people produce the kind of material which won't be rejected by the editor.
demagogue on 18/4/2012 at 19:35
If bias were intentional, you wouldn't call it bias anymore. It'd just be the guy's explicit opinion. Bias is when you spin or cherry pick facts based on the way you look at the world, but you're still saying the "facts" speak for themselves, not how you're picking them (unless they're very self-reflective and notice that's what their doing and mention it explicitly, but if they could do that, they'd probably just weed out the bias themselves, and say here are the real facts and here is my opinion).
The whole original point of this thread (I thought) was that most reviewers aren't specialists in the technical arts of making games, so they already have a diminished view of what the relevant "facts" are, and it's makes it all the easier for them just to grab whatever parts struck them personally while playing it and re-package their opinion in terms of it as an "objective review" of the game. That's the issue or problem going on here IMO.
edit: wow, double ninja'd.
Edit2: @Faetal, there's a difference between "bias" and "worldview" that goes to what you're talking about, I think. A good journalist can keep his worldview, and papers can target an audience sharing that kind of view, like the xenophobes and the liberals and the reds, as long as they're being fair to what the facts on the ground are, and separate their opinion. When it becomes bias is when they're slanting what the facts on the ground are because of their worldview. The first is ok, the second is the problem. That's how I understood it anyway.
faetal on 18/4/2012 at 19:42
Bias just refers to disproportional representation away from the central balance of fact. A newspaper which is against promoting e.g. the science of global warming, will only publish pseudoscience instead in order to give undue weight to what they want to be considered the truth.
With regards to gaming journalism, it's a slightly less consequential question of bias, since it only affects people's gaming purchases. I get the general impression that most mags split their writers into categories based on their preferred gaming genres. I've often wondered how someone who plays games as exhaustively as possible to deadlines for a living could actually enjoy them the way they were intended, which leaves me wondering if they don't just take some kind of cues from the devs telling them how the game is supposed to be enjoyed and then just racing through and taking notes around those bullet points. But huuuuuuge speculation there on my part.
