Is what you read what you get?

I recently read quite an interesting column over at Edge(or Next Gen). Games journalist N'Gai Croal wrote about how previewers of games often fill in the gaps of what they think will be in the final version. Many of them often have to try and be as positive as possible, even if the game has a very low standard and is basically unplayable, journalists are told by their managers to ensure they get a review or another preview copy, hence be positive. But is that really giving readers an insight into the game, or simply buying into the hype machine.

Look at Haze. Yeah, the shoddy unpolished graphics may hurt your eyes and crude AI may drive you insane, but none of this was mentioned in the preview versions. From that, it was going to be the perfect game, and having seen videos and articles about it, I believed it would be a good game. Nevermind then. So which would readers prefer, to be told a game ain't looking good before hand during a preview or to be told that the game is going to turn out fine.

For this blog, obviously as we ain't  journalist's or anything near it, I don't see preview copies, or review copies, or most of the time, any copies. My personal process of writing about games, if previewing them for example, is to attempt to gather as much information as possible from the largest variety of websites I can, read through it, look a videos etc and try and build up a image of what the game is like, hence why I refuse to attempt to 'review' a game. It's therefore difficult for me to actually contextualise and look objectively at games, but many blogs are now starting to be given preview builds of games, leading them to simply say what they see.

Honesty appears to be a an important aspect of the gaming community, one which is failing fast. So many games are now being hyped up to be better than they are, (Matt recently blogged about one such situation) then it has a knock on effect on the industry as a whole. It's becoming the trend for developers to have journalists to play through games in the developers HQ, so they can give feedback on the good and bad parts of it. This doesn't seem to be happening in the previews, which means some developers do not bother making changes to the game or upping the standard as the previewers seem to believe 'It's all fine'.

So should the process be changed. As mentioned earlier, yes. Previewers all do a good job, they allow fans of a series to gain the next bit of knowledge, allow readers to generally get a interest in the games, but overall being forced to bow down to the more corporate side of the industry. I listened to a podcast a while back, where some journalists were talking about how they were not being given games by a well known publisher simply for writing some less than complementary comments about their new release. With attitudes like that with some developers, it's understandable when previewers 'play nice'.