How To Break A Game

A short while back we had a little discussion session, sparked by articles from Matt Drake  and Michael Barnes , about game reviewing. There were some very good points made about the parlous state of game reviewing in this hobby, the reasons why it's in such a state and some suggestions as to what we can do about it. But there was one viewpoint, expressed by both article authors and supported by a lot of people on this site, that I absolutely could not swallow. And that is the idea that by saying that a game is "not for me" rather than saying "this is a bad game" the reviewer has somehow sidestepped their responsibility to the reading public to deliver an actual opinion about a game and is likely doing so only to avoid offending a portion of their audience and/or the game manfuacturer. This isn't to say I disagree with the general thrust of both articles, because I don't, but by putting the focus squarely on the expression of personal opinion in a review the writers were, I think, doing a grave disservice to their attempts to improve the state of review writing in the games industry. People have often accused the opinions expressed on this site of being divisive, mostly wrongly in my view, but if ever there was an viewpoint to which that sticks, it's the one I'm attempting to disabuse here.