Thanks for your perspective Garry. I don’t think I can convert you to my own favourite style of reviews, but I think I can at least explain why people like me write them the way we do! As you point out, the 80s and 90s reviews were usually written to help people decide whether or not to spend money on a game. For that purpose, you want a spoiler-free review that gives you a factual account of the game and, of course, an indication of how good it is.
But this is usually not the situation we’re in today. We don’t spend money on games. We spend time on games, of course, and so it’s still useful to have this kind of factual review; IFDB reviews written outside of a competition contest often still have this form, or at least come close to it. But when we’re in the middle of something like IF Comp, the situation is different. What you write about yourself is true for almost everyone:
When I write a game during IF Comp, my audience is people who have already played the game and, also very important in my mind, the author. Neither group needs a review that explains the basics of the game to them. They already know the basics. So I sometimes don’t even mention the basics, but go straight to… well, it could be a lot of things, it just depends on what I think I have something interesting to say about! Sometimes I’ll talk about the interface, or the plot, or the puzzles. Sometimes I’ll talk about the theme. And sometimes, often in order to talk about one of these things, I find it helpful to show where the game is located in a broader cultural space. If someone makes a game where there’s a turn limit and you have to collect as many treasures as possible within the turn limit, then in order to understand how this puzzle was designed it’s going to be useful to compare it to Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder and Sugarlawn. You won’t get as much out of my review if you haven’t played those two games, that’s true. But then I hope it’s still useful, because now you know about these other two games.
So, here’s an especially egregious example of what you complain about: my review of LAKE Adventure. Most aspects of the game aren’t mentioned or explained, and there is me, quoting poems by Hardy and Dickinson! But you’ve got to see this review in a certain context. When I wrote it, there were already about 15 reviews of LAKE Adventure. I had read all of them. I felt no need to repeat what those other reviewers had already talked about. But I felt a strong need to talk about what I found touching, interesting, emotional, about LAKE Adventure: it’s steadfast refusal to see the death of the sister as in any sense positive, not even in terms of something that made the protagonist grow or that they managed to ‘give a place’ in their lives. That’s a tough, tough theme; and it reminded me of those poems; and I felt that those poems expressed my point at least as good, maybe better, than I could. And I hope that at least some readers of the review will read it and think: yes, yes, that’s what I felt when I played this game, that’s what I couldn’t put into precise words. And if so, mission of the review accomplished. Because I’m not here to tell you whether or not to buy that game, but to help you make sense of the experience of playing the game, or even, which happens to me with the reviews I love most, to enrich that experience after the fact.
Maybe it doesn’t work for you, and that’s okay! But I don’t think any of us is in the surely rather stupid business of writing essays
I promise you that I’m not rubbing my hands cackling, “ha ha, those guys and gals over at intfiction.org will be really impressed by my literary knowledge”!
