Don’t take my word for it, look around you: regardless of your field of interest, there are more people tossing around opinions then there are those with original ideas. And that’s not bad, it’s actually quite good. We fought so hard and for so many years for freedom of speech it would be a shame not to exercise it just because any individual with a brain the size of peanut can benefit from it also. The internet boosted our voices to a super power level and now everyone with a keyboard and a decent ISP can share his thoughts with the world. There are no more age, gender or race boundaries we need to overcome in order to be heard. We tore those walls down brick by brick or all at once with a large enough quantity of dynamite and now we are enjoying the infinite possibilities provided by such freedom. Hurray for us!

The most heavily affected by the new worldwide-heard critical voice are without a doubt video games. People interested in this form of entertainment are by definition internet broken and certainly not scared by technological advancements. So any gamer with something to say will eventually find his way to a forum, a blog, his Facebook account and say it. For some, quite many of them unfortunately, spelling and grammar still functions as an encrypting device meant to make the message more… interesting. But language is after all nothing but a tool and as long as the information reaches the recipient(s) in its original form then we can consider the act of communication as a successful one – no reason in pointing fingers. Some do it out of boredom, some are passionate about it, some are paid to do it, some just need the attention, but regardless of their reasons, gamers are all, at some level of public awareness, critics.  But public criticism in its many forms comes with a pretty heavy load of responsibility that not many are interested in carrying.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but critics must be color blind: criticism is gray, there are no extremes. There is no such thing as a perfect game, that concept is against the basic rules of progress. If someone is inclined towards giving a video game a perfect score, he/she should stop and think for a second. What happens when we reach perfection, not that man could actually create something that is flawless, but for the sake of the argument let’s say he can? Nothing! We stop! There is no step to take further, there is no way to improve something that is already perfect and the whole industry comes crumbling down since there is no point in creating games that are by default worse than what we already have. So a perfect score for a video game spells retard or whore – it’s as simple as that. At the other end, I can assure you there is no such thing as a worthless game. If we just consider the whole process of creating it, the amount of work that goes into it, the commitment of the developers and the miracle-like-event of having a market ready product, then it’s clear that game deserves at least some appreciation. Its memory might be short lived, it might be buggy, it can rip off of some other popular idea, but even the simple fact that the game exists should be applauded.

Looking beyond the cover is another thing a balanced critic should do – it doesn’t happen that often, does it? A game should not be stripped of its many artistic layers until the concentrated gameplay core is reached, and then analyzed and labeled by considering just the value of that core. But that is the starting point and the most important part of a game, not the cutscenes, not the character creation tool, not the voiceovers or lipsyncs, not the story and basically nothing that can’t stand on its own and be regarded as a game. Take Halo for example. What is Halo? At its basic level it’s a First Person Shooter. How good is it? Well, I don’t know, let’s see. We must compare it with other FPSs like Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half Life, Counter Strike, Killzone, etc and see what new stuff it has introduced to the genre, what he has borrowed from similar games and improved or not. Once we’re done with that, only then we can move on to “Master Chief’s suit is so awesome!” and “I like it more than WoW, because it’s better and… it’s cool”. These outer layers generally appeal to taste and preferences. The fact that I don’t like bright colors doesn’t make Mario Galaxy a bad game, just one not suited for me. And this works the other way around also. Keeping this in mind would seriously filter out the enormous amount of trash game reviews we are seeing at the moment.

Finally, it doesn’t matter if you grew up playing that game, it doesn’t matter who made it or how much advertising space the developing company bought on your website. Yes, a critic should be as objective as humanly possible. If the need to be biased suddenly presents itself in the form of an uncontrollable itch at the tip of your fingers, then it’s only fair to start bashing a game of questionable quality from a well known, respected company than that of a newly emerged studio. At least in the first case they have no excuse. They can’t blame it on lack of man or financial power, not when you compare them Studio Nameless that has just ten guys including the genitor, underpaid and working round the clock to release a competitive product. Unfortunately, if you look around and read some reviews you’ll see the situation is quite the opposite. Big companies get all the glory, the applause, the human sacrifices, even though some of their products are way below the tolerable limit of crap. Nobody seems to notice or care and as long as that big shiny name is printed on the game box. A good publicly known critic should care, should notice and should scream from the top of his lungs when poor products are advertised as something they are not and when a good game is ignored as it fell in the shadow of a more popular one. There are some people out there that do that: proud owners of a backbone, a minority when compared to the rest.

Before you start asking me why I am so serious, let me ask you first: why so much prostitution? Yes, I prefer to blame it on money instead of calling so many people stupid. It helps when it comes to my life insurance evaluation.