14 DAY TRIAL // As with books, movies or music, it’s rather difficult to review and grade a videogame. There’s inherent subjectivity that comes into play and threatens to topple the carefully balanced system of pros and cons, observations and grades. I can’t be sure that my experience with, say, Fallout 3 will be similar to that of another player.
The complexity and open ended nature of games is partly to blame. Human nature is another likely culprit. So, while thinking of my Game of the Year and how I could justify my choice, I thought about how we could put human nature to good use in evaluating gaming experiences. No matter what we do, the process will still be flawed, but here’s the best I can come up with.
The best unit of value we can assign to a videogame is time. We all live in the age of speed and we all have rather limited time. Even those fortunate enough to be able to play 12 hours in one day face choices. Will I load up Gears of War 2? Will I pick up Fable 2?
And there are numerous gamers who have the financial means to get all the games they want but end up having stacks of titles unopened near one corner of their desks. Which means that as long as we invest time, a whole lot of time, in a title, it means that there’s some value hidden there, value which we want to enjoy, explore and explain to others. Unfortunately, my time invested is not equal to someone else's so it can be irrelevant to another player.
Sure, playing one hundred hours of something doesn’t guarantee perfection. I played (and still play) a lot of Sid Meier’s Colonization (the original one) and that doesn’t make the game perfect. But surely this kind of investment shows people that the title has something that can be enjoyed, as long as your gaming coordinates are somewhat aligned to mine.
Classic reviews should not be understated and I will continue to write and publish them. But you might see a subtle shift in how I evaluate my games based on how much time they manage to take up.