The Role of Videogame Reviews

The games industry is a young industry, but games journalism is even younger. Videogame reviews make up the largest share of games journalism, and these need to receive further study. The question this thesis deals with is if videogame reviews have attained a level of critical assessment that is comparable to other cultural industries and what their content can say about the purpose of videogame reviewers. The main components that will be studied are technical and aesthetic elements. Technical elements are non-evaluative and descriptive, offering the how and what of playing particular games. Aesthetic elements are the opinions and feelings the reviewer has about a game. Since reviews have only barely been studied, but are continually heavily discussed by the gaming community, some type of data is needed to confirm or deny the criticisms that reviews receive. Here 30 reviews are chosen because they form the top 10 most highly rated games of 2011. These were selected because of their propensity to move away from technical deficiencies and into critical discourse. The technical and aesthetic elements are further broken up into narrative, visuals, sound, gameplay and overall value and turned into codes that are applied to the text of the review. In addition, the context a reviewer provides is also coded. This includes the relationship of the game and its components to other media and to other games. The results show a highly differentiated image; though most clearly it is shown that overall there are almost an equal amount of technical and aesthetic elements present in the review. The gameplay is often more technical, but the other attributes of games receive more aesthetic attention.