I don’t have time to play though all of the comp games these days, so summaries are useful for people like me to get a sense of the “highlights” of the competition that we shouldn’t miss.
They also serve at least one other useful purpose: reassuring the author (and other readers of the review) that the reviewer has actually played through the game and understood what it’s about.
For the thread in general, I don’t support saying one type of a review is more right or ‘proper’ than another, and feel that it’s nice having a variety of styles. I did want to comment on this though:
That’s definitely one of the most important roles of my reviews. I got into reviews by seeing how many games on IFDB had no reviews on them; I had been using other people’s reviews like book blurbs or newspaper movie reviews, i.e. as a way to decide whether to play a game or not and what to expect. So to have games without reviews just seemed ‘bad’, especially when there were games I knew a lot of people had played (many Infocom games lacked reviews, for instance).
So the purpose of most of my reviews are to:
1-Catalogue games and provide a quick blurb for them to let others know what to expect
2-Like @evouga said, to prove (to the author especially) that the game has been fully experienced, and to try to provide your summary of the game and its content/themes, so that the author can now how effectively or not their idea was transmitted.
Unlike many reviewers, I do not have artistic intent in my reviews, and I usually do not use my reviews to share part of myself the way I use game writing. The exception is when the game is somehow tied up in my life, like Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.
I always identified Victor Gijsbers as one of the instigators/early influencers (depending on how you see it) of the ‘artistic review’ movement, with Emily Short another strong influence.
For me, I value my volume of reviews over my quality, and especially on under-served areas (which there are a lot less of now that so many people are reviewing!). That’s why I don’t think I personally would be the strongest representative of a review roundtable, and would prefer others to be there. I value and enjoy ‘reviews with artistic intent’ and find them to be very good and proper reviews, and I hope the roundtable focuses on that segment of reviewing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you were influential in making that happen. Certainly, the “every game deserves reviews” ethos seems to have risen since you started.
I concur with @prevtenet that your influence – if not in style, but in the importance of the practice of reviewing – is fairly evident. I believe for that this very reason, you would be an essential representative at the table.
Coming in late with a non-useful response because he’s no longer an active IF reviewer, but I just wanted to mention that I always enjoy Paul O’Brian’s reviews when I come across them.
Paul O’Brian still occasionally writes new IF reviews (of old games, usually) on his blog; for instance: