"But do we really need it?"
Until you have a proper alternative that's not tarred with partisan politics (otherwise it will be the same problem in another way) and is all about games and doesn't take focus from them to unrelated matters, that's sadly what you have set up yourself for. And yes, I agree unified topics to discuss various topics like these would work wonders since it would otherwise turn into Gaming Politics Forum.
But instead of complaining, let's do something more productive, shall we? Let's listen to game journalists and see where they are coming from in their detachment from gamer interests. Game journalists sometimes actually address the gamer plebs to
defend their incredibly biased and political ax-grinding controversy-hungry game coverage. Let's look at one such case,
Destructoid's 100% objective game review "satire" by famed Jim Sterling, the paragon of consumer rights (can't even type this with a straight face).
Final Fantasy XIII is a videogame released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was developed by Square Enix. It stars characters. One of the characters is called Lightning and that is the main character of the game that can be played with a controller. The game's story is about Lightning and a collection of other characters who must fight some other characters called Fal'Sie and save a planet called Cocoon. The story has a beginning and an ending and a middle bit.
Final Fantasy XIII belongs to the role-playing-game genre of videogames, more specifically a genre that some people dub "JRPG" with "J" standing for Japanese. Final Fantasy XIII was developed in Japan which would make this genre designation accurate. The game has things in it that other JRPGs have, such as leveling up and weapons and shops.
The battle system is a battle system. In this battle system players select commands for one character while other characters are controlled by the game's AI. Players can manually designate commands or let the AI decide which course of action is best. There is a system called the Paradigm shift which is new to Final Fantasy XIII and it allows players to pre-program how characters behave and the player can swap these behavior patterns whenever they want during a battle to deal with different circumstances. Many people enjoy the Paradigm system, but other people do not like it so much.
Players have the ability to restart a battle if it does not go well which you may or may not find useful depending on your personal preference. You might also find weapon leveling useful but that's only if you find weapon leveling useful, so whether or not you find weapon leveling useful is down to how useful you ultimately find weapon leveling.
You can save the game if you want sometimes.
The videogame has graphics and sound. The graphics are seen with your eyes and the sound is heard by your ears. When you start the game the graphics and the sound will occur almost at the same time, letting you know that the game has started. There is also text which players can read.
If you buy Final Fantasy XIII and like it, then you like Final Fantasy XIII. If you buy Final Fantasy XIII and don't like it, then you don't like Final Fantasy XIII. It has things in it that some people might enjoy but other people who have different ideas of what is enjoyable may not actually enjoy it.
In conclusion, Final Fantasy XIII is a videogame.
Score: N/A (Since a reviewer would use his judgment to give a game a score, a score cannot be given at this time.)
So far, the gaming media's approach to addressing this issue was pretending that:
- Objective reviews are impossible
- Reviews that describe and evaluate the core experience are physically impossible if that's in a vacuum from political opinions and personal feelings
- Scoring individual aspects of the experience didn't make sense, hence the gradual dropping of that evaluation system (Graphics/Gameplay/Story/Challenge)
- It's about what the reviewer felt, not how helpful this would be to advise a potential player whether it's worth your time or not. Not mostly the former, exclusively the former.
A better approach that's objective (and isn't a wikipedia article about the JRPG videogame genre with circular grammar to pad the article like the satire above implies is the only way)
is definitively possible. Acknowledging bias, and separating the author and the work, and separating politics from judging the artistic merits of a work (there's a reason why most art produced worldwide in WW2 wasn't destroyed), is possible as well. When rating boards have bullet point lists that evaluate certain aspects related to morality in games, that also makes it possible indeed to have a bullet point list that evaluate parts of the experience more relevant to gamers. Maybe hiring someone who doesn't like a genre or hates some games to review them won't result in a review that's particularly useful for that readership, other than self-masturbatory columns written by and to people who like to complain about games more than playing them.
You can look up early examples of game journalism from the nineties and take inspiration from that to start something new.
