Those Wot I Thinks were not called reviews, but even in the early days of the site they functioned identically to reviews. The founders wrote the same sort of stuff for RPS that they had been writing (and would continue to write) for PC Gamer, Eurogamer, etc.
The name “Wot I Think” was more a response to readers than a differentiation from other sites. Certain kinds of reader would mistake reviews for objectivity, and so RPS set out its stall early and clearly. This does not mean that other sites were striving in any way for objective reviews. Even if you think the multi-score method (6 for Sound, 7 for Replayability, etc.) was leaning in the direction of objectivity, it was still… y’know, not.
Wind forward 13 years and that style of reviewing is gone, and the reviews editor at IGN is regularly pointing out to people that all reviews are subjective. Far fewer readers within games mistake reviews for objectivity, and those that do probably don’t deserve debating. Plus loads of other games websites also ditched the scores. So: do our reviews really need to be named after what amounts to a 13-year-old joke?
My view is, times have changed. People know what “review” means. And given that our WITs were just reviews in all but name, let’s give them the name that people understand.
(At least until we think of a better joke.)
Does this mean that more people might find the site by Googling? Yes. I am broadly of the opinion that our work is excellent and that the world would be a better place if everyone read it.
As for not realising that Grounded would be such an in-depth piece, and therefore not clicking on it: that is good feedback. I will think on it.
And as for “reviews come with burdens”, what I mean is: readers have certain expectations for what a review should contain, and since everyone worked out that “Wot I Think” was a synonym for a review, the expectations were the same. A looser essay format can be more liberating and produce more interesting thoughts - but this is murky territory that gets into the difference between “review” and “criticism” and we should all find more fun things to do with our time.
