Critical Failure

You might well have seen Jesse Dean’s fantastic article on boardgame reviews and A Few Acres of Snow the other week - it deservedly generated a lot of discussion on the forums. Jesse’s work on this inspired me to have another think about reviewing generally which resulted in a piece on NoHighScores last week about the function of criticism in gaming. That was, deliberately, a generalist piece about game reviewing, its purpose and a comparison to professional criticism in other areas. But I am primarily a board gamer and not a video gamer and whilst I felt that was an important piece to write in terms of theory, I wanted to write a much more definitive one when it came to board gaming.

In that previous piece I lumped board and video game reviews together for the sake of convenience and rather glossed over the differences between them, putting it down entirely to the lack of a professional press on the subject. But this is disingenuous: while video game journalism could benefit from some focus and self-examination it is on the whole in a much better state that board game journalism. I don’t want to possibly preempt Jesse in regards to what he’s going to write with his own survey results but what he told me he found was very scary. And if confirmed what I’d observed myself: that what the board game community seems to be celebrating in terms of reviews are verbatim rules re-writes with a lot of pictures and little or no opinion or analysis, at least if the thumb count on boardgamegeek.com is anything to go by. This is deeply alarming: it’s one thing to suggest that the people who write about board games aren’t stepping up to the plate in terms of quality or pushing the envelope but far more terrifying to contemplate that their audience of supposedly well educated, intelligent gamers is lapping up poor quality material and falling for the most basic traps of mistaking presentation for depth.