Video Game Criticism vs Review

These are just a few thoughts on the recent Sarkeesian video.  Last week I made the mistake of wandering into the comments on Kotaku surrounding the latest Damsel in Distress video.  It seems that as a community those of us who play games have a very difficult time separating a review of a game from a cultural critique of a game.  The mechanics of a game can be excellent, the plot engaging and the characters well developed while the game simultaneously possesses cultural signifiers that may be troubling to a portion of the players.  In fact as we demand greater complexity of games, we can hope that they become more culturally aware and complex as well.  We are used to thinking of games in terms of the review--an expert giving the reader context for their experience and enjoyment of the game.  In this context negative comments can easily make or break a title depending on the reviewer/publication.  Now that our games are growing up and ourselves along with them, we are beginning to see a public, academic and non-academic analysis of these games.  This analysis can only help us understand the games we play and help designers understand what it is we want from them.  Just as in literature or film, a critical essay or in this case video is just one person's analysis of the cultural impact of a text/film/game/etc.  It would seem that the correct response or the response that will help games grow the most would be a well reasoned critique from one's own perspective.  Where does one disagree? Why? and so forth.  It is difficult to write about culture, especially cultural objects that we feel strongly about; but we must separate our love of the thing for the place it holds in our lives from the unconscious messages it may be contributing to our shared cultural spaces.  Personally, I have my own objections to Sarkeesian's videos in that I think it is quite difficult to extract the role of the female in video games from the role of the female in geek culture as a whole (something she personally experienced with the launch of this series).  But then again we have to start the discussion somewhere...more to follow.