Sep 09
10
Kropotkin on Review Structure
Shortly after releasing our two-parter on video game reviews, we were lucky enough to be contacted by Chris O’Regan, maybe better known to most as Kropotkin from the Kropotkin and Hendrix Game Review Show and now of SuperHappyFunTimeShow fame. When we say contacted, what we actually mean to say is ’sent a whopper of an e-mail that got us thinking”. And we felt compelled to share it with you, with Chris’s permission. We’d normally provide Chris with a bio at this point, but we think he did a pretty good job of providing his own in this piece. What we will say is that you should check out some of his further thoughts on the subject in a blog post over at the SHFTS website, as well as checking out the show itself.
SuperHappyFunTimeShow is a popular, longstanding podcast that reviews the gaming week, and one which shares our Transatlantic bent, as well as our aim to talk about gaming in-depth – but that won’t surprise you after reading Chris’s piece on his personal history with game reviews, and review structure. All that’s left to say is thanks to Chris for sharing his thoughts with us, and to remind listeners that we’re always happy to receive feedback about our shows, so please don’t hesitate to e-mail us bigredpotion@gmail.com.
Hello Sinan and Joe,
After listening to the last two episodes of Big Red Potion today regarding game reviews, I thought I’d share my views with you on the mechanics of writing a game review, rather than their purpose. Now, I don’t propose to regurgitate what is being discussed over at Mr. Shawn Elliot’s now neglected symposium, for that appeared to be looking at game reviews at a much higher level than I wish to look at them. The symposium asked about the role of reviews and their nature in the realm of video game critique. I on the other hand wish to explore how they are written, not what they are and what they do. Although one can’t help but touch on these high concepts when carrying out such an examination, I will do my best to avoid them.
Before I start, I would like to qualify the following text by explaining that whilst I have written reviews for many games for over 10 years now, as well as having consumed them for over twice that period, I have never received remuneration for writing such critical pieces. At this point you may regard my opinion on the matter as redundant for I have never been under the proverbial fiscal cosh to get copy out. But I do understand the need for judicious copy editing and the speed at which reviews must be written and posted, so do please indulge me as a keen enthusiast on the subject.
The first game reviews I can remember reading were in a magazine called Crash. It started life in 1982 and it was a single format magazine for the ZX Spectrum, the computer that almost single handedly built the UK’s video game development community, but that’s a story for another time. I will say, however, that without that little rubber-keyed slab of plastic we wouldn’t be playing GTA IV, Wipeout HD, or Fable 2 for that matter. Examples of Crash’s work can be found on this online archive. Crash gave birth to the kind of frivolous, almost snarky style of game review that became the stock and trade for UK based magazines up until the arrival of ACE and latterly Edge in the mid 90s. The pinnacle of this type of review writing came with Your Sinclair, a magazine that was such an entertaining read that people bought it even though they didn’t actually own a Spectrum in the first place. Again, there is also an archive for this magazine, and it can be found here.
ACE and Edge brought in the more cerebral yet acerbic style of reviews that remain the latter publication’s trademark. Whilst written with passion, they are none the less cold with no by-lines, as all copy in the magazine – or coffee table book to quote Mr. Jeff Green – belongs to Edge. Only the columnists get a credit for their inputs, which is something The Edge cannot baulk at, as anonymous columnists are rather pointless. The exception to that, of course, was Red-Eye, AKA Ste Curren, he of One Life Left fame who used to write under the aforementioned pseudonym. Thankfully, there are still publications out there that continue the spirit of Crash and Your Sinclair, with outlets such as PC Gamer UK who use single word missives to sum up reviews, and PC Zone who insist on being as offensive as is humanly possible without being pulled from store shelves. Sadly, PC Zone failed to do this on one occasion; read the infamous ‘cruelty zoo’ article here - oh, and yes they pulled that magazine very quickly!
Moving into the mid 90s, we find that the Internets and its series of infamous yet mystical tubes come into being, and game reviews take on a very different form. No longer tied to the print media, web sites sprang up all over with people churning out reviews without the hindrance of word counts and long lead-in times (to allow for printing). Anyone can pretty much set up a site and start hammering away at their keyboard. I should know, for I was one of them. After starting to write news copy for All Games Network in 1998-2000, I then set up a gaming website that went under the name of XL Gamer. It was fun for a while, and we even did an E3 2001 special, but the fellow founder and I couldn’t really meet eye-to-eye, so we parted ways. This was the first time I wrote a review and up until then I had never actually attempted to write one. I had to learn fast, and we managed to build up a reasonable following during our short life span. I moved on to write for other sites and start feature writing, an art that also requires examination, but that is yet another subject for another time.
This leads us to present day, and now the Internet is more of a social network than a reservoir of information. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Wordpress etc have all done their bit to create Web 2.0, and the likes of us are reaping the rewards for it. Without the shift of content driven ‘new media’ I would not have encountered your output. But how has this affected reviews and how they are written now? Subtly in my view, and I’m going to explain why.
Before I do however, I’m going to talk about the structure of reviews, and something myself and SuperHappyFunTimeShow co-host Pat McTie AKA Hendrix discovered when we used to record the Kropotkin and Hendrix Game Review Show back in 2006. Whilst many would regard these shows as somewhat chaotic, they did follow a very basic yet well trodden structure – one , as writers of reviews, I’m sure you two are very familiar with and indeed make you wince at a little inside. Just as a point of clarity, I’m going to describe it now to ensure we’re talking about the same thing. As I understand it, the structure for games reviews is: NAME OF TITLE -> INTRODUCTION -> STORY (IF APPLICABLE) -> GAME PLAY -> GRAPHICS/PRESENTATION -> SOUND -> MULTIPLAYER (IF APPLICABLE) -> SUMMARY THOUGHTS -> SCORE. Granted, a lot of these headings can be juggled around and such a structure can only work for reasonably long reviews – 400-500 words minimum, I suspect. 100 word efforts are filled with sound bites, and having never written such reviews I’m not going to discuss them here. Not that I am wishing to dismiss them in any way, far from it as I believe to write such a concise copy is something to be proud of. I just have no experience in writing them, I’m sad to say.
So we have this structure that I follow to this day. You could lambast me for doing so and I’d willingly accept criticism for it, but I have relied on it for many years and find it hard to drift too far from such a structure. I can say that I enjoy pushing around this structure in a similar way someone would try to push at a plastic bag, almost to the point of it breaking. I do this by making very short opening missives, in a similar way to PC Gamer UK’s single word summaries. It’s a terribly crass and I’m sure the both of you would argue that it is a clumsy way to get someone’s attention, but it’s my way of trying to get people to read what I’ve blathered about in this age of rampant attention-deficit disorder. This is especially true for people who play video games! So, I grab them in with a weird opening gambit then continue to turn the reel by leading the reader around paths that I hope they weren’t expecting, yet still maintaining the structure described above. I like to think this method works, even if it is ‘clumsy’.
So how has Web 2.0 changed things? Well I encountered it when I wrote my review of Blue Dragon Plus for the DS. In it, I spoke about the lack of voice acting and that it was mercifully absent given that the [acting] performances in the original Xbox 360 game were somewhat high on the Cheese-o-meter. I then made a reference to the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch, at which point I linked the word sketch to a YouTube video of that very sketch. Five years ago, such a thing could not be done, but now with the arrival of YouTube I can make an obscure reference to a sketch many readers wouldn’t a have a clue about, all by using the king of Web 2.0, YouTube. So not only have I made an obscure reference, but I can link directly to it, ensuring the reader can understand the reference and hopefully get a laugh at the same time.
I think that’s enough for you to chew on for now. I have much more to divulge to the both of you, but I fear I’ve already horrified you with this email from hell. Sorry about that. Keep up the good work, I enjoy the thoughtful debates Big Red Potion indulges in.
Kind regards
Chris O’Regan
Co-host and Producer of the SuperHappyFunTimeShow
Web: http://www.shfts.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/shfts
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/SHFTTheatre3000
