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| "I'm a clone, I know it and I'm fine." |
After dabbling for a
few years in writing my thoughts on games down in words and forms
that other people could understand instead of keeping my feelings
restrained exasperated abandoning of pads and grunts of joy/despair
from in front of a screen in the safety of my own home, I've
progressed onto tackling the idea of consistently trying to review
games, and I'm starting to think about how hard it is to actually
write about games well. Part of the issue resides in the idea that a
game is inexplicably tied to its mechanics and presentation in a way
that other mediums aren't (bear with me) and this poses a unique
challenge to a reviewer, with three of the choice issues being: how
do I explain these mechanics which at there most basic are “Push A
to do B” without boring people, how do I separate the my inability
to control a game well from the actual quality of the control scheme,
and how do I talk about something that is mechanically similar to
dozens of other titles without falling back on those titles?
I think these are all
fairly interesting ideas so I decided to postulate a bit on them and
write about them, and tackle them in three separate bits. Obviously I
don't write for any big sites or anything, but these issues have
cropped in my very basic communications about games with others, and
are issues with the vocabulary around gaming that exists so far. So
maybe there are examples of reviewers out there doing it right, or
maybe I've missed communities where these issues are resolved through
deft prose and delicate syntax, but as far as I'm aware that isn't
the case. Anyway, onwards.
