Dan Amrich
Los Angeles, CA
Male, 41
I started reviewing videogames professionally in 1993, when Genesis and SNES roamed the earth. Over the next 15 years I worked for magazines and websites like GamePro, GamesRadar, Official Xbox Magazine, and World Of Warcraft Official Magazine, while freelancing for Wired, PC Gamer, and many others. In an attempt to guide the next generation of reviewers, I wrote and published Critical Path: How to Review Videogames For A Living in February. Ask away!
I believe there are certain elements that all gamers feel are valuable, so I draw on them: an engaging story, a sense of progression and advancement, an abundance of experiences that elicit interesting emotional responses. Pretty graphics, cool music -- they're part of the mix, but they're not as important as what the game does to you or for you. All gamers do not hold all those elements as equally important, nor do all games do not try to incorporate all those elements -- no big story to Tetris, for instance. So while a lot of games have similar goals or components and a lot of gamers expect similar things when they play a game, I've never found a way to truly approach it scientifically, with empirical accuracy. You are evaluating both art and science -- storytelling and emotional resonance, plus technical aptitude -- so you can't use only one or the other to build an opinion. I have worked from templates in the past that leaned heavily toward to the science side -- more like checklists. Rate the graphics; rate the sound; rate the controls. The trick became how to express those elements in a description of the overall experience -- to drop in phrases about those specific things in the discussion of what the game offers as a whole, which strikes me as a more artistic endeavor. Reviewing is analytical writing, but if it feels analytical when you read it, you are doing the audience a disservice. They don't want scientific data so much as personal insight into how that game might make them feel if and when they choose to play it, or even buy it. And if you are dealing with feelings, I think the whole thing leans more toward art. Value is tricky, because some people want X amount of hours of gameplay for Y dollars. Other people don't care about the length of an experience, but how it affects them. I'm one of those people who loved Portal from the first day I sat down to review it. I knew going in it was going to be a 3 to 4 hour experience. Didn't bother me at all -- the quality of those three hours was so amazing and surprising and joyful to me that I still smile every time I think about the game. Whereas I've played 15-hour games where I was begging the thing to end already. Yet some people felt Portal was too short to be worth their money (even though watching a non-interactive theatrical movie for roughly the same money is a shorter experience!). There is an inherent money-is-time value for them, and if the campaign of a $60 single-player game isn't at least 10 hours, they feel ripped off. Sometimes 10 isn't even enough. And if they can burn through a $60 game in 6 hours? It often does not matter how good those six hours are; they walk away angry. The value is not there. But it might have been for me. So I can't quantitatively evaluate the overall value of a game for someone who has different values. I can absolutely say "this is what I found valuable, based on this criteria," and then they can determine if that matches what is valuable to them as well. That's how a review is supposed to work -- here's my opinion, and how I came to it; use it as you form your own.
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You know those were created by the guy who also created the first Easter egg in games, right? Warren Robinett, creator of the Atari 2600 classic Adventure, where he snuck his name in as a credit in a secret room. Awesome.
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I think the earlier answer about Combat Cars being one of the worst games I ever reviewed counts here -- a top-down 16-bit racer with no minimap. No prediction of where the turns are coming, so it was just one wall after another. You were expected to learn the tracks by trial and error and then memorize them. Fail.
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Not really. Publishers love those kinds of quotes from the media, and they want to use them whenever they can. Everybody wants to be Game of the Year according to someone, and really, the only consensus is when multiple independent editorial outlets all come to the same conclusion -- which happens some years and doesn't other years. Every year at the E3 Expo, the Game Critics Awards offers its best of show stuff, and that is a panel of judges from dozens of the top editorial outlets -- but that group of judges does not reconvene at the end of the year when the games are actually finished.
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Lifeguard
Did you ever have to perform CPR or mouth-to-mouth on a swimmer?
Air Traffic Controller
When would you order fighter jets to be scrambled?
Hotel Front Desk Agent
Why do hotel room toilets clog so easily?
I applied for a job at GameSpot once, but have never worked there -- I think you mean GamePro, where I wrote as "Dan Elektro" from 1997 to 2003. Leaving GamePro was very difficult and emotional. I really thought I would be there for my entire career, and my wife Kat (Miss Spell) and I really enjoyed the luxury of working together. We have a great shorthand that makes us very efficient together. A change of management valued me but not her, and we got an offer from Future to go as a team to work on a new project. I wanted to stay at GP, and made that clear, but I wanted to keep this creative partnership going more, so we took the other offer. The project we worked on only lasted a year so I transitioned to GamesRadar, where I was US employee #2. It was a long and sometimes torturous process, but I think it's that way with any startup project. The daily grind and chaos got to me and started affecting my health, so when an opening appeared at OXM, I almost begged for it -- and it turned out to be a great fit. I am still super proud of those three years and the features the magazine ran on my watch. However, it became clear that with a staff full of superstars with seniority, there was little room to advance -- and in over a decade, I had never been Editor-in-Chief of anything. The WoW mag gave me that opportunity and I was one of the bigger fans of the game in the office, so it was a natural fit. I do not consider myself a flighty person -- I like to pick a project and stick with it long-term -- so the shorter sections of my resume are a little embarassing. But in all cases, I was chasing job satisfaction. I know what I'm good at, and I want to play to my strengths. Writing makes me happy, and I always wanted to write for outlets where my voice and skills were a good fit.
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It's a big community; I think there's some of both. The negative gamer stereotype is not going away; you could argue that's because of cruel jokes being so common and tolerated, or you could argue that it's because they are based in fact. The very thin distinction is that the South Park guys are themselves huge WoW fans and players; they are equal opportunity offenders, so they are making fun of themselves along with everybody else they make fun of. So some gamers took that episode as an offense, and some took it as a signifying self-mocking. I laughed. I also laughed at the "Guitar Queer-O" episode they did. Would it be worth the time and energy to get offended anyway?
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It can take the fun out, if you let it. One of the worst but most common problems with the job is that the people who do it can become cynical -- they forget why they loved games and they start actively hating games. I think this is because before you get the job, your strongest memories are your best memories -- you remember the games that made you feel the greatest highs, and then you wind up with a job where there are many more mediocre to bad games than there are transcendent ones, and that's what you spend most of your time writing about. It's very easy to start focusing on the negative, and then believe that nothing can ever be good again. So that factors into how you start seeing games as a chore instead of the escape that they once were. I touched on this in one of the other answers, but it's really a personal path at that point -- you have to will yourself not to turn into a jaded jerk. You have to remind yourself that games are fun, and even if the last three weren't, the next one very well may be. In the book, I suggest that you have to leave yourself open to be amazed. (This is part of the free Kindle you can get from Amazon, by the way, if you want to read that part.) Gaming only really felt like a chore when I had to work weekends. It might seem like "Oh, poor baby, you have to play a game this weekend" -- but when that game isn't a good one, or might be plagued by pre-release bugs, then it really does become a chore. You start wishing you could paint the house or rake the leaves instead. It's frustrating enough to have to replay a level over and over because you can't figure out how to get past a part or beat a boss; it's extra frustrating when the reason you are restarting is because the console crashes due to a software error...and that's something you cannot fix as the reviewer. But your responsibility is to hit that deadline, so now you have to call your editor, who has to call the company, and you're in limbo until it's all worked out...but the clock is still ticking. That really, really makes it feel like a chore, to have a responsibility that you cannot fulfill. I don't think I ever fantasized about going back to being a "civilian gamer," as you put it, but I did constantly remind myself how other "normal" people saw and played games. I regularly discussed games with friends outside of the industry, gamers who did the normal thing of buying three, maybe four games a year and sampling the rest by borrowing from friends or renting. They didn't get to play as many games as I did, but they had more of an investment in the game they played, in both time and money. So I always felt like I needed to ground myself in reality, and remember that when I write, I am writing for people other than myself. My experience is valid, but I have to incorporate the audience's expectations and needs, too. If you lose sight of your audience, you can no longer do them any good.
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