The Mercenary, Prostitutional Nature of Professional Video Game Criticism - GUI 79

A clear lack of extramental [objective] standard motivates most contemporary “professional” video game criticism (for more on this and our proposed solution. This is clear from contents of reviews themselves, which rely heavily on subjective states of affairs and relative measures of quality; from a general approach that posits the experience of the player as the absolute measure of a game’s worth; from disparity between reception of similarly-structured products by the same people. This lack of objective critical standard reduces “professionals” to victims of consumer culture, who appear to judge the value of a work on its capacity to titilate with superficial “polish”, the presence of humanist cinematic stories and well-recognized mascots/brands.