Talking Game Design - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 56

is far from revolutionary, the tangible impact of the overlap is that because
developers play games as audience members they are exposed to ideas and
concepts that may wriggle their way into or out of the games on which they
are working. This is further muddled by the long history of hiring active
players onto development and design teams. From the Doom modders hired
by Ion Storm 19 to hiring particularly active, vocal players onto development
teams 20 or seeking to hire game modders who have developed particularly
interesting modifi cations of existing games, 21 the design community regu-
larly turns players into developers. The overlap between the two groups is
notable because traditional analysis of video games frequently focuses on
the elements within games or the development of games, rather than on
how, as game players, the active play of games impacts the construction of
and discourse surrounding video games.
Beyond the class of gamers who also make games, another highly infl u-
ential audience for video games is the critics who review video games. In the
early years of video games, one often needed to rely on information from
friends or potentially uninformed store clerks for recommendations on which
games to play. Now, the presence of a wealth of dif erent resources on the
internet devoted to reviewing games makes it ridiculously easy for gamers to
fi nd out the relative merits of a game without having to personally play, buy,
or rent the title. This makes game reviewers a crucial audience for designers,
as particularly good or bad reviews can have a substantial impact on the
success of any given title. To this end, review aggregators, like Metacritic,
have a central role as producers of discourse about video games. This system
highly rewards games that are critics' darlings, dif erentiating the video game
industry from other forms of entertainment, like television or movies, where
there is often an inverse relationship between the quality of reviews and
popularity. Some game companies, like Take-Two, which produces highly
acclaimed series like Grand Theft Auto , Bioshock , Red Dead Redemption ,
and NBA 2K , depend on quality reviews. Their chairman and CEO contends
that “unlike many other entertainment business [sic]—there are just a few—
evaluations by Metacritic and others' reviews really can infl uence the success
of a newly-released title,” as “if your ratings go below a certain level, it can
really hurt your ability to sell the title, and above a certain level can make
a real dif erence in your success.” 22 To this end, the “ability to have high
scores over and over and over again is a huge competitive advantage, and that
advantage drives sales, it reduces risk and creates profi t.” 23 Reviewers have a
tremendous impact on what games are successful and, thus, what games are
made. Whether or not reviews actually drive sales is less important than the
perception that they do, which means that developers, like Take-Two, have
a vested interest in doing everything they can to get the highest scores pos-
sible for each of their titles. Although only a small cadre of gamers actually
impacts a Metacritic 24 score, the importance of the reviews in the reception
of a game means that certain gamers have a substantive impact on what
games are made and how they are designed, executed, and released.