This leads back to the often discussed question how good journalism should look like. At least from point of view a good journalist should always be a tad more critical than his/her readership. So short answer: Yes. If a wine connaisseur tested wines on the assumption that a lot of people who drink wine just want to get wasted he probably wouldn't be that far from the truth, but he certainly wouldn't be a very good connaisseur either.
I understand, like the way a film critic who said 300 was a good movie is both objectively wrong and undeniably stupid. But aren't things a little different where games are involved? Unlike other artforms, games are played.
Listen here, we all know games struggle to be taken seriously as art, and I for one think that at their best, games are no less artistic than prose or painting. BUT one real distinction between our medium adn those other ones is the form of the interactivity, and pro- game-as-art though I am, I admit that the playing of the games makes them fundamentally different from other art forms, and even from food and wine. Eats and drinks are consumed, but that too is a different thing than being played.
I sincerely think that games are an entity unto themselves, from a critical standpoint. In literary terms, we can agree that Danielle Steele and Stephen King (an absolute favorite of mine) are lousy writers, while poor, tortured David Foster Wallace was doing something tremendous. We can agree to that despite inverted book sales that make it clear the works of the former too are far more popular than the latter. And in foodiary (note to ESLs: foodiary is not a word)terms, I can accept that a Big Mac is utter crap, even though a majority of folks might prefer its familiar taste to that of some quality cuisine. I accept that there's a quality, even to the way something tastes, that transcendes popularity.
Games are neither like art nor like food. I contend that a game's purpose is to be fun. If a game does EVERYTHING right, but a reviewer finds it to be no fun, don't we expect a low score? If a game has problem upon problem, but the reviewer gets addicted, don't we expect a higher score, albeit with caveats?
EXAMPLE: Bejeweled or whatever, those immensely popular puzzle games. I don't play them or like them, but can I take a reviewer to task for giving them a high score just because they compeltely lack the elements of gaming that are important to me? I can't say they're not good games.
There are other elements to game quality, and they do count. I want my critic to say when a story is forulaic or incomrehensible, when the characters are poorly voiced or their dialogue is tedious, whether the pacing or scaling works, whether the combat hurts your wrist, etc. But in an MMORPG like WoW? How many of these other factors come into play? The things you want a critic for an MMORPG to talk about are size of content, stability, polish, balance, copmlexity of character skill system, whatever.
Where does this WoW expansion let you down, exactly? Is it filled with bugs? Do the new areas crash all the time? Is the content not filled out? Is there nothing to do at the higher levels? Are the classes unbalanced? Do the quests bore you so much that you stop playing before ou get to level 80? Those are the kinds of problems, if omitted from a review, that should have us guffawing and talking about the sad state of journalism.
Again, I bet if anyone who's poo-pooing these reviews sits down for a second and writes out where SPECIFICALLY they think our current journalists are turning a blind eye to WotLK's shortomings, we'd see no more than differences of opinion. Differences of opinion, moreover, between people who are either sick of WoW or don't even like MMORPGs on the one hand, and 10 million paying customers on the other side. Wait, not just paying customers, but committed, avid gamers.
Why should a critic pay attention to what you care about, instead of what them 10 millions suckers care about? No wait, now it's 11 million.