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Ahoy there, r/games. I’m Dan Stapleton, Executive Editor of Reviews at IGN, and you can ask me things! I’m officially all yours for the next three hours (until 1pm Pacific time), but knowing me I’ll probably keep answering stuff slowly for the next few days.
Here’s some stuff about me to get the obvious business out of the way early:
From 2004 to 2011 I worked at PC Gamer Magazine. During my time there I ran the news, previews, reviews, features, and columns sections at one time or another - basically everything.
In November of 2011 I left PCG to become editor in chief of GameSpy* (a subsidiary of IGN) and fully transition it back to a PC gaming-exclusive site. I had the unfortunate distinction of being GameSpy’s final EIC, as it was closed down in February of this year after IGN was purchased by Ziff Davis.
After that I was absorbed into the IGN collective as Executive Editor in charge of reviews, and since March I’ve overseen pretty much all of the game reviews posted to IGN. (Notable exception: I was on vacation when The Last of Us happened.) Reviewing and discussing review philosophy has always been my favorite part of this job, so it’s been a great opportunity for me.
I’m happy to answer anything I can to the best of my ability. The caveat is that I haven’t been with IGN all that long, so when it comes to things like God Hand or even Mass Effect 3 I can only comment as a professional games reviewer, not someone who was there when it happened. And of course, I can’t comment on topics where I’m under NDA or have been told things off the record - Half-Life 3 not confirmed. (Seriously though, I don’t know any more than you do on that one.)
*Note: I was not involved with GameSpy Technologies, which operates servers. Even before GST was sold off to GLU Mobile in August of 2012, I had as much insight into and sway over what went on there as I do at Burger King.
Edit: Thanks guys! This has been great. I've gotta bail for a while, but like I said, I'll be back in here following up on some of these where I have time.
What are your feelings on the current state of videogame criticism, and what do you have to say on the matter of the perceived 7-10 rating scale?
Where do you think IGN ranks in terms of critical substance?
The state of our videogame criticism is strong. Really, though, it's impossible to sum it up in one statement, since there are now literally thousands of different sites and voices, r/games included. No matter how you like your gaming news and reviews served up, there's someone out there willing to give it to you, from IGN and GameSpot to Angry Joe and TotalBiscuit and everything in between.
The 7-10 rating scale thing is a big one, and it's got several components. For one thing, it's skewed on both sides (critics and readers) by the American school system, which tells us that anything under a 70% is a failure. New critics in particular have a really hard time breaking away from that way of thinking, especially when commenters are there to string them up for giving a game they think is "Good" a score that they interpret as a just-barely-passing C-. It's something I work at beating out of people, because I'm a big believer in sticking to the scale as described. It's why I gave Saints Row IV a 7.3/10 - because I think it's a good game, not a great game.
But yeah, there's no such thing as a perfect scoring system. Everything can be misinterpreted, everything can be abused. Yet our audience demands scores (we've done surveys that show overwhelming support), so we continue to provide them as best we can. Scores also improve our access to games for review - not necessarily good scores, mind you, but the fact that we give them at all is seen by publishers as a reason to prioritize us because if they do get a good score, they can slap it on the box.
How about a scoring system that just acknowledges its subjective imperfection and call it a score of "recommendation" instead? Then specifically name the reviewer and the other similar games they enjoyed so readers can understand if they have the same tastes?
Put less emphasis on whether the virtual assets of the game (get rid of that '10=perfection' psychology) and focus more on its importance in the current time of the market.
That's what our scores do. I agree our site doesn't do a good job of letting you easily see what other reviews a writer has done - hopefully we'll get that addressed at some point. But our scale clearly defines a 10 as not being perfect - anyone who cares what we're actually saying will know that.
I actually spend a good chunk of time removing the word "perfect" from reviews, by the way. It has no business there other than as sarcasm, as far as I'm concerned.
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If I may be so bold, I think ME2 and ME3 are in fact on the same level for different reasons. I thought the gameplay and mission layout of ME2 was the worst in the series, with the story being generally good but obviously not ME1 quality. ME3 suffered greatly in a few specific areas in the story department. Other than that, I really have no complaints. Multiplayer was well implemented and the updates were all free (AFAIK). Gameplay was super tight and well done. Squadmates were a lot more developed. Mission structure made sense instead of being one recruitment mission after another. Just my two cents - I know a lot of people probably disagree about the overall quality of ME3.
My question is similar, so I'll jump on here: would it make more sense to just start rating games on a 5-star scale?
I was on a 5-star scale at GameSpy after being on a 100-point scale at PC Gamer (actually a 99-point scale, because 100% was defined as perfect and there's no such thing as a perfect game), and I found it liberating. If I got to choose the scoring system we used, it would probably be that. Since it's represented visually, you get less of people mistaking a 2.5/5 for a 50% grade on their homework. However, it does have the drawback of being converted to a percentage on Metacritic, so I did get some angry calls from publishers who were upset that I'd given their "Okay" game a 50%.
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I ask them if their problem with our review is based on a factual error, or a difference of opinion. If it's the latter, tough cookies. A review is our opinion, and they can't tell us we liked it more than we say we did.
How frequent is this sort of correspondence with a publisher? Do they typically get an advance notice of a review score before it's published? I'm wondering how much influence they end up having overall.
Have there been a lot of factual errors?
How often do things like this happen? I know you say that PR and marketing do not encourage you to give good scores, but when there is discouragement after the fact, how does this not affect future reviews?
Also, any cool stories of publishers being pissed after a particularly negative review?
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What sort of tactics do the big publishers employ to encourage your staff to deliver positive reviews of their games? How easy or difficult is it to see past that and offer up honest reviews?
They play all kinds of mind games, and they're all hugely frustrating. Sometimes they'll deliberately give us their games late so we have to rush, sometimes they'll hold review events because they want to control the conditions (we all hate when they do that, and it makes us grumpy, so I don't think it works)... stuff like that. Also, they try to be your friend and butter you up. Once you've been doing this for a little while, it all becomes fairly obvious what PR people are up to and that they're keeping files on you. I notice them asking me about random personal things I've mentioned in passing years ago, so they've clearly read up on me.
I'd say when you're starting out it can be a little more difficult to see through, but it's not that hard.
Those files on reviewers are hilarious. I know Jeff Gerstmann has talked about how every PR person brings up hockey around him because of something he said once years ago. He doesn't even particularly like hockey.
I mentioned my wife likes The Sims. I hear about that a lot now.
Haha, I love it. "Let's try and use human interest to sway these reviewers over, but in the least human way possible."
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"How is ... Human Food treating you these days? Ahh? Yeah?"
Start changing your likes and dislikes at every event. Make their file interesting.
Wife likes the sims
Wife now hates the sims
Wife apparently likes the sims again?
Wife is ambivalent on the sims
Claims to have never been married; acted confused when wife was mentioned
Became noticeably upset when asked who woman he was escorting was. Turned out to be wife (new wife? original wife? unsure). When asked about the sims wife expressed confusion at what the game was and the concept of video games in general. Said she thought her husband was a car salesman. What the hell is wrong with these people???
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"Yeah, Im single..."
"...."
"MEET HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA"
Hell I'm in a goddamn relationship and I still get those messages
Do you ever call them out? Not to be mean spirited, but more along the lines of "Hey, I appreciate you're trying to forge a lasting relationship and get to know me, but the way you're doing it sounds more like you've been stalking my 2005 Myspace profile than an actual relationship."
I'd like to ask on a different note since I feel like I'm doing that to some recruiters. Is it annoying or does it reflect that you're taking the party concerned seriously. Should I back off?
Are all PR people like that? What percent of them would you guess are genuinely interested in you as a person?
Probably zero. Why would they be genuinely interested in a person they don't know and likely have never met? Th reason they take the notes is so they can be conversational and make you feel good about your interactions which they hope will influence your view of their games/company. That's their job.
Also this question is kind of moot unless you've met the person and become friends because there isn't really any way to know if someone genuinely cares about you as a person unless you've been around them enough to assume it.
None, they're PR people. It's their job.
If you are trying to woo Colin Moriarty, you should know to show up with an islanders jersey on and be ready to talk history and Republican politics.
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I think the intention is that the reviewer wouldn't have enough time to beat the game and get a review out in time for the release date. So if the game is bad, there won't be any bad reviews on launch day. Just the day or two after.
Exactly. Activision is very guilty of this. They send out review copies of their B and C list games later than they would something like Call of Duty.
Actually, on CoD they do review events, which we absolutely hate. It's really inconvenient for us, especially when we want to produce video reviews. For stuff they want to bury, like their upcoming TMNT and Spongebob games, they don't send copies until launch.
Games journalism has a long-term problem, and I would appreciate your view on this problem: What is the right way for games journalism to react when a game's quality changes after a review is posted?
Games (or at least some games) are shifting towards a business model where they make lots of small updates to a living product, rather than make a monolithic product release which will remain mostly static.
People want your advice on if they should buy a game or not, so they come to read your review. Your review captured a snapshot of the game's quality at some past instant, and if it is no longer representative of the game's state, your review isn't fully serving your readers. BUT, writing game reviews is a long and difficult process, and I suspect you don't have the bandwidth to revisit reviews every time the game is updated. BUT, I don't think you should go soft on a game's flaws today because they might fix it later, or count on it's potential that the developers haven't captured yet.
In your opinion what should be done?
You're absolutely right that it's a huge problem, and we're wrestling with that one right now. We've had several big meetings on how to address the changing nature of games in the past few weeks, due in large part to the GTA Online situation bringing it back to the fore. Unfortunately I don't have a "right way" to do it yet, just some ideas I'm kicking around. But what we really need to address is situations like our review of League of Legends, which was done in 2009, and no longer reflects the nature of a game that is still very popular and commonly searched for. So the process we're sorting out is how to identify which games need updated coverage, which ones can be left in the past, and how to make sure we're not re-reviewing old games at the cost of skipping reviews on interesting new ones.
You can expect to see us come out with a policy on that within the next few months.
It would seem to make sense to have a "First Impressions" score, and later the reviewer can update that as they complete the game. This would have to be established, of course, otherwise you get the backlash that Polygon received because of their Sim City 2013 review updating.
edit: On top of that, perhaps you could create a backlog of previous scores and link it to previous reviews?
A lot of game reviews don't have time to complete a game, though. Their "first impression" is often times their only impression because of their growing back catalog of article to write. A lot of reviewer/podcasters voice their frustration of not getting to enjoy some of the games they reviewed positively because of time restraints.
In all the podcasts I've listened to they're talking about this in terms of the games they play on the side. I've never heard a reviewer say that they didn't actually play the game.
Play and complete are different, though.
We do our best to complete nearly everything. Personally, I've never run a review of a single-player game I didn't finish.
Or they could just use year tags and cross reference between reviews. "League of Legends 2013 Review", with a new editor and a whole new set of copy. Then maybe a sidebar from the original reviewer if still around, or an editor just to cover the changes.
Also, they should review GTA Online as it's own thing, which is basically what Rockstar is doing. Love to see them slap a mid-range score on that bad boy and let Rockstar get a little bit of a wake-up call, maybe make some changes.
That's not exactly fair, though, is it? You're judging a part of whole for not being whole enough. In other words, there's a reason it's not as amazing as everyone wanted it to be, and that's because of the single player. In actuality, I wouldn't be surprised if they kept Online leashed to GTA V as a sort of test run before releasing a fully-fledged standalone GTA Online.
I agree. A first impressions score and a current score would be better.
I think we're all extremely interested in how to handle it, mostly because nobody has really been able to come up with a good way. Changing the official score just makes you seem petty and clickbaity or even a fad-follower; posting new scores can just get confusing.
And yet, as you said, it's not even debatable that these games change, in a way that movies and books don't (or at least don't very often).
If IGN manages to come up with a way to handle this that works well, you'd have to color me impressed.
(by the way: huge fan from your PC Gamer days)
What exactly do you do as a reviews editor? I have heard reviewers at IGN say they have to make a case for the score they give, are you one of the people they make said case to? Also, how do you feel that varying reviews for a game, Beyond two souls to be exact, effect the publics view on it? I personally it is a result of the kind of game that it is, and that cause such polarizing reviews.
I assign out reviews to our editors and writers, and then I go over the submitted drafts with the author for both mechanical stuff and to try to poke holes in the arguments and ask questions. I also make sure the score lines up with the text, which is done mostly by asking the author if, for example, he or she would really describe said game as "great" if he/she's giving it an 8.
Games reviewing is art criticism, and everybody perceives art differently. It's just like movies, music, books, etc - you're going to have a range of opinions on everything. No sane reviewer has ever written a review he or she expects everybody to agree with.
Since you're responsible for handing out reviews...
When a big sequel comes up, a lot of times you'll find that games will have both detractors and fans. How do you choose who reviews which games when your office might be divided , on something?
Generally I like to go with the same reviewer who handled the last game, when possible. Reviewing a sequel to a game someone else at your outlet liked makes it kind of messy to disagree with, because people will shout at you for faulting it for things that the other guy liked.
That happened with Etrian Odyssey III, if I remember correctly. The first two games were reviewed by someone who was familiar with dungeon crawlers and the absurd difficulty of some of the classic dungeon crawlers. Both Etrian Odyssey and Etrian Odyssey II were rated as good games.
Etrian Odyssey III scored a lot lower, because the reviewer for this game wasn't particularly charmed by dungeon crawler nor familiar with the previous two titles. The review wasn't particularly harsh or anything, but the scores create a strange contrast. Etrian Odyssey and Etrian Odyssey II scored pretty high, Etrian Odyssey III, which is basically an improvement in most areas, scored much lower.
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Well, GiantBomb is owned by CBS Interactive. IGN had been owned by Fox, until recently, and is still one of the bigger sites on the internet, period. We're not cowering in fear of pissing off a publisher - you can see plenty of negative reviews of EA and Activision games on IGN - and I have never, ever been told that I should give a game a score higher than I think it deserves in order to please an advertiser. Not once in almost 10 years. I'm not saying that's never happened anywhere, but anecdotally, it's never happened to me.
I think you're going to see the bigger news organizations get as much into games coverage as much as they got into movie coverage, since it's too big an industry and entertainment source to ignore. But it'll always be a very small slice of their coverage, and they'll never be able to do the kind of in-depth stuff IGN does with a big group of people who love games all working together. So yes, a specialist games press is a good thing.
Can you comment on the pressure that game reviewers feel from publishers?
For example, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the Jeff Gerstmann controversy. It seems clear to those of us on the outside that there is some sort of pressure going on. Is that misguided?
When CBSi bought GB, he did an interview with GameSpot on his dismissal. Basically, they had a new manager who hadn't worked in games before flipping out at the threats given by Eidos (which were both typical and empty) and also had the ear of the higher-ups.
Basically, it was the fault of a new guy.
Here's the view from Jeff Gerstmann himself as a reviews editor. (around the 9 minute mark)
http://www.gamefront.com/jeff-gerstmann-finally-talks-about-gamespot-firing/
The reason the Gerstmann/GameSpot incident was such a big deal is that kind of thing pretty much never happens. After it did, there was a big exodus of editors from GameSpot, because no one wanted to work at a site that did that.
Here's another way to look at it: that happened in 2007. Since then, or before, how many instances can you point to of a guy getting fired for anything even close to this? I can't name even one.
That guy from Eurogamer who went after people on Twitter for a Tomb Raider PS3 promotion, Ryan Perez from Destructoid after some tweets surrounding Felicia day. An australian writer from a lads mag who was given the boot after revealing a letter from Rockstar gently suggesting that red dead redemption be given a high score. It's not an isolated incident.
If you actually read the page you linked to you would have answered your own question. Or better yet listen to what Jeff himself has to say on the matter.
I wanted to hear someone else's perspective in terms of what's happening now.
Does it ever bother you how many times you have answer this type of question? I mean every interview I've seen with a gaming website gets asked how much their reviews are being influenced by a cash source, and every single time the answer is that they have never personally experienced this type of dishonesty.
And yet there's always that one asshat who says "'nuh uh! you take bribes!" and you simple have to sigh and reply that no, you do actually preform your job with integrity.
It is a little sad, yeah. It's a taste of what politicians live with every day, I'm sure.
The difference of course being that politicians DO take money for votes in the form of campaign finance, but I take your point.
Why do you not use half of the score values ?
do you mean why don't games get scored(on average) less than five on a scale of 1-10? this one is pretty obvious. a game that scores a 5 isn't very good and anything less than that is pretty darn bad. and frankly, not too many bad games get made. if they're bad, they get scrapped because developers and publishers know they won't sale well and will lose them money if they go through with development.
We also just don't cover a bunch of really terrible games because they're obviously terrible and not worth our time. We would much rather tell you about games that are good than games that are bad.
Late to the party but I for one would love a monthly bad games list. So weekends when I am in a shitty mood I can go see what is really bad and go play it to make my self either A) feel better or B) hate my life.
Seems like you're missing out a lot on the range of expression that a 10-point scale gives you. A typical big budget game usually lands in the neighborhood of 7-9. That's a lot of titles to cram into a small space; it diminishes your ability to recognize a truly exceptional title when the best it can do is score one higher than half a dozen other games.
Shift your review scale so that the median sits at 5, and it'll really mean something when people see a game receive a 9/10.
As a full-time freelancer (Leif Johnson) who's worked with IGN and numerous sites for years, I'll just say that in all of that time I've never been contacted by PR to "influence" a review a certain way, nor have I ever been asked by an editor to alter a review to avoid "pissing off companies." And yes, even as a freelancer, I get to work on some pretty high-profile stuff.
The most I've received (from an editor) is an "Aw, I kind of liked it," but they left the review as is (with edits, of course). Reviews in my experience are usually personal; they're not dictated by some committee as some people think they are. Now I have been told to reconsider my scoring--but get this--it's always been to make it lower. (I'd be SO happy if reviews didn't have scores--with all the work I put into these things, I hate when people just read the score.)
I recently worked with a PR for a free-to-play game (meaning, they just gave me some in-game items to make the trip easier without me having to spend my own cash for the review), and their followup response to my low-ish score was essentially, "Thanks for the criticisms. You made some valid points while paying notice to the good aspects." Nice and professional, even though I was kind of snarky in the review itself. I even got a press release for a new game three days later, so it's not like they blacklisted me.
Granted, I've never worked full-time at any of the sites I work for, but I've always believed that the community has a hilariously skewed and tin-foil hat idea of how this stuff works.
Cheers for the answer, man.
No problem! Glad I could assist. As a more direct response to your question, I'll add that--and I acknowledge that I have no real basis for this other than opinion--that I'd actually be MORE worried about the Guardian or the BBC doing the coverage. Some of the writers I've seen in mass-media general news sites (but certainly not all--I adore Simon Parkin, for instance) seem almost as though they were arbitrarily assigned to the projects rather than knowing their contexts. In other words, as if I of all people were told to cover a football game. (God forbid.)
I think the interest in the actual act you see on specialized sites like IGN is important.
(I'd elaborate and clean up my thoughts, but I'm actually on deadline. lol.)
I live in Sweden, and I've noticed recently (over the past two years or so) that some of the biggest news companies have gradually increased their coverage of gaming, and one perticular big news site has done a couple of game reviews. Obviously either huge AAA games or smaller articles regarding anything Swedish. They are all, as far as I'm concerned, very negative reviews. Anything mildy negative gets exaggerated. One recent review of GTA V said this in it's title: "No, it's not a masterpiece" and went on giving the game an average rating. The eye-cathing titles are just there to gain viewers.
Dan, you've been at PCGamer and Gamespy in the past, and now IGN. IGN has been seeming better quality wise, but they're still being bashed by the community for review scores and articles. How do you feel working for a company that seems to be trying to improve while also receiving a large amount of negative feedback in doing so?
Thank you for noticing! We've been working really hard to emphasize quality over quantity. We frequently ask ourselves if we're doing too many different articles instead of focusing on doing a knock-out job on a few, and that keeps us in pretty good balance. I have to give a lot of credit to Steve Butts, our EIC, for keeping us on track. Related note: it's National Boss Day today!
But yeah, being on a site like IGN with a long history is kind of like being on a sports team. You have people who love one or hate the other, and it's often because of people that are long gone and things that happened way before you got there. I'm just appreciative of the audience I have here - many, many more people see what I write and say on IGN than they ever did at PCG or GameSpy.
Negative feedback is a bit of a drag, since people are so much more likely to comment when they're angry than when they're happy, so it's weighted heavily that way. You kind of have to learn to develop a thick skin and know that it's impossible to please everybody, especially when those people are completely anonymous and could be anybody.
On that note: Colin's History of... articles have been exceptional.
Is it ever challenging to remain profession on the internet? Or a better way to word it, are you ever scared you'll accidentally say the wrong thing and have it immortalized on the net?
In print journalism it seems like there is less public interaction directly with readers, and everything is heavily scrutinized before it runs.
In Internet-centric industries there is a lot more back and forth, like this AMA. Are there rules at IGN on when you can engage readers directly?
We do have our fair share of trolls. And yeah, it can be a challenge to refrain from telling them off. But that's exactly what they're going for, so it's more fun to not give them what they want. Our rules are pretty simple guidelines: don't be a dick.
How would you deal with a review you completely disagree with the reviewer. Let's say after 10 hours a reviewer comes to you and says that game X is a horrible mess and that some mechanic is completely broken and unusable, but you know a few people that don't have that problem. While this is a totally valid reason to dislike a game, this person might be the only one to not "get" the mechanic, or it could be that almost no one gets it to work consistently.
Thinking vaguely about W101 and Steel Battalion. Most people agree that SB is completely broken, while some people can work with W101 while others never get the figures to work completely and the game sucks for them.
That's a tough one, because reviews are opinions, and I can't expect everyone to agree with my opinion. As long as they're able to back up their argument and explain why they like or dislike something with reasonably sound logic, I'll let it go. If it's something that's factually inaccurate, though, I'd put a stop to it.
Bugs are a really annoying problem for reviewers, because one way or the other your experience might not be representative of everybody else's. For example, if you're reviewing a game and hit a game-ending bug, it should get a really low score, right? But what if you're the outlier? What if only 1% of players hit that bug, and the other 99% are have a blast? On the other side, what if you have a pretty much bug-free experience, but tons of other people are having problems? (That happened to me on Fallout: New Vegas.)
The answer, I think, is that you have to go by what you personally experienced, but if you're able, you should note that a lot of other people are having difficulties. That's not always possible, as many games are reviewed ahead of release.
I never really ran into problems with New Vegas, either. So many people complained about crashes and I didn't experience a single crash in my actual dedicated play-through.
Disclosing bugs and their impacts on gameplay could be useful for reviews, if you ask me. If you guys are actually planning on adjusting your review system to re-visit games you could incorporate bug adjustments as well.
Many major sandbox titles have heaps of bugs at release but stabilize a fair bit some months after release. It's important to recognize the impact the bugs could have on your experience but it'd be a disservice to leave inaccurate information behind, too.
I hope your changes to address games evolving after review will work out really well!
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