Objectivity is an expected characteristic of journalists, to a fault. Generally, journalists are expected to factually report and explain current events, while putting aside their personal views and bias.
While this is entirely unreasonable, due to our natural need to pass on our opinions, in its origin it’s clearly an understandable request. After all, if not in the media, where are regular people to find the truth? Companies will always defend their interests and the government will hardly be stepping into the information business, so objectivity falls to journalism.
Unfortunately, while every reporter and writer strives (or should strive) for this, they are unable to achieve it to its full extent. But, while the constant struggle for objectivity is a constant of reporting, it should at no point be a demand for critics.
Critics (or reviewers, as they are more commonly named in the gaming industry) work in a similar vein to that of columnists. They build opinion pieces, not statements of fact, and should therefore not be constrained by the same rules that affect other classes of the media.
In most industries, critics and columnists are clearly separated from reporters and very rarely take up both roles, but this isn’t the case in game journalism. Very rarely is a video-game reporter free to only produce opinion articles, analysis, reviews or news reports. The vast majority has to juggle a multitude of tasks, to fulfill their expected role at any publication, and this aggregation of careers seems to have dribbled down to the general audience, without the appropriate context.
A reviewer’s mentality is not the same maintained by a reporter, so the same journalist does not hold both roles at once, it has to separate these bodies of work on a mental level and jump between them at appropriate times, according to the needs of the article. This article, for example, as an opinion piece, is at no point objective, although I maintain a code of conduct for its writing, one to which reviewers and columnists must still abide to, as a replacement for the reporter’s ethic they ditched.
The purpose of a review, and how to define a good review, is a topic comprehensive enough to deserve a whole other article, but their essence is what allows us to define the work of a reviewer. Reviews are inherently subjective pieces, they are closer to narrative work than to journalistic papers. At their core, critics look to transmit emotion, action and reaction, and the mental analysis of the instantaneous feeling.
Reviewers attempt to capture the sensations playing provided them with, and carefully connect these to elements of the experience, to define what caused positive and negative feelings. Reviewing is a process of correlation as a means to causation, as the critic projects his own emotions onto the video-game, to better understand what parts of it are good or bad, according to the sensations of pleasure and displeasure they brought to the user.
It therefore becomes apparent, how something written through a process which parallels that used by Fernando Pessoa (the intellectualization of feelings after their occurrence) must be subjective to an undeniable degree.
How, then, do consumers continuously demand for reviews to be, more than unbiased, objective?
Because reviewers gradually insert dashes of classical journalism amidst their analysis. Across a review, there is no shortage of moments where a reviewers clearly states a fact, prior to commenting it. Be this a statement on who publishes a video-game, on the presence of a mechanic, or regarding the length of an experience, these can, of course, present opinioned undercurrents, but while seen in contextless vacuum they are statements of fact, which fall under the objective grasp of reporting.
The confusion regarding the objectiveness of reviewing is born from this careful balance between reporting and analyzing, which makes critique such a wonderfully complex area of expertise. Most readers see this as a journalistic piece, due to such objective drops in the massive sea of subjectiveness that is a review, and therefore ask for full objectiveness, as with any news report.
The clear distinction that must be made, is that reviewing is not reporting, becoming, in a sense, immune to the demands of journalism. This, obviously, cannot be taken as a license to deceive.
Critics do not have to be unbiased, but they must clearly assume their bias, be it the dislike for a gender, the fanboyism for a publisher, or the friendship towards a developer.
Reviews mustn’t be objective, but necessarily have to present facts to back up their subjective claims, and properly inform the reader on the characteristic of the product being analyzed.
These are the most basic ethic codes for the writing of opinion pieces, including but not limited to reviews: honesty, clarity and justification. And these are the only demands a reader should make of such articles, as long as they are aware of their nature.
Only through these, can reviewers fully accept and indulge in the subjectivity of their line of work, and take advantage of it, while maintaining the trust necessary to be of use to, and maintain, an audience.
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