A Review of a Reviewer

Welcome back my saucy bagel bites~

When asked to write a review of a game review author, I decided to choose Brenden Caldwell for obvious reasons- we share the last name. Which, as everyone knows, sharing the same last name with someone is definitely at the top of the list of criteria for choosing what author to review.

All jokes aside, I do enjoy reading Caldwell’s reviews, which can be read in the gaming newsletter: rockpapershotgun.com. He posts many reviews of games, most of which are shorter than 500 words. I really like Caldwell’s style. He uses humor and wit to paint an engaging picture of each game he is reviewing, and his short reviews keep his readers’ attention. His reviews are enough to get a feel of what the game is, so the reader can decide for themselves if it is also a game they might want to check out, but they aren’t long enough to spoil everything. I would say his reviews are a good resource for gamers who like to start games knowing as little about it as possible, so as to garner their own fresh experience from the game on their first play through. I would also say Caldwell’s posts and reviews are not for the casual gamer. He often reviews new games that are a part of a series, and because his posts are so short, he doesn’t go into detail about previous games of the series, which he often references to elaborate on the newest installment. He leaves it up to reader to go research more on their own.

Caldwell doesn’t spend a lot of time critiquing the games he reviews. In the majority of his posts he uses his wit and humor to compliment the game’s specific aspects that he likes, but he doesn’t often go into elaborate detail on a game’s shortcomings.

I would definitely read more of Caldwell’s reviews, because he brings attention to games that I normally would never hear about or think of playing. I like that his reviews are short and funny; they are entertaining to read without droning on, and they don’t give much away if you want a fresh experience when playing the game for yourself.

However, I don’t know how much Caldwell is contributing to the cannon of video game analysis. To refer to Aaron Suduiko’s article, “A Three-Stage Method for Analyzing Video Games,” I would say that Caldwell stops at the 2nd stage, “Perspective Application.” According to Suduiko, perspective application is “the use of a theoretical lens, or particular evaluative criterion, to render judgements on the content of your unfiltered reception.” Now, I know that was just a mouthful, but what that basically means is that as we play a game and take it all in, we pick out aspects of the game as a whole and use those aspects to judge the game based off of our individual ideas of what makes a game good or bad. I believe that this is the majority of what Caldwell does, he picks out all the good things he likes about a game and uses humor to entice the reader to the play the game.

What Caldwell doesn’t really do is go into the 3rd stage of Suduiko’s object-holist theory, which is Explanatory Thesis. In this stage, one takes their judgement which they derived from the perspective application process and use it devise a thesis that explains exactly why the game is good or bad, or what exactly the game was trying to achieve according to a particular player. Caldwell doesn’t really get too far into this step, likely due to the sheer brevity of his posts. So, in a way, Caldwell is contributing to video game analysis by offering light reviews, or stages 1 and 2 of the Three-Step Process for Analyzing Video Games, but he doesn’t go into depth about why each game is good or bad or if it properly conveyed whatever story that game was trying to tell.

Is this super important? Not really. Caldwell’s reviews are still easy to read and enjoyable and good for encouraging others to try out new games. I love his sense of humor and ability to use wit to draw the reader in, which is something I would like to use more of in my own writing. However, I think in writing my own reviews of games, I would definitely want to step further into Step Three of the object-holist theory and add my theory as to why certain games worked or didn’t work and add to the cannon of video game analysis.

Until next time~

ricecakerabbit