Dan Amrich
Los Angeles, CA
Male, 41
I started reviewing videogames professionally in 1993, when Genesis and SNES roamed the earth. Over the next 15 years I worked for magazines and websites like GamePro, GamesRadar, Official Xbox Magazine, and World Of Warcraft Official Magazine, while freelancing for Wired, PC Gamer, and many others. In an attempt to guide the next generation of reviewers, I wrote and published Critical Path: How to Review Videogames For A Living in February. Ask away!
It's a big community; I think there's some of both. The negative gamer stereotype is not going away; you could argue that's because of cruel jokes being so common and tolerated, or you could argue that it's because they are based in fact. The very thin distinction is that the South Park guys are themselves huge WoW fans and players; they are equal opportunity offenders, so they are making fun of themselves along with everybody else they make fun of. So some gamers took that episode as an offense, and some took it as a signifying self-mocking. I laughed. I also laughed at the "Guitar Queer-O" episode they did. Would it be worth the time and energy to get offended anyway?
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Well, let's differentiate between "journalism" and "reviews." I don't think a review should ever be a casual, on-the-surface look at a game. I think you need to go deep, but it's about what you are analyzing -- the artistic elements or the value proposition. Other forms of criticism are the same way -- some folks write and read movie reviews as artistic commentary on the work, other people just want to know if it's worth their time and money this weekend. It's very difficult to say one approach is better than the other, because both have merit and value -- but neither is a surface scan. Both require deep thought and careful creative analysis to be worth anything. For the larger realm of "journalism," some of my favorite pieces (that I've read and that I've written) have been personality focused. I had a fantastic conversation with Cliff Bleszinski between Gears 2 and 3 where we talked not about either game so much as his place in the industry, and his accidental role as one of the five or six game designers people could actually name. Feature-length pieces that show you insight into a developer or what makes them tick, or offer a look at a trend that affects gaming as a whole...I think those are valuable too. But again, they don't strike me as casual or on the surface just because they are less product-focused. So I guess the takeaway is never do casual on-the-surface looks at games and call it a form of journalism. :)
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I think the earlier answer about Combat Cars being one of the worst games I ever reviewed counts here -- a top-down 16-bit racer with no minimap. No prediction of where the turns are coming, so it was just one wall after another. You were expected to learn the tracks by trial and error and then memorize them. Fail.
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I believe there are certain elements that all gamers feel are valuable, so I draw on them: an engaging story, a sense of progression and advancement, an abundance of experiences that elicit interesting emotional responses. Pretty graphics, cool music -- they're part of the mix, but they're not as important as what the game does to you or for you. All gamers do not hold all those elements as equally important, nor do all games do not try to incorporate all those elements -- no big story to Tetris, for instance. So while a lot of games have similar goals or components and a lot of gamers expect similar things when they play a game, I've never found a way to truly approach it scientifically, with empirical accuracy. You are evaluating both art and science -- storytelling and emotional resonance, plus technical aptitude -- so you can't use only one or the other to build an opinion. I have worked from templates in the past that leaned heavily toward to the science side -- more like checklists. Rate the graphics; rate the sound; rate the controls. The trick became how to express those elements in a description of the overall experience -- to drop in phrases about those specific things in the discussion of what the game offers as a whole, which strikes me as a more artistic endeavor. Reviewing is analytical writing, but if it feels analytical when you read it, you are doing the audience a disservice. They don't want scientific data so much as personal insight into how that game might make them feel if and when they choose to play it, or even buy it. And if you are dealing with feelings, I think the whole thing leans more toward art. Value is tricky, because some people want X amount of hours of gameplay for Y dollars. Other people don't care about the length of an experience, but how it affects them. I'm one of those people who loved Portal from the first day I sat down to review it. I knew going in it was going to be a 3 to 4 hour experience. Didn't bother me at all -- the quality of those three hours was so amazing and surprising and joyful to me that I still smile every time I think about the game. Whereas I've played 15-hour games where I was begging the thing to end already. Yet some people felt Portal was too short to be worth their money (even though watching a non-interactive theatrical movie for roughly the same money is a shorter experience!). There is an inherent money-is-time value for them, and if the campaign of a $60 single-player game isn't at least 10 hours, they feel ripped off. Sometimes 10 isn't even enough. And if they can burn through a $60 game in 6 hours? It often does not matter how good those six hours are; they walk away angry. The value is not there. But it might have been for me. So I can't quantitatively evaluate the overall value of a game for someone who has different values. I can absolutely say "this is what I found valuable, based on this criteria," and then they can determine if that matches what is valuable to them as well. That's how a review is supposed to work -- here's my opinion, and how I came to it; use it as you form your own.
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"The Onion" Contributors
What's your favorite Onion headline of all time?
Waitress
What types of customers are the worst tippers?
CPR Trainer
Are men better at CPR than women because they're generally stronger?
Not really. Publishers love those kinds of quotes from the media, and they want to use them whenever they can. Everybody wants to be Game of the Year according to someone, and really, the only consensus is when multiple independent editorial outlets all come to the same conclusion -- which happens some years and doesn't other years. Every year at the E3 Expo, the Game Critics Awards offers its best of show stuff, and that is a panel of judges from dozens of the top editorial outlets -- but that group of judges does not reconvene at the end of the year when the games are actually finished.
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I don't know the current statistics on the percentage of female game players. I'm a reviewer, not a statistician. :) And I think we've both seen games that are marketed directly to female players, so it seems pretty clear that publishers do.
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I applied for a job at GameSpot once, but have never worked there -- I think you mean GamePro, where I wrote as "Dan Elektro" from 1997 to 2003. Leaving GamePro was very difficult and emotional. I really thought I would be there for my entire career, and my wife Kat (Miss Spell) and I really enjoyed the luxury of working together. We have a great shorthand that makes us very efficient together. A change of management valued me but not her, and we got an offer from Future to go as a team to work on a new project. I wanted to stay at GP, and made that clear, but I wanted to keep this creative partnership going more, so we took the other offer. The project we worked on only lasted a year so I transitioned to GamesRadar, where I was US employee #2. It was a long and sometimes torturous process, but I think it's that way with any startup project. The daily grind and chaos got to me and started affecting my health, so when an opening appeared at OXM, I almost begged for it -- and it turned out to be a great fit. I am still super proud of those three years and the features the magazine ran on my watch. However, it became clear that with a staff full of superstars with seniority, there was little room to advance -- and in over a decade, I had never been Editor-in-Chief of anything. The WoW mag gave me that opportunity and I was one of the bigger fans of the game in the office, so it was a natural fit. I do not consider myself a flighty person -- I like to pick a project and stick with it long-term -- so the shorter sections of my resume are a little embarassing. But in all cases, I was chasing job satisfaction. I know what I'm good at, and I want to play to my strengths. Writing makes me happy, and I always wanted to write for outlets where my voice and skills were a good fit.
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