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!
Sometimes, but not usually. They have actual consultants for that, and many of those consultants are ex-media. They write detailed reports on games in development and assess strengths and weaknesses. Most of the time they even give a score range, like "if this were coming out in its current state with its current scope and plans, I would expect it to receive 65-75 on a scale of 100." But if you are an active member of the media, it's sort of...not done. A few times I've seen developers fish for feedback during demos but I have always expected demos to be largely one-way info presentations, and not a focus group -- though I'm sure they are reading body language and conversational reactions as much as possible. PS -- Must I defeat you to stand a chance?
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Sure -- nobody really likes to be told "you're wrong." I wrote unpopular negative reviews of games other people liked, so I became a target -- and that comes with the job. It's something you have to accept; you cannot be a critic without being willing to be criticized yourself. The problem really becomes when the people telling you that you're wrong have less experience with the topic in question. If I've spent a week digging into a game before coming to a conclusion about it, and the person telling me "that's not right at all" hasn't played it yet...that's particularly annoying. That's just someone wanting the game to be awesome, or someone who has invested emotion into a game they haven't played, so they don't want to look bad to their friends, or they are insecure in some way about their support of the game up to that point. If my negative review threatens your own opinion, I think you're reading it wrong. But if my negative review gives you more information as you make up your own mind, then we're getting somewhere, even if we disagree and you call me names.
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Depends on the level of the hype. This is really an unanswerable question, as we have seen some preview footage and cool plans, but I have no experience with the console itself. Nobody can say if it will live up to the hype without significant personal experience. I plan to get one, but I have no idea if it's going to live up to anything yet. Top-tier media often get retail units day of release, or slightly before; I lined up and bought my PS2, GameCube, PSP and Xbox 360 at midnight. This time around, I just want to preorder.
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No console is "necessary" to begin with. We're talking about a form of optional entertainment. And those forms vary wildly; many people simply like having a dedicated machine for their hobby. Could the future remove the hardware and just bundle it all into the display? Sure. I think it's interesting that Steam is working with ways to bring its content to TVs instead of computer monitors, and even then, they are investigating a dedicated piece of hardware, and not just delivering it through a web-enabled TV or an existing device. So...sure, the future is unwritten, and things always get smaller and wind up being combined with other things. But if the market likes the idea of a dedicated console, I'm not going to tell them it's unnecessary.
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Business Start-Up Specialist
Should friends go into business together?
Inner City English Teacher
Are you pressured by administrators to pass kids that aren't ready yet?
Navy Officer (Former)
What's the most dangerous situation you were ever in?
Yes, absolutely. When an editor looks for new talent, they almost always search for existing writing by that person before the interview -- in fact, sometimes that can make the difference between whether the person even gets an interview at all. Your blog will represent your personal approach to writing, and that is extremely valuable to a hiring editor -- but it also means it has to be extremely professional and polished if you want it to reflect kindly on you. Anything you write online, from a personal blog to a Facebook post to a comment in a forum, suddenly represents you as a professional writer. I tell a story about this in the book, about a writer who was blogging about applying for a job, and his arrogance in his blog posts cost him the interview. So you do have to be careful. But by all means, get some experience simply writing and publishing, and thinking about how your words are received by the public at large. That's very good experience, and it will look better than someone who has no writing samples to show at all. It shows you took initiative, even if you haven't had a big opportunity yet.
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Interstate 76, a car combat PC game from Activision. Car combat is my favorite genre, and now that Twisted Metal has returned for PS3, that's my next target. It was a very rich universe with an alternate-history story as its backdrop, plus lots of customizable muscle cars. It's available again at GOG.com if you want to play it.
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Space Giraffe for XBLA was one. I gave it a 2. Others gave it a 10. There were very few scores in the middle. We all perceive games differently -- design elements make sense to one person and baffle another. Things that seem incredibly hard to me might be rewardingly complex to you. Person A doesn't feel a game is good unless it has 40 hours of gameplay; Person B just wants to enjoy a six-hour story and move on to another story. This is why I always encourage reading a lot of reviews if you put stock in any one of them. To me, the bigger danger is not polarized opinions but homogenized ones -- when I see people start to attack a negative review because "everybody else liked it" or say a positive review must be the result of corruption because "the MetaCritic average is three points lower than your score," that's some dangerous groupthink. This ties back into the reality that people use reviews to prove themselves "right" rather than taking them for the individual critical analyses they actually were intended to be.
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