The birth of the Web sparked the most significant information evolution in the past century. The Web didn’t just change the way we consume media, but also the way we create it. It’s opened new channels of creativity and self-expression for authors who traditionally sat on the receiving end. Why is this so significant? The growth of user-generated content (UGC) has surpassed all expectations and truly enabled the concept of, “Wisdom of the Crowd”. Most importantly, UGC has taken center stage in our daily lives.
User-generated content is a very broad topic. UGC, as a term, encompasses everything from Wikipedia (crowd-sourced encyclopedia) to Facebook (user-generated information exchange and social graph). But I want to focus this blog post on a topic that’s very close to my heart – user-written game reviews. I often read editorial reviews from various traditional media sources. From gaming giants like IGN to GameSpot, and from old school magazines like PC Gamer. But I start to realize I am slowly migrating away from editorial reviews completely. I can’t help but ask myself why? The issue of editorials vs. user-written content has been an ongoing debate since the beginning of the new media revolution. Which one is higher quality? Which one is more accurate? And most importantly, which one is more relevant? If user-written reviews are here to stay, or even become the mainstream, what is their future?
Maybe I am a bit biased – since PlayHaven is a site powered by its great community – but I believe user-written reviews will eventually replace editorial reviews in the future. The power of user-written reviews is not the content presented by one individual, but the value harvested from a massive collection of knowledge and opinions. It is arguable that a review written by an amateur journalist may never reach the quality of a professionally-written editorial, since by definition, a professional writer is afforded a lifetime of training and expertise that a typical John Doe isn’t. However, the quality lacking in UGC reviews are made up in quantity. User-centric review sites such as Yelp, Amazon, MenuPages, NewEgg, and IMDB have outgrown their editorial counterparts by harvesting the wisdom of the crowd. The knowledge and expertise that is lacked by one individual is often supplemented by another person. As an aggregation, the knowledge and opinions from a group of people well exceeds the breadth of expertise that can be offered by any single individual.
Another significant disadvantage of the editorial review is “relevancy”. When reading an editorial review, readers must take a leap of faith when deciding to trust the editor’s opinion. What’s important to the editor could be drastically different from what matters to the reader. When it comes to game reviews and myself, I rarely care about the depth of the storyline, but I care deeply about fun-factor and replay-value. More often than not, this level of personal relevancy cannot be achieved via editorial reviews. User reviews, especially in quantity, solve this problem. When seeing a user-written review, I try to get a sense of what’s important to the reviewer. Once I can relate to the reviewer on a personal level, due to our shared intent, his opinion immediately weighs more than anyone else’s. To find this kind of personal relevancy requires content in quantity. When there are hundreds of reviews, written by hundreds of people from diverse personalities and backgrounds, you are more likely to relate to and connect with at least one of them.
Now, sifting through hundreds, or sometimes, thousands of reviews is both daunting and time-consuming. This leads me to the next logical question: what’s the future of UGC? With technical advancement, the ability to recommend and feed relevant content to the reader will be key for the next few years. Imagine that when you want to buy your next game, you could use a tool that delivers you the exact reviews you are looking for, because it knows reviewers like you. And those reviewers love to kill gigantic space bugs (EDF anyone?). Wouldn’t that be great? What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below!
