I recently had a short chat with someone involved with the BBC Good Food magazine, over the lack of investment in print, inlight of online ventures. She reminded me people spend more time with print, and magazines, and it's more of an experience, of, say, getting snug on the sofa, and spending time with your favourite magazine.

Whilst I'm aware a recent Deloitte Survey found that the average UK consumer spends only 1.8 hours a week reading magazines, versus 8.7 hours a week on the internet, - the nature of the internet is to jump around via links, whereas the relationship with a magazine is rather more intimate, and exclusive to one outlet.

Her argument that magazines involve/engross you more, reminded me of this debate on short versus long reviews.

And I suddenly realised, how I had read four or five of Mitch's one paragraph reviews in a few minutes, all on the same page, and then buggered off somewhere else, not really remembering much, bar, some game with a flower in it might actually be cool. What had occurred to me was that a longer article involves the audience more - whereas short articles may encourage a fickle readership. When it comes to advertising, there may be more value in a platform that has longer articles that subsume the audience more in a particular gaming product, or see someone stay on a page or site for longer [hence possibly have time to take in the advert banners, and/or click through to more pages, and be exposed to more ad banners on each], whereas with a shorter review, the amount of time spent with one website's brand, and the amount of time spent exposed to whatever ads they're hosting, is reduced.

Overall though, I think there's room for both - it just depends what you want.

Online, if you're not giving someone what they want, they will google for what they want, and go elsewhere.

>>In short, arguably the same could be said of longer articles - you spend more time with them, and it's more of an experience.

>>By contrast one could say shorter articles give you what you need to know, and let you move on.

As a writer, it initially strikes me as a disastrous comment. But perhaps taking the focus away from reviews would allow for more interesting, creative and original games journalism and criticism. If we're freeing up magazine pages, they'll need to be filled somehow. Just as long as it's not with even more outdated news.

(Brief aside: it strikes me as bizarre that so many mags still dedicate so many pages to news, when it's all been available on the internet for a month already by the time it hits the shelves.)

One thing I would say is that, if the focus were to shift to short-form reviews, you're pretty much cementing scores as essential. Which would split people something rotten.

I look for 800 to 1200 words from a review, but that's because I like a review that gives me a good idea how the game functions AND evaluates it with perhaps a few examples along the way. To do all of that, you NEED the 800 to 1200 words. Anything less tends to mean that you're leaving out details a review really shouldn't ignore. The 500 to 600-word sweet spot is difficult enough to hit while satisfying the basic function that a review serves, let alone a single paragraph. To me, a paragraph review is like an essay that I might have written in high school before my teacher taught me things like how you need to justify your statements and opinions to the reader.

I actually think it can be an incredibly useful thing for /writers/. Condensing 800 words into a single paragraph is a real and valuable skill, and I think it /can/ be done... I'm just not sure it should.

Yeah...I'm getting your points.
Even if I was asked to write a one paragraph review, I'd probably write a page, scour it for the main points, and try and condense it all down to one paragraph. 800-1200 sounds cool. I think United Games reviews tended to be of a similar length.

Regarding justifying points - it depends what you're trying to do - who you're speaking to, and what service you're providing. If you're giving a brief overview, or an in-depth review. What's great about the internet is you don't have to do one or the other. You could have a paragraph, and then click through if you want to read more.
But yeah, we had one to three page reviews in United Games (usually one page review of about the length Jason mentions, followed by a Take A Closer Look double page spread), but when I tried to do an E3 DVD, and we were running through 10 games for each format, we had to do these little roundups, for the voice-over script, that weren't more than two paragraphs, really. Anything longer, and we would have lost the viewer's attention - so short, sharp, witty, summaries, became necessitated.
So it depends what you want to do.

Regarding games mags, and news, yeah - I often hear complaints about EDGE's reviews, but praise for their features, which shows the latter is still a selling point, and I think magazines have a real strength in providing long features....I actually cannot read long articles online, I find it really difficult. I don't think other people have this problem, but it's something that I find myself unable to do.

If the internet is also giving us lower attention spans, then perhaps magazines having less going on on a page layout, and using white space to focus a reader's attention down on a single nugget per page, might be an interesting technique. But of course, it's less efficient with page counts, assuming you have the same amount of content spread out more.

To provide another summary,
there's a hypothesis, that as well as casual and hardcore gamesplayers, there might also be casual and hardcore readers. Said hypothesis would assume the casual audience like short, and the hardcore like long.
As for us, I think we just like writing. ^_^

The point Lewis raised, that being able to write short reviews is a good thing, is completely valid. I didn't mention it before, but I think one problem that people have with long reviews is the way they go on for ages without saying much. If you write a long review, it should be long by virtue of insightful commentary, not self-indulgence or some strange desire to appease the wordcount gods. People have responded to my writing a lot better on average since I learned to better focus my writing and to make sure that new paragraphs were actually covering new ground rather than serving as redundant summaries of things I already had said (concluding paragraph excluded, naturally).

Anyway, I think we're really all on the same page: we like writing and we like good quality. Most readers that we'd care to cater to are the same way, I'd wager.

Good summary there, Jason, regarding the positive aspects of being able to write short reviews. I recently read an article in PC Gamer, and was dismayed to find three quarters of the way down the first column, after a new subheading, the writer was still making the same point, he'd made in the previous paragraphs ['twas a Sam and Max Hit the Road piece, in the latest issue].

I still think humour and entertainment plays an important part, when it comes to maintaining attention with longer articles - provided it suits the style of the publication, or is welcomed by whoever's commissioning you. If I'm enjoying an article, I'm more likely to continue reading it.

If I ever find myself on IGN or something, checking reviews, I'll jump to the closing comments and the comments that go with the scores.

If it's a huge game, like a Metal Gear or something, I'll read the whole thing.