I'm speaking from experience on this one. As a frustrated young writer looking to break in the game's industry I spent way more time bitching about what was wrong with games journalism than I did trying to muscle my way into a job or become a better writer. And I'm not the only one to follow this trajectory. Kyle Orland got his start with a blog called the Video Game Ombudsman -- a site dedicated to pointing out errors and worst practices in games writing. But when it comes down to it the best way to correct the behavior of games journalists is to show us how its done. If you think you can do it better stop bitching and show us what you've got.

Lists (present writing included) are the laziest form of journalism. But thanks to places like Digg they're traffic gold. Readers, oddly, hate reading. And lists can be easily scanned and digested, significantly cutting the time between first discovery of the story and inevitable composition of a bitchy response comment. Most complaints about lists focus on ranking (only a moron thinks NHL 2K7 is better than NHL2K4) or games that didn't make the cut. Both are missing the point. The best way to read lists is for discovery -- to get turned on to a game you may have overlooked. Arguing about the rest is pointless.

The landscape of game fandom is rife with loyalists -- those who fight fiercely for their preferred console or platform, gamers infatuated with a particular publisher or designer and fans fixated with a particular game. They perceive even the slightest criticism or comment as a snub or even worse, a bald-faced sign of bias. Reviews of console-exclusive games attracted these toadies by the truckload. They're a generally humorless bunch -- people who revel in being put-upon underdogs. But the truth is that they're not seeing the world clearly. They've become so entrenched in their mono-chromatic culture and so enamored with the notion of being a underserved minority that they can't see the truth -- the things they love aren't all that great and the things they hate aren't all that bad.

A video game review is the opinion of one person. But angry readers frequently get their panties in a bunch over reviews that they disagree with. They invariably cast aspersions in the comments calling the game critic a bad gamer, a poor journalist and a terrible person. They can't wrap their heads around the notion that there's no such thing as a wrong opinion. Positions can be ill-informed. They can be taken in bad taste. But no opinion is incorrect. Much of this confusion stems from the notion that video games can be measured objectively, like a pediatrician would take a baby's temperature. But criticism isn't a science. The sooner gamers understand that the better.

Plenty of people bitch about review scores, but they never go far enough with their complaints. They try to propose better ways to score games and calculate Metacritic averages. But there's no point. Review scores are meaningless. Any attempt to make sense of them is pseudo-science. You may as well ask an astrologer to tell you how good the new Need For Speed game is. Because, when it comes down to it, the number at the end of a review is simply a digit that the critic pulled out of their ass after writing about the game. There's no method or process to assigning scores. They're determined by gut feeling. Anybody who says otherwise is fooling themselves. So if you're getting worked up over a review score you're either a gamemaker or publicist who foolishly allowed their employer to make their pay contingent on a Metacritic number or a reader who thinks that you can measure quality with a number between one and ten. Both parties are, sadly, misguided.