Well today I’m pretty pleased. Over at Kotaku, readers have been rewarded with a highly salient discussion about the role of Metacritic and other professional game media review score aggregators within the gaming industry and its associated culture, while over and Eurogamer, a similarly critical discussion was launched on the topic of the continued financial explosion of Free-To-Play (F2P games).
The attention that both of these articles give to the question of video gaming aesthetics is very welcome, and the fact that they are both freely accessible to any reader on such a popular forum should similarly be regarded favourably.
The argument that the author makes in the article about score-aggregators such as Metacritic is a cogent and persuasive one: the opinions that are expressed in mainstream professional gaming media do not necessarily reflect the true artistic substance of a game due to their increasingly politicised position in their industry, and, furthermore, even if they did, reducing an appraisal of a video game down to a one-dimensional rating does not represent a coherent method of simplifying its aesthetic value.
The concerns raised in the piece from Eurogamer reiterate and expand on an idea that we’ve heard before. That is that popular mobile phone-based games that reap in millions of dollars for small development outfits through exploiting human habit-forming behaviours.
I strongly encourage the reader to read both posts and think about the issues.