When someone explicitly says "it's not a review" do you take it as one anyway?

[SmallHatLogan]

Does it matter, at all? Surely all savvy gamers source feedback from various points; reviews, LP's, first impressions, word of mouth - preferably all of the above, frankly.

A review is a subjective assessment. A first impressions is a subjective assessment. It's all just feedback to inform you, and in the end, none of it's worth a damn if you happen to buy, play, and loathe it (or love it, if the review/first impressions/word of mouth slagged it off).

If they provide me with information that is relevant to me when I'm trying to decide should I make a purchase or not, I don't care how they call it. The information is what's important.

Two excellent posts. You can go on and on about who is and isn't a journalist and what does and doesn't constitute a review but the labels don't really matter. Reviews and first impressions may have different formats but they serve the same purpose: to provide you with information about the game. It really just comes down to what you, the reader/viewer, get out of the content.

 

[conmag9]

My methodology is fairly straightforward: if it fits my internal definition of review (ie. an informative set of facts and opinions about a product by someone other than its creator or associates thereof, produced and distributed deliberately for other individuals), for me at least, it's a review. Not sure exactly why anyone would have a problem calling it a review (maybe a shield from criticisms or companies with ethical problems and an itch DMCA finger?).

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

You can go on and on about who is and isn't a journalist and what does and doesn't constitute a review but the labels don't really matter. Reviews and first impressions may have different formats but they serve the same purpose: to provide you with information about the game.

Exactly, and this issue about 'journalism' seems to have become rather warped of late.

As in, some gamers now bizarrely associate the J word with some profoundly ethical, rigidly objective and dutiful calling... with politics, intrigue, and conspiracy behind every clicked-through link... when all it is is subjective feedback. Aggregate that feedback and analyse the perceived consensus to get something approaching an 'objective' assessment, sure (if you're that anally retentive), but don't look to reviewers to somehow uphold a gold standard of critical thought and representation of a product whose merits will always be profoundly subjective.

Transparency is important, sure, and I think that's being recognised more in the industry. But I think gamers are selling themselves down the river (as usual, frankly) by inflating a skewed perception and then judging everything from that perspective. The onus is on us, the gamers, to parse the information out there and react accordingly (not ***** and whine at developers, writers, or the All Mighty Garme Jurnalizts).

I think this is just another indicator of how young the medium truly is, as a serious medium open to greater criticism from all sides.
Reviews, critics, writers, gamers, LP'ers, etc - we all need to learn how to critique and to process our own as well as each other's responses/experiences. As of now, there's a whole mess of crossed wires and skewed expectations/projections making that tricky.

On the other hand, Jim's "Squirty Play" or Yahtzee's "Zero Punctuation" have entertainment as their primary goal. It's less about providing factual information and more about poking fun at games for the enjoyment of the viewer. Can you still get relevant information from such content? I suppose so. But not that much, and most of what you get will be intentionally warped for comedic value.

I kinda beg to differ on that point. I've seen Yahtzee be far more profound and informative - especially regarding the tone or thematics of a game - than, say, Angry Joe banging on about the same fairly superficial points for 30mins.

I don't see Zero Punctuation as 'journalism' (i.e. a formal review) or entertainment - I see it as both, or/and neither, usually relative to whatever I may think of a given game. Different people give different feedback in different ways - that's all any of it is, and it's all as valuable, or useless, as we personally deem it to be.