One Paragraph Reviews April 6, 2009
Posted by Mitchell Dyer in "Game Journalism" Industry, Blog, Games, reviews.trackback
When I first listened to the March 27th episode of 1up’s ListenUp podcast, I brushed off game-developer David Jaffe’s proposal that game reviews should be stripped down into a single paragraph. On my second listen (it was a long day at work, give me a break) it kind of made me mad.
I’m used to having a word count, but capping an online review of something at 600 or so words seems totally reasonable to me. Excessive length as a problem is something that I can understand, but as a writer I’m compelled to read someone’s thoughts to whatever extent they’ve expressed them. If I’m feeling particularly lazy, I’ll skip to the bottom and read what is almost always a recap of the review (as expressed in our reviews’ tail-end verdicts) and get the gist.
But to say that something like that should basically replace the full-text review sounds insane to me.
So that’s why I’m going to start doing it.
I want to see how writing a one-paragraph review actually works out for me as a writer, and you as the reader. Every day for the month of May, Meghan Watt and I will be posting a one-paragraph review (possibly with a rating, if only to further give in to Jaffe’s suggestion) for 31 random games.
When the time comes, I hope that you’ll take part in giving us feedback not only on how the reviews themselves work for you as a reader, but how you accept it as a form of criticism. At the end of it, we’ll see whether or not Jaffe’s idea is brilliance or idiocy.
It’s gonna be a busy month.
Ooh, I’m intrigued. But how will you deal with time constraints? Will you only be playing games that can be finished within a day? Or will you just put up the reviews after having played through part of them?
My list of planned reviews covers stuff as new as Guitar Hero Metallica and as old as Mario Kart DS. I’ve got a pile of notes on games I never ended up reviewing, and we’ll be doing games that we’re very familiar with. We won’t be half-assin’ it. It’ll be like a regular review, just shortened to a single paragraph. Possibly with a rating.
So we won’t be playing chapter one of something and calling it a day. We’ll be well prepared. We’ve got all month to do it.
Hmm, I didn’t catch the Jaffe thing, but I’ve been having an interesting idea akin to this. I’ll be interested to see how this goes.
This actually sounds like a great idea if you can manage to find enough time in the day. I think most people with a regular job would not be able to do this due to the fact that our day’s have so many other things that must be finished.
What interests me is will you go back and simply write a review of a game you played in the recent past (eg. your Half Life Marathon) or will these be all new experiences?
Good luck on this since a one paragraph review is quite possible and a great way to get your point across without giving out useless bit of information (newspapers have been doing it for eons).
They’ll all be as new as possible. I’ll be doing some older stuff, like I said, but it’s all going to be legit. I’m not doing stuff like Freedom Fighters or Stranger’s Wrath, stuff I’d love to do, because it’s just not as vivid. Like I said, my notes and memories and recent time with a lot of games will help, but I’ll be doing stuff like Metallica, Weapons of Fate, and RE5.
Oh cool, that makes sense. You’ve obviously thought this through — too often, people begin undertaking something like this and then realize they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. Best of luck!
Whoa, let’s not go overboard there, sir.
This will be interesting to read. Considering you’re a large percentage of the messages that come through my twitter, I imagine you’ll be able to accomplish this no problem :p
Next logical step of course is 100 games, one sentence each.
[...] | 30 Reviews in 30 Days Stay tuned to DownWriteFierce next month to watch Mitch and Meghan go insane trying to review a game a [...]
One sentence each? God, I already run 40+ word sentences in habitually.
That could get messy!
Ooo, there’s a website that summarizes books and movies in one sentence. We could -totally- do that for video games. Summaries though… not reviews. That would just be silly.
[...] whole One Paragraph Review escapade we’re doing in May. The original idea, as written in the original post, is to review 31 games in 31 days. You’ll notice I didn’t say [...]
Wow. What a weird coincidence. I was reading an article on Destructoid about how gaming blogs need more original content since apparently most fan blogs are reposting links to other site’s articles or press releases of a company (I’ll admit to being guilty of that myself.) Knowing I had not done original content for my own Nintendo blog in a while, I decided to start doing one-paragraph reviews… AGAIN. I find this article and apparently I’m not the only one who had this idea. I started writing reviews like this back in August last year.
Great minds think alike, eh?
Why the heck are there seven paragraphs talking about one paragraph? Do you expect me to read all that? =P ^_^ Lol.