Press Reset: Episode Seven - 'FunFactor™'

A note from Arthur Gies, Reviews Editor:

I'm writing this at 11:45 p.m. the night before this episode of the documentary goes live. Both Phil and I have been pulling 80-hour weeks since the beginning of September, performing the video game site equivalent of herding cats. This is the first chance I've had to write this, and there's still more left to do. We're both exhausted, and reviews season? Well, this year it goes long, thanks to a new console courtesy of Nintendo.

I think it's easy to lose sight of, watching this episode of Press Reset, so I feel it bears clarification: Writing reviews is the best part of the job for many members of the video game press. I know it is for me, and I think I can speak for Phil as well. I love reviewing games, figuring out how they tick, talking about how they succeed, trying to determine why they sometimes fail. To the chagrin of some, I love forming and supporting an opinion. There's something very powerful about declarative, confident statements, and reviews, more than any other sort of content, let you know where a site stands. I feel pretty privileged to shepherd those opinions for Polygon.

We talk a lot about time in this episode — the time we spend getting things together, the time it takes to get things done. But reviews themselves are about time. They're about the finite amount of time you have. They're about respect for that time, and they're about helping you figure out how you can best spend it, and keep from wasting it. So even though we are, to quote a friend, "writing book reports about toys," there's something pure about that, at least.

- Arthur Gies, Reviews Editor

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