Critical Failure

As the Internet has grown in prominence in all of our daily lives, it has turned many of us into increasingly savvy consumers. Where, in the past, one might rely on a single review from a trusted source - be it a magazine, a TV show or simply a friend - before buying a product, the wide range of information sources available online allows everyone to access dozens if not hundreds of different opinions and experiences before committing.

This is true of everything from life's big purchases - cars and houses, for example - through to smaller ones, like holidays, computers and even, yes, videogames. Indeed, videogames in particular have developed a powerful and complex network of opinion sources. Popular, broad-based consumer websites are merely part of a wider continuum of opinion which stretches from word of mouth on forums, Facebook and Twitter through to mainstream press coverage, taking in a whole spectrum of specialist sites, fansites, YouTube videos, blogs, Digg posts and so on.

Like any complex network, key nodes have also emerged; places where viewpoints from different sources intersect and to which consumers often turn to get an overview. Sites like Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes and even some leading forums fill these roles.

All of this is, of course, wonderful if you're a consumer in one of the core demographics. Never before has it been possible to get quite so many viewpoints before putting down your hard-earned cash, and while that can also seem incredibly daunting, savvy consumers are becoming adept at sorting the signal from the noise, figuring out where they can get viewpoints that align with their own tastes and preferences, to the exclusion of others.

It's less wonderful, however, if you're a parent trying to figure out what games to buy for their children - in which case, sadly, you fall a long way outside of the key demographic of people who talk about games on the Internet.

Talking to the creators of kids' games about game journalism, for example, is usually a depressing affair. While developers are rarely terribly enamoured of writers in the first place - after all, you can't expect hugs and kisses from the people who create the products over which you've set yourself up as an arbiter of quality - those who work on kids' games are most often genuinely bitter, angry, or both.

What's more, they've got every right to be. One need only read reviews of kids' games on top games sites to understand the ire of the developers. It's not that these reviews simply note that the game is aimed at children, and unlikely to be of interest to the teenaged or young adult readership of the site. Rather, it's that the reviews can be unprofessional to an extreme, often adopting an extremely dismissive tone and even showing evidence of being based off mere minutes of playtime. All too frequently, the target audience of the game is forgotten, and any pretence of providing useful information to parents abandoned, in favour of the reviewer giving the game a savage kicking for not being the kind of game he, personally, enjoys.

Needless to say, this is a pretty unprofessional thing for a publication to do - and it's worth noting that not all of them do it. Many have simply chosen not to review kids' games at all, recognising that their staff simply aren't properly equipped for that task - a slightly disappointing decision, perhaps, but certainly better than the alternative of ploughing ahead with having twenty-something Gears of War aficionados reviewing games aimed at eight year old girls.

One could also question, of course, how important it is for a kids' game if a specialist game site gives the product a bad review - and the answer, of course, is that in the past it wouldn't really have mattered at all. Kids' games were routinely bought by parents who didn't play games themselves and had no contact with the specialist sites, so unprofessional reviewing by those sites made not a jot of difference.