Your Favorite Game Sucks

[rsvp42]

How well you know them? That's another variable. We're not talking about that. Pretend you know them both the same. This is a discussion of the benefits (or lack therof) of experience playing a game. Played it vs. not played it. I haven't really seen a good reason to take the word of someone who hasn't played it over the word of someone who has. You just keep making up hypothetical situations that throw the comparison off balance.

Then you have entirely missed my point. My point is that mindset is everything and experience with the game is nothing. Period. No matter how intimate knowledge someone has of a game, you aren't going to be able to use his opinion if you aren't of the same mindset of him and like those kinds of games.

A person who has knowledge of a game still can't tell you whether or not the game is good, because your opinion of what makes a good game might be different than his. Sure, he can describe the game for you, but if his descriptions is subjective (which it is most likely going to be) and he is using terms like "The level design is _great_", then it is still going to be useless to you because you have no idea of his standards for level design.

Also, I'm not creating imbalanced situations that throws the comparison off. You ask me to assume that i know both Gamer A and B the same, but thats what I'm already assuming. That still doesn't change that Gamer A and B have a different mindset, and that the general person is still going to trust the one they identify the most with.

Just to give you another example, lets take the recent Final Fantasy game. On one hand you have Yahtzee who has played the first 5 hours and hated the game. On the other hand you have the people who played through the game (without necessarily being fanboys) and who is telling him that the game gets good 20 hours in. In this situation, most viewers still trust Yahtzee the most rather than the bloke who sat through the game, because after having watched his reviews for 3 years, they know his mindset (even if they sometimes disagree with it).

If you are asking about a 100% equal situation with 2 people you know equally well, is of EXACTLY equal mindset, and one has played the game and the other hasn't, then yes, i might agree with you that you would trust the person who has played the game (although not necessarily enough to buy it yourself). That situation is pretty much going to happen to anyone though, and even then there will be more factors involved, like how well they describe the game to you. "I haven't played the game, but from the gameplay videos it looks like a generic FPS with ugly graphics" is still more useful than "I've played the game and it's awesome, you simply have to try it".

Well in your Final Fantasy example, all the people you mentioned (Yahtzee and the other people) had played it. Sure Yahtzee had played less, but but he had still played. If you compared any of those testimonies to that of someone who hadn't even touched the game, you could see their relative strength. I definitely agree that mindset plays a big part in how much stock you put into someone's opinion and I didn't mean to suggest that it didn't. I was worried you were suggesting that experience had no beneficial effects on a person's opinion or recommendation. Clearly it does. That being said, whether or not you have the same taste in games is the next level.

The strength of an opinion is in how informed it is. It's relevance to any given person is based on mindset. I guess that's why I see them as separate, but connected issues.

 

[BrotherRool]

I honestly just plain disagree, I'm not even going to argue it because I can only vaguely see how you could be right. The idea is to save yourself time and money by evaluating other opinions, not to form an opinion of your own, which you then spread. That's how we get the "games kill people" debacles.

 

[Duskflamer]

I'm aware that this is an old article but I came across it through the "related news" list of the more recent How to read movie criticism [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/moviebob/8812-MovieBob-How-to-Read-Movie-Criticism.3] and I just felt a strong need to comment on this.

Forming your own, personal, private opinion on a game you haven't bought as part of determining weather you should buy it, is entirely valid.

Publishing (even on the internet) a semi-professional review that claims that your opinion of a game you have never played is just as valid as the opinion of someone who has played through every nook and cranny of the game, is absurd.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that people are right for flaming people who say "Oh, I don't think I'd like that game" on a message board.

But if you're talking about a published review (even something as minor as a user review on Gamefaqs), there's an expectation that the person writing the review actually has at least some experience with the game. If this person admits that they never actually played the game they're reviewing (especially in systems where every review is given equal weight on a rating scale), they might as well have personally asked for every flame he/she gets as a result.

 

[grammarye]

Edit: Holy crap this is an old article. How did I get here

If I want to gain an opinion of a game, I read multiple reviews & opinions of a game, and then account for the potential bias of what I've read (for example I know from past experience that particular reviewers like the same sort of things I do). If it has a demo, I don't need any of that, but that's extremely rare, and even then you get caveats like 'oh this will be better in the release' and it turns out it isn't.

It's always a gamble. It always requires me to form and hold an opinion before playing the game. Renting doesn't count - money has still been put down by that point.

Advertising that opinion as 'this game sucks' is not particularly appropriate, but that wasn't Shamus' point. You can form an opinion of a game, try it anyway, be entirely informed, still like/dislike the game, and say so, and apparently you are just plain wrong. Yet in classic Internetz fashion, this thread is already busily debating completely the wrong points. It's entirely feasible to come away from reading others' reviews (real ones not three lines on Metacritic) and feel that game X is not for you for the following reasons etc. etc. Polite people will be open minded enough to ask the question 'so I've heard this, is this true? will I find I have trouble with the game if...?'

The deeper issue is that people refuse to listen to others, and debate in a polite manner. No no, it's much easier to be rude & fanatical (both liking & disliking), and people will latch onto any strawman they can to say 'aha clearly you are wrong!' - not having experienced a given part or any of a given game is just one example.

The idea that somehow you must have tried an activity to know it's good or bad completely misses whole swathes of human evolution & experience. You don't need to go out and eat glass to realise it's a bad idea. Why not? Millions of years of evolution of people telling you it's a bloody stupid idea has already informed you. In short, you listen to your peers and elders as you grow up. Reading others' opinions on a game is no different; it's just a smaller sample size over a shorter time period, and thus more likely to be variable in reliability.

Reviews do need to be informed. That's why they're called reviews (the word itself means 'seen again'!). Opinion can be held without direct experience.

But it begs the question; if you don't like a game, and you haven't tried it, why are you getting involved in an argument over something you clearly have no interest in in the first place? If you'd played the game, or even demoed it, and had genuine criticism for it, then I think its something to discuss, but wading into the troll pit blindfolded is not bringing anything to the table except bad feeling.

Four key takeaways I had from this would be:

'argument' - it shouldn't need to be an argument in the first place

'clearly no interest' - beyond the occasional genuine troll, I doubt many are there for kicks, though I empathise when dealing with those that just are there to cause trouble

'troll pit' - well that pretty much sets the scene doesn't it - why would anyone knowingly go to such an environment in the first place, informed or otherwise?

'only bringing bad feeling' - quite the contrary, they are bringing a viewpoint - I can explain rationally why I hate golf games despite only having played one in the 1980s, and someone else is welcome to try and convince me how today's golf game is just so much better & different, but I remain entitled to that viewpoint formed over years about a given genre of game. If the context of a given debate starts out with the diametrically opposing viewpoint of 'how can any idiot hate golf games!?!' (as it usually does on the Internet) then clearly my opinion is not only valid but informative of 'actually this idiot does hate golf games and here's why'. Presented well, that's useful feedback.

The real problem is huge numbers of people posting on forums fail totally at presenting their opinion, politely in the right context, as opinion.

Well, nobody ever said the human race had to be rational, I guess.