Coming Soon: Reviews

Coming soon to my little site here, dear reader, will be reviews. At least initially, but perhaps forever, they'll just be for video games. I've developed a scoring system that I think I can apply to broadly to art as a concept, though, so I thought I'd give you a sneak peak of it now.

We're basically going to be running with three scores of zero to five for the following categories: Craft, Pathos, and Wonder. I think those evoke the three qualities that really define art, and since that's exactly what I consider games to be, they're what I'm running with. The fact that the three came out as both cross-disciplinary and timeless were a happy accident of the process.

Craft represents how well-made something is. We can talk about all of the technical aspects here, from graphics to sound to gameplay, and we'll also be looking at the quality of the craftsmanship. Does the game run well consistently, or are we putting up with that ol' Bethesda jank, for example? And can we excuse the jank because scope has a value all its own? It's also going to be judged based on the medium. I wouldn't evaluate sculpture the same way I'd evaluate an oil painting, and I likewise won't evaluate a PS5 game the same way I'd evaluate an NES game. This is strictly about what people accomplished with the tools they were using, not about the quality of the tools themselves.

In Pathos, we're talking about how the game makes you feel, and yes, I believe that every game should make you feel. There have been several games I've played just this year that made me feel deeply across a spectrum of emotions, but even back in the early days of the art form, games still had that power. You better believe that Preteen Pilgrim felt a massive surge of adrenaline when he was up against Bowser in the eighth castle with one life left for the first time. Games are art, and art's job is to make you feel something.

Finally, we come to Wonder, which is kind of my wildcard category. It's not about how games make us feel here, but how we feel about games. Wonder is the indefiniable x-factor that makes a piece of art stick with you, whether that's its ability to swallow up your time, the moments that will stick with you indelibly through the rest of your life, or the place it holds in your thought life long after your time playing it is done. Whatever that "it" is, it's the thing that separates Elden Ring from God of War; the former is my favorite game of all time, and while the latter is nearly perfect in execution, it just didn't catch me the same way. I can't necessarily define Wonder, but I know it when I see it.

So, that's what you'll see here soon. If you take a look at my preview image, you'll see that I'm also going to aggregate those scores into a standard five-star rating system. I want it to be easy for you to see at a glance, and I likewise want the chance to get on Metacritic someday. There lies the path to people sending me free stuff.