How can Games Journalism be made better?

[jeffool]

I just saw a post (http://www.gamegirladvance.com/archives/2005/05/23/manifesto_2005.html) over on the ever pleasant-to-read Game Girl Advance (http://www.gamegirladvance.com/) and thought it would be interesting to ask the readers of Evil Avatar. In her post Jane mentions how we often see manifestos (http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/manifesto.html) appear on the internet and poses a question to readers.
This manifesto is smart, and makes real suggestions that can be implemented TODAY. And some (like #19) are about refraining from doing something in a game that we don't want.

Now, can we collectively do that for game publications? If we were to make a manifesto of everything we wanted from gaming magazines, what would that look like?So I pass this questions along to you; what do you want from your gaming periodicals?

[*Legion*]

(1) Tell me whether Game X is worth buying or not, and why
(2) Tell me what you know about upcoming Game Y
(3) Cut the crap that does not fall under #1 or #2

There is a difference between product review and art critique. Game magazines need to realize which side of the line they fall on.

[*Legion*]

One thing from the stupid manifesto:

Doesn't every feature that gets added, by necessity, take designer's time and energy away from the features that make for great gaming?

No. It's time for people to get beyond the simpleton idea of design being a zero-sum undertaking.

Wouldn't you prefer your game machine devote all of its muscle to gaming and nothing else?

The ability to play DVDs doesn't take any of the PS2 or Xbox's "muscle" away from gaming. It's a chip of memory containing a tiny bit of software. Time for people to figure that out already.

[KamaItachi]

One thing I'd like to see which doesn't happen very often, and was actually mentioned on another recent thread, is a second opinion for games. I'd like to see P.O.Vs from fans and the non-plussed of a genre when a new game comes out. I remember Mean Machines (an old U.K. magazine) used to do it and I found it pretty helpful when I would ony get 2-3 games a year.

But otherwise I agree with Legion, I can do without NGJ when I'm considering buying a game. I don't want an editorial, I want a review.

[Liquidize105]

Half way through the article, it's a very nice read; it got pretty ridiculous towards the end.

The beginning though, with its succinct and easy to understand testimonies, single-handedly captures the undeniable fact of how the interactive entertainment industry at large is unwilling to break free from the monotony of "same 'ol, same 'ol."

Gamers have been performing the same repetitive act of shooting and spell casting in roughly the same manner, by the same means, through the same personas, with essentially the same backstory, fighting the same generic evil, saving the same pretentious world, etc., on and on. Depending on the style and the technique in the gamemaking process, a game with 2 or more of the aforementioned elements could be considered a rehash.

Now I wonder how many of your anticipated games in the upcoming months fall into the rehash category.

[Savok]

Gaming "journalism" can be made better by being the complete opposite of current journalism. No sitting by the fax machine waiting for a press release to appear, no more taking PR crap at face value, no more fluff interviews with "so just how awesome is this game going to be?", ask a god damn question with some guts.

Investigation, for the magazines especially that's their last refuge. The PS3 videos, debate is raging if they're actual in-game or typical Sony PR stunt. Here's an amazing idea, how someone in the position with the contacts gets off their ass and provides some real evidence either way.

And for the love of god no plastic turkeys or holy texts in toilets, when you publish something make sure it's the damn truth.

[jeffool]

One thing from the stupid manifesto:
No. It's time for people to get beyond the simpleton idea of design being a zero-sum undertaking.
The ability to play DVDs doesn't take any of the PS2 or Xbox's "muscle" away from gaming. It's a chip of memory containing a tiny bit of software. Time for people to figure that out already.

While I generally agree about the ability to play DVDs and such, when any project is given XX amount of time to be finished, ever hour spent working on a feature that does not make it to the users hands is a wasted hour. That's why people design code before they write it. (In an ideal situation, anyway.)

But slightly more on topic, EGM now has at least three people review every game. And while I agree that the appeal of 'fan reviews' isn't bad. Though I wouldn't want it overdone. Maybe just one review per mag.


Myself? I'd like to see a few pieces on genres in themselves. I know PC Gamer used to (dunno if they still do,) have columns devoted to any given type of game. I found it helpful for a single column to keep up with, and point out, trends and new ideas in a genre. This as opposed to following gaming in its entirety as a genre.

[Eon]

Gamers have been performing the same repetitive act of shooting and spell casting in roughly the same manner, by the same means, through the same personas, with essentially the same backstory, fighting the same generic evil, saving the same pretentious world, etc., on and on. Depending on the style and the technique in the gamemaking process, a game with 2 or more of the aforementioned elements could be considered a rehash.

Now I wonder how many of your anticipated games in the upcoming months fall into the rehash category.

Well, if you guys would actually BUY innovative and new products in the same numbers that you buy cynical rehashes, you might SEE more of them on the market.

It's a numbers game and, guess what, the Dev's and the Publishers don't make the numbers. Everytime a well executed game with a innovative approach bombs at retail - one more team goes over to the Dark Side. Because, hey, it pays the mortgage.

[Furious Wang]

Get rid of the dumb one liner joke screen shot captions. Nothing more annoying than that bullshit.

Oh, and bigger screen shots. These 1x1 caps just don't show the detail of these next gen games anymore.

Big pretty posters. I like posters.

Umm...get rid of the plastic covers unless your mag includes a cd.

Uhh...all mags should include cds.

Labels, decals, stickers, gameboy covers..

$10 for a 100 page mag with a cd that has 2 game demos is way too much. bring that shit down, yeah I'm talkin to you OXM. You could fit like a million more ads inside your magazine.

Err...

[yutt]

My ideal gaming periodical;
1) Online.
2) Has the most current news possible, within hours of its release into the general public.
3) Allows readers to publish articles and submit news.
4) Regularly references competing sources with more complete information.
5) Staff is incredibly biased against Nintendo and PC gaming.

As for the manifesto itself, one thing I want to comment on is "sexy women" as game characters. I hear over and over again how "women don't want to play a game where females are represented as such." In reality, it doesn't matter. Do you think my ideal gaming avatar is some steroid-shooting, single-brain-celled, former Mr. Universe? No, but I don't give a fuck what he looks like, I'm trying to enjoy the damn game, not determine my sexuality.

My girlfriend regularly plays Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball and never once has complained that, "OMG these women look much like women playing volleyball in the real world on a beach would!" As much as the pseudo-feminists of the world may hate it, many women do have real, large breasts, and fake ones too!

[King Drewsky]

What would I like to see from gaming periodicals? How about WORDS, PARAGRAPHS, SENTENCES? I would like to have something to read, not just look at. Over the last 3 years, gaming periodicals have really dropped their word count. It's all about pictures, screenshots, and cool graphics these days. They are nice but I still would like to read something. How can a review of a game be accurate when it is less than 3 paragraphs long?

I would also like to see them spell out the difference between the multiplatform versions of the game. I own a PS2 and an Xbox, so when I am buying a game I typically have nothing to go on about how they are different. As such, I usually just get the Xbox version because the graphics will probably be better and/or the online component will probably be better. It would be nice to know for sure.

Independence. Gaming journalists used to have opinions that were not influenced by the game creators. We have a couple major scandals going on right now. First off, some gaming mags are making deals with publishers to give their game good reviews if they are given the opportunity to review a game first. I don't remember all of the specifics but I think that Enter the Matrix was involved. Second, Nintendo has outsourced their online component to IGN. This is a definate conflict of interest as IGN is one of the biggest gaming journalist organizations. Nintendo has practically guaranteed that they will never get a bad review from them, especially for the online portion of their games.

Todays journalists are fanboys. All of them have one game / game system that they like more than any other. However, their fanaticism tends to work its way into their reporting. I could barely watch the E3 G4 coverage because Kevin P. was unabashedly trashing the 360 for no apparant reason other than it was made by Microsoft. Let us gamers be the fanboys and you just stick to the facts.

And to reiterate what Savok said: Investigative Journalism. Don't rely on press releases alone to provide content for your mag. Go out and dig up some interesting stories.

[Orphiuchus]

Developers will be shocked one day when they notice that the world is full of women. It's true! More than half of your potential customer base are penisless. They have money. They like doing fun things.

I'm sorry, but I'm getting sick of seeing this argument. Yes, some girls play video games, but the proportion is about the same as guys who shop for fun. The primary demographic of video games is males ages 18-34(ok, probably younger than 18, but on paper its 18-34). These articles are always written by politically-motivated people who don't actually care about reality, they just want every facet of every ones life to reflect their world view. When I start playing a game and find political bullshit, which is unfortunately something a few games with female leads are chocked full of, I usually just turn it off and go play something else.

And beyond that there are games with strong female leads that aren't chocked full of vegetarian female crime fighters who use empowerment to stop crime, but nobody ever points them out when they write these articles. Look at Eternal Darkness or the NOLF games, hell, look at the genres of survival horror, role playing, and adventure.

Just because from time to time there are games that clearly target only males doesn't mean the gaming industry is hostile to females. It just means the developers and producers of these games have enough common sense to see the sales numbers on games like DOAX. If the industry stoped making games where most of the tech goes into making things jiggle more realisticly, then and only then would they really be ignoring a demographic.

[Rommel]

There are tons of games that draw female gamers in and they already make up a significant portion of the marketshare. If they want to get the obessed fan girls like they have men, they simply need to market them better and show more real female players. Gamergirl's article of how to masturbate with a Rez controller is not it.

Also, women are never going to make up half the money making industry for a simple reason - they don't like sports as much as men do. Sports have been around for centuries and women have never been a huge portion of the fan base. There is little that can be done further to change that by now, I believe - unless a new sport rolls around girls like.

As for journalism - stop selling your review scores.

[Savok]

The Longest Journey, don't forget that game. Hell, it even had lesbians, and get this, they were neither naked or hot or anything, they were just you're average women who happened to like going down on each other, that blew my mind.

[TheHulk]

One place all console gaming mags drop the ball is in reviews. They give us about five sentences on the game and then a score. I'd love to see reviews at least the length of those in PC Gamer, where the reviews are sometimes two to three pages on games. Longer reviews, baby, longer reviews...

[Savok]

Really? Here we can get 6 pages for a big game, sometimes 8. Of course it's full of shit a lot of the time, stuff they've made up, what they had for breakfast, how much they hate John Howard.

[Blue]

Mine should come with a free pizza from Pizza Hut....much like EQ2. While I'm playing the latest next-gen title, I like to be able to pull out a piping hot supreme pizza right out of that fancy plastic cover sporting Master Chief on the front. That's where the real money's at.

[MosBen]

Orphiuchus, your main argument appears to me to be, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, that the reason games are made for men are because predominantly men play games. It seems to me that if you make games that don't appeal to women it's pretty obvious that they won't play games. Just look at the oft cited similarity between the movie industry and the games industry. The TV industry is significant too. In both of those other industries there's plenty of product aimed directly at female consumption and I really don't see any reason why games should be any different. It's not that I particularly want to *play* those games, but it seems pretty rediculous to me to assume that gaming is for men because women don't like to play games that are designed for men. The bottom line is that gaming is a hobby for people that have money and there are men and women alike that have money and a willingness to spend it. If the industry is unable to tap into that pocket of money then it's the loss of the industry.

And as to the fact that women don't like sports, well, that hasn't seemed to hamper women from having a large impact in the TV and movie genres.

[EL CABONG]

Gaming "journalism" can be made better by being the complete opposite of current journalism. No sitting by the fax machine waiting for a press release to appear, no more taking PR crap at face value, no more fluff interviews with "so just how awesome is this game going to be?", ask a god damn question with some guts.

Investigation, for the magazines especially that's their last refuge. The PS3 videos, debate is raging if they're actual in-game or typical Sony PR stunt. Here's an amazing idea, how someone in the position with the contacts gets off their ass and provides some real evidence either way.

And for the love of god no plastic turkeys or holy texts in toilets, when you publish something make sure it's the damn truth.
U R so right. I read at gamespot that sony paid a scottish company to make that e3 cgi and they worked on it for 3 monthes yet I have yet to hear anything about it form anyother gameing cite or print mag You would think if its true someone else would report it or if it was flase someone would report it as be just a false rumor or something.

[Alexious]

Ok... seriously. Who hijacked this thread and turned it into battle of the gaming sexes?

Several people here have already mentioned PC Gamer. Frankly, I would like to see the console rags take a few clues from the gang at PC Gamer. As was mentioned, they have several monthly articles on trends in different genres like war gaming, MMORPGs, ect. Their reviews also tend to be longer and more nuanced than console reviews. A lot of games reviewed by them are close to an Editor's Choice award but don't quite make it, which I find refreshing.

Overall though, gaming "journalism" has really failed to evolve at all. It's still just reviews mixed in with a healthy dose of rumor and speculation. Where is the gamer version of 60 Minutes?!? As was stated previously, there is a great news story in whether the PS3 presentation was real-time or prerendered! Why isn't some budding Walter Cronkite out there getting the scoop? I mean, we figured out scandals like Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Whitewater... can't somebody get to the bottom of some stupid game renderings?!?

[Nuggsy]

What I'd really like to see is gaming journalism defend our hobby by educating people about the realities of our digital realms and the concepts, and politics, of design. When was the last time you heard a congressman/woman speak on behalf of games? When was the last time you had a conversation with a politician about how their toon in WoW is? These politicians know nothing about games and neither do a large amount of people, outside of dedicated magazines, that report on them. If we're going to redefine gaming journalism we need to educate people first. We hardcore gamers need to realize that there is swiftly approaching a time when our hobby will be threatened by these politics and that it has been our responsibility to educate people about why we play games and the artistry involved.

[LilAbner]

So I pass this questions along to you; what do you want from your gaming periodicals?

1. Ask the tough questions.
2. Stop rehashing press releases.
3. Think outside the box, like a real journalist.

[Varsity]

Going back to the actual topic, ahem, there's a whole bunch of good ideas, and then there are a few duffers too. I mean, what's up with 7? Sure, it would be nice but there's a little thing we call 'time' and 'not making a game in a straightjacket'. Making an engine with short loading times is nice, but way way too restrictive for most developers. Nobody minds loading times, so why not put them to good use?
Seamless map transitions and Source's partial map loading are a different matter, of course.

[MosBen]

I agree with the "ask real questions" sentiment.

I do think, though, that gaming journalism needs to move beyond simply listing a feature set from a game and then saying something about if it's buggy/short/long/etc. These sorts of nut & bolts reviews can be useful, but journalists should try to push the craft further, and I think the New Games Journalism is a way to do it. We need our Hunter S. Thompson.

[Liquidize105]

Well, if you guys would actually BUY innovative and new products in the same numbers that you buy cynical rehashes, you might SEE more of them on the market.

It's a numbers game and, guess what, the Dev's and the Publishers don't make the numbers. Everytime a well executed game with a innovative approach bombs at retail - one more team goes over to the Dark Side. Because, hey, it pays the mortgage.
You guys? Does that mean that it doesn't include you?

There's more to sales than just being innovative. Publishers would actually have to endorse the marketing too. I really can't think of any such game going meltdown at retail. Give me some names if you think you do.

[woodentaco]

Let's see... I think that a gaming magazine should certainly have articles which are distinct from hardware or game reviews - Computer Games Magazine is a great example of how this can be done effectively, and for me, those are always the part that I enjoy reading the most.

I wish video game journalists wouldn't try using humor so much - and especially cut the bathroom humor. It's frankly insulting to my intelligence to have the editor of some magazine constantly making fart jokes (I'm looking at you, Game Informer).

I think that ideally, an average game should get 2.5/5 stars, or a 5/10, NOT a 7/10 or 8/10. If a magazine devoted themselves to that framework wholeheartedly, I'd really appreciate it.

[IndependentGMR]

I would like it if the magazines took the artform a little more seriously. You wonder why people still think games are for kids? Because, the mainstream video game journalists are a bunch of jerk-offs. Just take a look at PSM, do you really want to ask a 40 year-old man, in a gorilla suit, a question about video games? These magazines are a total joke. You can find good humor in publications like Maxim, or even Rolling Stone, without running into the mindless ignorance you'll find in video game periodicals. These magazines are making our sub-culture look pathetic. Plus, their reviews are too brief, and often vague. They don't mention glitches, and sometimes seem biased. I don't claim to be a professional journalist, but I wrote a number of video game reviews for my college newspaper. I always made sure I played the game all the way through, and clearly stated what was good, or bad about it. That's probably why I never got a reply from any video game companies, when my school sent them letters requesting games to review. Hahah!

[Kelegacy]

Objective staff who love videogames, not companies.

Reviewers who are hard on games, not because they hate giving good scores, but because they have a certain standard that must be met before a 9.9 should be given out. with that said, no game is worthy of a 10. IGN, you dolts. Nothing is perfect, or if it truly IS, then there had better not be a SINGLE nitpick or blemish discussed in your review!

For printed mags, less ads. For online mags, less ads. Money makes the world go round, but for god's sake, keep the advertising to banners and stuff. Don't make huge popups flash on the screen for Splinter Cell and hide the "exit X" button so that i have to hunt around for it to close the ad. Also, IGN's incessant page load halts that bring you to an ad every 5 seconds really pisses me off. Keep the advertising up in order to stay in business and pay the bills, but do it decently please. Dont make me have to remove my bookmark from your site.

Hire correctly: hire intelligence. A guy who loves videogames does NOT equal a good gaming journalist.

Give equal time to all companies, in regards to news, reviews, commentary, interviews. See below: No pandering.

No pandering. This means dont even do so if a publisher threatens to remove their advertisements from your mag unless you review positively. If they threaten, post their threat in the Mailbag section to really piss them off.

EGM is employed by a bunch of retards and 3 are given teh same game to review in order to come to some "average". That is a flawed system. Stop employing retards and also let genre reviewers review genre games. Giving 3 retards a game to play and having them give 3 wholly different scores defeats the purpose. It just confuses me more.

Gamespot does a good job at fitting most of the above criteria. That's why I stopped subscribing to magazines and instead read most of my stuff from their site. Smart guys, crafty writers, and avid gamers. They know their shit.

[*Legion*]

with that said, no game is worthy of a 10. IGN, you dolts. Nothing is perfect, or if it truly IS, then there had better not be a SINGLE nitpick or blemish discussed in your review!

This inane argument needs to die.

Giving something a 10, or the top of any rating scale, does NOT represent absolute perfection.

Giving something a 10 means, "this is the very best we have. These are the best games the industry has to offer". It doesn't mean PERFECT. It means the BEST.

Every magazine or whathaveyou explains the rating system and makes this clear, but some people still have this dumb mental block when it comes to the top of a rating scale.

[Savok]

Giving something a 10 means, "this is the very best we have. These are the best games the industry has to offer". It doesn't mean PERFECT. It means the BEST.

And when you get something better then that?

[KamaItachi]

I don't buy the 10=perfect/no game deserves a 10 arguement either. Why even have the score then if you're not going to use it? Does that mean a 9.9 is almost perfect and if so, how far off perfect is it? What if an even better game comes along, does it get a 9.99? 9.999?

A ten should mean an exceptional or stellar game, not the best, not perfect. I'm not going to get into semantics and discuss whether things like poor story and ill-devised characters should be mark downs for a game that is otherwise excellent. I don't think we're at the point yet where we can easily distinguish when games are trying to be entertainment or an experience ala film ... maybe we are, but I don't trust most games reviewers to handle it well.

[mister_slim]

There is a difference between product review and art critique. Game magazines need to realize which side of the line they fall on.
But are there any magazines actually publishing criticism? I haven't been able to find any coherent gaming critical theory, much less good published critiques.

Todays journalists are fanboys. All of them have one game / game system that they like more than any other. However, their fanaticism tends to work its way into their reporting. I could barely watch the E3 G4 coverage because Kevin P. was unabashedly trashing the 360 for no apparant reason other than it was made by Microsoft. Let us gamers be the fanboys and you just stick to the facts.

And to reiterate what Savok said: Investigative Journalism. Don't rely on press releases alone to provide content for your mag. Go out and dig up some interesting stories.
First, people apparently want their gaming magazines to be like Maxim, and unless people buy others, like Play or even Nintendo Power, that's what we get. Second, there's really not a lot of investigative journalism possible in game coverage. If people aren't going to even slightly dig into EA's work environment or lobbying, we're not going to see anything.
What I'd really like to see is gaming journalism defend our hobby by educating people about the realities of our digital realms and the concepts, and politics, of design. When was the last time you heard a congressman/woman speak on behalf of games? When was the last time you had a conversation with a politician about how their toon in WoW is? These politicians know nothing about games and neither do a large amount of people, outside of dedicated magazines, that report on them. If we're going to redefine gaming journalism we need to educate people first. We hardcore gamers need to realize that there is swiftly approaching a time when our hobby will be threatened by these politics and that it has been our responsibility to educate people about why we play games and the artistry involved.
Well, first the industry needs to actually produce such products and gamers need to buy them. The only people working on critical theory are developers, and publishers aren't greenlighting much that actually has something to say, and when they do, it doesn't sell. Games could sell to more than just the Hollywood blockbuster audience, but instead they are ghettoizing themselves.

[MosBen]

It's already been said, but what the hell, I'll repeat it. A 10 does not mean perfect. If you say that a ten should never be given out, then what does that make a 9? What happens if you give one game a nine and then a month later a better game comes out? Now, it's prefectly fine to argue that too many 9s get given out and that publications should use more of the scale, but it's never bothered me. I went to school that was graded on an A = 90-100%, B = 80-90%, C = 70-80% and so on. As long as I understand how they're using the system it doesn't really matter to me how they use it. A system that crowds games towards the higher end assumes that most games that make it to retail are better than 50% successful and I think that's fair. A system that crowds games towards the middle thinks that the mean quality of the industry is what should be your baseline and I think that's pretty fair, though I would wonder what happens as that mean changes over time (is a 5 from 1995 the same as a 5 from 2005?). Another system might be so scrutinizing of gaming quality that most games would be crowded towards the bottom. I tend to have a more positive outlook on games, but to someone that generally doesn't like what is released by the gaming industry it might be a very appropriate scale. Again, what's important is knowing how a particular source uses the system they set up for themselves.

It's like with movies. Have you ever had a friend that just generally doesn't like movies? They have their list of like ten movies that are good and the rest are garbage. A person like that that rates movies on a ten point scale is going to have a lot of fours. On the other hand, a friend that just loves turning the lights off, popping some popcorn and turning the speakers up for the movie might end up with a lot of eights or nines. There's no one right way to do it, you just have to inform yourself as to what each score really means in relation to other reviews.

Or if you want you can just check game rankings, though that not might always be a good indication of what *you* might think of the game/movie/whatever.

[Varsity]

And when you get something better then that?
So what should they have rated the original Doom?

[Savok]

You can't really score genre defining games, especially so in retrospect.

It's becoming increasingly apparent how stupid scoring is. Take ICO, What is it? What do you compare it to? How the hell do you score it?

We don't simply grab Van Gogh's Starry Night and label it with a number.

[Orphiuchus]

Orphiuchus, your main argument appears to me to be, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, that the reason games are made for men are because predominantly men play games. It seems to me that if you make games that don't appeal to women it's pretty obvious that they won't play games. Just look at the oft cited similarity between the movie industry and the games industry. The TV industry is significant too. In both of those other industries there's plenty of product aimed directly at female consumption and I really don't see any reason why games should be any different. It's not that I particularly want to *play* those games, but it seems pretty rediculous to me to assume that gaming is for men because women don't like to play games that are designed for men. The bottom line is that gaming is a hobby for people that have money and there are men and women alike that have money and a willingness to spend it. If the industry is unable to tap into that pocket of money then it's the loss of the industry.

And as to the fact that women don't like sports, well, that hasn't seemed to hamper women from having a large impact in the TV and movie genres.

First of all, sports ARE games, thats why women's not liking sports has a bearing on the industry. Second, I made two points in my article, and somehow you missed the second. I'll let you re-read it to see if you can track it down. Try reading past the first paragraph.

[MosBen]

And sports ARE TV shows, yet women represent a very significant portion of television viewers. Just because sports games sell the most units today doesn't mean they always will.

To be honest I didn't think your arguments in the second and third paragraph were really relevent to what we were discussing. The article talks about how very few games are designed with a female demographic in mind. Your first paragraph made the arguments I addressed, that is, that women don't play video games which is why there aren't games made with women in mind. I think I addressed that point fairly well. Just because women don't play games now which are designed for men doesn't mean they won't spend their money if they were tempted with games they wanted to play in the first place.

Your points about how there are some games out there with strong female leads just don't address that point because a strong female lead in a game that women don't otherwise want to play really isn't going to draw in female players. The misrepresentation of a certain class of people, be they a racial minority, a gender, or an age group, is definitely something we should think about. It's good that there are games with strong female leads and that there are starting to be more games with non-stereotyped minority leads, but again that's not really what we're talking about. It's not like the only reason women weren't drawn to Doom was that the lead character was a man, it was that women don't want to play Doom; they want some other type of game. It's just like movies, just because you put a strong woman in an action movie, which is by and large a genre dominated by male fans, isn't going to change the fact that the underlying source material is still not something most women will be interested in.

Yes, of course, some women like action movies and some guys like romantic comedies, but those are the minority and when we're talking about growing markets those people really aren't that important. Rather, it's the untapped market that's important to this discussion, and that untapped market is mostly women and doesn't care for most of the games on the market today. None of this should be read to be saying that developers shoudl *stop* making the types of games they're currently making, just that more games should be made and that some of them should cater to demographics that aren't currently interested in the types of games out now.

[MosBen]

Sorry for the long post, I would try to go back and edit it down, but I'm too busy for that, so here's the really short version: Putting a strong female lead into Doom isn't going to make the game something that most women want to play. It's not that most game characters are men that is the problem, it's that the types of games being produced don't interest most women.

[Savok]

Wish I had a woman.... god I'm alone

[Kelegacy]

And when you get something better then that?

exactly, at least in the same console generation or whatnot. What I mean is that the root word of perfection is perfect. A 10 might now appear to be perfect in some peoples' mind, but to me it is. especially when a publication has a 100 point scale or a 10 scale (with decimals it's essentially a 100 point scale) a 100 IS perfection. Gamespot is great at not giving games perfect 10's, though they have in the past. They score appropriately and the scores usually hold up as years go by (unless it was the ROOKIE Gamespot...they scored awfully sometimes when they first came about)