Friday, March 7, 2008

Shut Up About Your Preview Copy

This may be meanspirited, but I honestly wish game reviewers wouldn't blog to announce they'd just received a copy of a much-awaited game about a week before everyone else.

One of the faults in our internet culture is that it encourages bad ideas as well as good. Everything is grist for the mill... but sometimes I feel these type of posts are poorly thought out and, if anything, have a few bad outcomes these reviewers don't consider:

  1. It fuels the hype machine. Invariably if you're talking about a game before you've played it this amounts to a preview, and the more previews and fewer reviews a game has, the more it's hype-to-reality ratio goes up.

  2. It causes their audience to resent them. More importantly, it trivializes their position as reviewers to make them seem like 'fans who get the games first' rather than 'members of the media with a responsibility to report on the games.'

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