Today I was listening to the latest Giant Bomb Bombcast (which if you don’t already, you really should give it a listen), and I was struck by Jeff Gerstmann’s take on the new Sonic game, Sonic Unleashed. To paraphrase, he didn’t like it, and his reasoning behind that opinion was the game might not have been made for his audience. He said it was positioned to be the great comeback of Sonic for the die-hard fans, but the game ultimately was skewed way too young to cater to said fans. Again, I’m paraphrasing, but he said a six year-old might have fun with it.

Might. That word got me thinking.

There’s a couple of things going on here. One is the ever-increasing rift between the gaming critics and the “New Age of Video Games,” or what might be commonly known as the Wii Generation. The press have been up in arms for the past two years Nintendo is no longer addressing its core audience. One can argue the core audience has shifted from die-hard Mario disciples to the casual market. And indeed, that is what is keeping Nintendo miles from the competition. So why fault Sega for trying to capture a segment of this market? Or Microsoft, with its Lips/Movies/Scene-It! trifecta? The press dismiss these games almost immediately because reviewer opinion is highly subjective, and most reviewers at mainstream outlets are hardcore gamers. People like N’Gai Croal and John Davison have seen this disconnect, and in the latter’s case have positioned themselves pretty well for its future.

The second thing is regarding the quality of game reviews. Sure, someone like Gerstmann will never rank Sonic Unleashed at the top of their Game Of The Year picks, but can they use their subjectivity to pen an objective viewpoint? I know that sounds contradictory but hear me out for a second. What I’m talking about is not to play through a game assuming the role of a six year-old, especially if one has no connection to that mindset. And it’s not to go down the typical review checkpoints to see if it satisfies technical and mechanical baselines. It’s something else, and it got me thinking. How does Roger Ebert approach reviewing a film that is clearly not for his demographic? Babe was a childrens’ film, albeit one with adults in mind. But if he dismissed it because it had a talking pig, how would it have played for the general audience?

So I came up with this experiment – review editors take notice. What they should do is give every staff reviewer a casual or kids game to critique. Pair that game with a film of similar and comparable tone. Let the reviewer write the game review, and then compare that with Ebert’s film review of the film to which it was paired. Even though the media is different, it should provide some insight to Ebert’s thought process, which in turn can be applied to the reviewer’s repertoire for approaching future games in the same vein.

The goal here is not to dumb down the reviews for the targeted audience, nor is it to dismiss a game because it’s not for the critic’s demographic. It’s to be able to see what’s not good for the reviewer may be good for the reader and the ability to explain why.