Following outcry against similar results of a smaller study conducted last year, Susquehanna Financial Group's Video Game Journal once again took to the facts to try and find a correlation between game sales and the opinions of game reviewers.

And once again, with an even larger sample than originally taken, their data indicates that there is no reason to believe that anyone cares what reviewers think, after all.

...a theory (that game ratings matter) that fails under scrutiny is accepted as conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is wrong. And we have not even addressed the causation argument - that a higher rating causes a game to sell better. There is no reason to argue causation, because while correlation does not equal causation, the absence of correlation means no causation in our case.

WHERE IS YOUR LESTER BANGS NOW? Eliza Gauger

Game Score-to-Sale Theory Again Disproven [Gamasutra]

Chuck Klosterman tackled the question for Esquire, showing both his panache for writing and total misunderstanding of game culture. Lucky for us we have Clive Thompson.

In an article for Wired, Thompson cuts through the bullshit and gets to the reasons. While he breaks down the reason behind the lack of any seminal gaming journalist out there into four sections, the whole thing can be summed up in his to-the-point conclusion:

With games, we're in the realm of ludology. It's an insanely rich field of human art and meaning, but it's utterly neglected. It's not taught in schools. It's not written about in newspapers. So we're just now scratching its surface. The game criticism of tomorrow won't look anything like the stuff that Pauline Kael wrote. It'll be some crazy, unruly spawn of sportswriting, gonzo journalism, analytic philosophy, memoir and investigative reporting. The Lester Bangs of gaming is going to be a philosopher of play.

And personally, I can't wait to read him.

Don't let this summary serve you, go read the entire article, it's worth it.

Why aren't there... [Collision Detection]

Rock critic Chuck Klosterman asks, in the July '06 issue of Esquire, "Why are there no video-game critics?" In a piece titled 'The Lester Bangs of Video Games', Klosterman rehashes a postulation familiar to any fan of games and games journalism.

Lester Bangs is known for his use of the term "the last of the white niggers," a reference to not only Norman Mailer's essay 'The White Negro', but also, as Wikipedia eloquently sums, a "social miscreant with questionable or objectionable outward idiosyncrasies." It's a term that, ignoring the racial characterization of all involved, could as easily describe the perception of modern gamers by the publishing world at large.

The problem isn't a lack of suitably high-brow game criticism—it's that Klosterman and his peers have placed gamers and game culture in a metaphorical ghetto. They're acting as the very same established cultural stagnancy that critics like Bangs and Kael were bucking.

The fundamental flaw in Klosterman's premise is this: There are plenty of game critics who "[think] about these games in a manner that's human and metaphorical and contextual" (as Klosterman establishes the benchmark for what determines 'real' criticism). However, Klosterman isn't reading them, having lumped all game magazines into a pile he labels "consumer advice." Lumped—and ignored completely.

The very fact that Klosterman can get a column in Esquire writing about a subject area about which he is obviously unfamiliar highlights the real issue: mainstream magazine editors don't know anything about gaming, making it difficult for them to hire game critics worth their salt.

There are other flaws in his reasoning. Klosterman mistakes video games for virtual worlds, using a hypothetical Gone with the Wind scenario: "What if the conversation were sometimes interrupted by a bear attack? And what if all these alternative realities were dictated by the audience itself?" How many games have you played lately had dialogue interrupted by a bear attack? (An unscripted bear attack, at least.)

Like Roger Ebert before him, Klosterman conflates his lack of understanding and familiarity with an entire art form to be a failure of the critics of that art form. Meanwhile, dozens of ably-minded writers are dissecting, analyzing, and contextualizing everything from simple puzzle games to—yes—virtual worlds.

Lester Bangs made his career writing for music magazines. For Klosterman to toss out the entirety of the gaming enthusiast press' work because it shows up in EDGE and not the New Yorker shows only that he's too modest a fan of video games to know where the real magic is happening.

As long as editors of magazines keep printing articles bemoaning the absence of a 'Lester Bangs of game criticism'—an editorial messiah for which erudite gamers have thankfully stopped looking—they'll continue to miss out on all the meaningful games criticism that's happening right now. Joel Johnson