Gamers love their love/hate relationship with video game critics.  When the critics agree with us, we’re happy. When they don’t, they’re trash. But the problem with video game reviews is not the reviewers, but the games.

The problem with video games is they often have problems: technical problems.  You never see a movie, no matter how cheap or out of the mainstream, released in theaters with bad audio, poor lighting, or people getting stuck in walls. Sure you’ll have a bad actor and some bad artistic choices, but most of the “bad things” were some director’s bad choice.  Video games, however, haven’t achieved that baseline to legitimize the medium as a storytelling and artistic form.

This means video game critics must assess the quality of the game in addition to its technical prowess, namely, does it break?  Bad camera, unresponsive controls, chugging frame rates, graphics pop-in/out, and more hurt games more than a crappy story or repetitive gameplay.  A game might be awesome, but enough glitches can turn it into a dud. Games like Advent Rising, Enter the Matrix, and Two Worlds were rushed products buried under paragraphs of reviews attacking the terrible technical quality of what could have been great games.

With the technical specs out of the way, reviews could devote their time to reviewing the actual game.  We all hate bad frame rates, so reviews need to explain gameplay, story, visual style with greater depth.  Doing so would help develop video game criticism, giving us time to discuss themes and methods rather than glitches and bugs. With flawless technical presentation inline with films, video games can start being looked at for their richer and deeper qualities.

Bug checking video games, especially the epics we now have, is hard to impossible.  But the industry needs to work to find a baseline of quality guaranteed by every game so games don’t have to fear buying a game only to have it crash because they went left instead of right.