Dan Amrich
Los Angeles, CA
Male, 41
I started reviewing videogames professionally in 1993, when Genesis and SNES roamed the earth. Over the next 15 years I worked for magazines and websites like GamePro, GamesRadar, Official Xbox Magazine, and World Of Warcraft Official Magazine, while freelancing for Wired, PC Gamer, and many others. In an attempt to guide the next generation of reviewers, I wrote and published Critical Path: How to Review Videogames For A Living in February. Ask away!
Yes, and burnout is a very real side effect of the job. I've worked with people who were so determined to cling to their dream job that they were unaware that they were grumpy and bitter about something they used to love -- when play becomes work, it's very easy to only focus on the negative sides of the work, like deadlines or office politics or technical issues. That can and does spill over into reviews if you let it -- and that can alienate readers and ruin your reputation. I took very few vacations at GamePro because I loved the work and there was always so much to do in a short amount of time; when I left I had banked a month of vacation time. I wish I'd taken it, because I went through a serious crisis of conscience while I was there, thinking "Is this it? Am I burned out? Can I still do this job and have my writing be worth something to other people?" And it did take a few weeks to realign my thinking; I was critical enough about my own performance and my own writing that I was able to see when I started to go off the track and self-correct. But yes, absolutely -- a combination of crushing deadlines and the inherent sameness of games within a genre (for instance, all FPSes are different, but they do all speak the same language) can make you bitter and jaded and very much in need of a vacation if not a career change. It's like eating candy all day every day -- sounds great when you're a kid, and when you get to try it, you love it at first...and then you realize it's just not healthy and you feel worse if it goes on for too long. You need to take it on moderation so you continue to love it.
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Sure -- nobody really likes to be told "you're wrong." I wrote unpopular negative reviews of games other people liked, so I became a target -- and that comes with the job. It's something you have to accept; you cannot be a critic without being willing to be criticized yourself. The problem really becomes when the people telling you that you're wrong have less experience with the topic in question. If I've spent a week digging into a game before coming to a conclusion about it, and the person telling me "that's not right at all" hasn't played it yet...that's particularly annoying. That's just someone wanting the game to be awesome, or someone who has invested emotion into a game they haven't played, so they don't want to look bad to their friends, or they are insecure in some way about their support of the game up to that point. If my negative review threatens your own opinion, I think you're reading it wrong. But if my negative review gives you more information as you make up your own mind, then we're getting somewhere, even if we disagree and you call me names.
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Sometimes, but not usually. They have actual consultants for that, and many of those consultants are ex-media. They write detailed reports on games in development and assess strengths and weaknesses. Most of the time they even give a score range, like "if this were coming out in its current state with its current scope and plans, I would expect it to receive 65-75 on a scale of 100." But if you are an active member of the media, it's sort of...not done. A few times I've seen developers fish for feedback during demos but I have always expected demos to be largely one-way info presentations, and not a focus group -- though I'm sure they are reading body language and conversational reactions as much as possible. PS -- Must I defeat you to stand a chance?
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Depends on the level of the hype. This is really an unanswerable question, as we have seen some preview footage and cool plans, but I have no experience with the console itself. Nobody can say if it will live up to the hype without significant personal experience. I plan to get one, but I have no idea if it's going to live up to anything yet. Top-tier media often get retail units day of release, or slightly before; I lined up and bought my PS2, GameCube, PSP and Xbox 360 at midnight. This time around, I just want to preorder.
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Waitress
Are you instructed to "push" certain menu items that are at risk of going bad?
Inner City English Teacher
What was the saddest student journal entry you've read?
Police Officer
Have you ever been shot or seriously injured on the job?
Interstate 76, a car combat PC game from Activision. Car combat is my favorite genre, and now that Twisted Metal has returned for PS3, that's my next target. It was a very rich universe with an alternate-history story as its backdrop, plus lots of customizable muscle cars. It's available again at GOG.com if you want to play it.
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Yes, absolutely. When an editor looks for new talent, they almost always search for existing writing by that person before the interview -- in fact, sometimes that can make the difference between whether the person even gets an interview at all. Your blog will represent your personal approach to writing, and that is extremely valuable to a hiring editor -- but it also means it has to be extremely professional and polished if you want it to reflect kindly on you. Anything you write online, from a personal blog to a Facebook post to a comment in a forum, suddenly represents you as a professional writer. I tell a story about this in the book, about a writer who was blogging about applying for a job, and his arrogance in his blog posts cost him the interview. So you do have to be careful. But by all means, get some experience simply writing and publishing, and thinking about how your words are received by the public at large. That's very good experience, and it will look better than someone who has no writing samples to show at all. It shows you took initiative, even if you haven't had a big opportunity yet.
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Space Giraffe for XBLA was one. I gave it a 2. Others gave it a 10. There were very few scores in the middle. We all perceive games differently -- design elements make sense to one person and baffle another. Things that seem incredibly hard to me might be rewardingly complex to you. Person A doesn't feel a game is good unless it has 40 hours of gameplay; Person B just wants to enjoy a six-hour story and move on to another story. This is why I always encourage reading a lot of reviews if you put stock in any one of them. To me, the bigger danger is not polarized opinions but homogenized ones -- when I see people start to attack a negative review because "everybody else liked it" or say a positive review must be the result of corruption because "the MetaCritic average is three points lower than your score," that's some dangerous groupthink. This ties back into the reality that people use reviews to prove themselves "right" rather than taking them for the individual critical analyses they actually were intended to be.
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