A Review of a Review

Hey guys,

so to follow on from my last post about reviews, I would like to take some time to talk about bad reviews. As Wags commented on my last post, online reviews can spread very quickly.

In response to Wags, I am not sure whether there are any product categories as time-critical as movies. With video games, reviewers often tend to get their hands on previews (or alpha or beta testing) or demos, which they might often make a review of, which helps to give an indication of what the final product might be like.

In the gaming industry, we can often find reviews from different review sites, where the reviews do not reflect the real state of the game. This is because game review sites often get games sent to them early, and might not receive them if they give a bad review. Therefore, certain game sites provide ratings where a 7/10 is an average game, which can often be misleading. This is because in order to continue to receive access to previews, demos, or earlier releases of the games, game developers and publishers prefer seeing good reviews.

My favourite review site for video games is http://angryjoeshow.com/. By providing video reviews of the products, we get to see the products in use, which helps the viewer to get a better feel of the product.

The reason why I like the angry joe show is that all the reviews are entertaining, as well as the fact that he is not afraid to give a bad review, such as a 2/10. By providing an honest opinion, I find I tend to agree with his reviews more often than those provided on other sites.

For those who are interested in a bit more, here is Angry Joe with a couple of other reviewers, discussing the state of the game review industry.

So what about you guys? Do you have a reviewer you tend to trust more than others? If so, why? Derschau mentioned on my last blog that for movies he doesn't tend to trust bad reviews for movies, but only good ones due to the being a personal subjective view. But aren't good reviews also personal subjective views? What do you think?

Guns, God, and Gospel

Howdy guys!

As I was doing some research for one of my other projects this semester, looking into the logistics and supply chain management of humanitarian aid and disaster relief, I happened to stumble across two blogs which caught my interest. Both J from Tales from the Hood and Brett Keller discuss "The Machine Gun Preacher", who identifies himself as a mercenary/missionary. While I must admit he is doing good by setting up orphanages in Sudan, and helping children in need, I disagree with his method. He chooses to carry guns, and fights alongside the SPLA. The main issue many people have had with this is that he is creating an image of humanitarian aid workers that could potentially further endanger the lives of other aid workers. Consider this article recently released by DW-World.

The big issue is that currently a movie is being made about The Machine gun preacher. When we talk about movies, and the impacts they may have, we can see that the movie "The Machine Gun Preacher", with a 40million dollar budget, a famous international hollywood star in Gerard Butler, and an Oscar-nominated directorin Marc Forster certainly has the potential to draw in a lot of viewers. In comparison, I would like to refer to a different movie which I happened to see recently, by Sorious Samura.

Here is the description of the movie from the website:

"Award-winning journalist Sorious Samura is increasingly gaining a reputation for a new kind of journalism which not many others can do. It’s ‘real’ reality TV – stories that offer a unique perspective into the lives of people facing terrible situations. On this journey he set out to become, for all intents and purposes, a refugee. He traveled to Chad to live with a family in a refugee camp for one month. He lived under exactly the same conditions, eating what they ate, drinking what they drank. Sorious built close intimate relationships with the people in this situation sharing their hopes and fears. This film provides a unique insight into what life is really like for a refugee."

So, to bring a social media twist into this, i want you guys to start thinking about online reviews. I will get more into this in my next blog post in the next few days, but how damaging can bad reviews online be?

Watching Games - Its for a good cause

In her recent blog post, Daiz questioned the practical value of using facebook. To answer this question, I wanted to look at the practical value of social media in relation to humanitarian aid, which Hubba started to address in his latest blog post.

A great recent example of using social media for aid, can be seen with professional starcraft 2 players, such as Dario Wunsch (TLO). He set up a 24hour livestream on justin.tv of him playing video games in order to generate ad revenue which would then be donated to Doctors without Borders. People were able to participate by watching him play, which people watched during the stream helped to generate the money for the final donation. As well as that, viewers were encouraged to make their own donation from the live chat. This has encouraged other gamers to follow suit, such as Shawn Simon (Sheth) to follow suit with a similar live stream. Both Dario, and Shawn were able to raise over $2000.

Thus in regards to Hubba's question of whether a Bob or Bonno is needed in the age of Web 2.0 i would have to say yes. In my opinion, people are always going to require some form of motivation when it comes to providing donations or aid, and an influential figure has often proved to be an effective method of getting that motivation. However, social media allows all of us to become little Bobs and little Bonnos, just as how Hubba's blog has influenced some of us, or how the professional gamers were able to gather their fans in support. At certain points during their streams, both had over 20,000 people watching at the same time.

I think there are still some unexplored ways in which social media can be used to promote these causes, as well as to help provide support. What do you think?

If you have other examples of social media being used in an interesting way for a good cause, lets hear them too!