I’ll make this short and to the point – brevity is good.

To expand: the value of a piece of writing is not a function of its length. Games journalism thinks otherwise, but games journalism is wrong. If a game can be effectively critiqued in ten words or so, there’s nothing praiseworthy about using ten thousand. I mean, look at this – a five-hundred word review of Pac-Man, for God’s sake. PAC-MAN. That poor bastard reviewer had to spend all that time and energy on five-hundred words of redundant tripe, and he only needed three: “It’s fucking Pac-Man.”

(Does Pac-Man count as one word or two?)

There are a few reasons why many game reviews are so absurdly long-winded, and they are all bad. The first is that videogame websites have simply inherited the habit from videogame magazines. With magazines you have real physical pages to fill. You can’t just write fifty words in a space intended for four-hundred – it looks tacky and unprofessional. However, the same doesn't apply online. In most cases, with layouts being what they are, a two word review will take up just as much monitor real-estate as a couple hundred.  There’s no reason for fluff.

Well, okay, there is a reason – but again, it’s a bad reason. It is this: games journalism is desperate for legitimacy. Sharing an insecurity complex with the games industry proper, games journalism craves cultural validation – it wants desperately to be seen as proper and serious and something with which one could associate without shame. Hence the ceaseless deluge of words. At a glance, long articles give the illusion of depth in both the writer and the subject. People see that some guy has written twelve-thousand words about Pong, and they naturally think that he must have something interesting and intelligent to say about it. But of course he doesn’t. It’s fucking Pong.

I’m not saying we should never write at length about videogames. My point is that it isn’t necessary, and that it often detracts from what would otherwise be decent work. Game journalists always complain about how nobody reads their reviews, and that everyone just concentrates on the score or whatever, but who the fuck has the time to read a ten page treatise on Guitar Hero: Aerosmith? People focus on scores because they’re succinct. If more reviews were the same, perhaps they wouldn't be necessary at all.