Reviewing reviewing

My review of Freedom Fighters went up on GameSpy.com today. I loved the game, but thought it was way short. Still, it has some of the best teammate AI I’ve seen yet, and it’s undeniably fun. See the full review for the skinny.
Video games aren’t the only thing I’ve been reviewing, though. I volunteered to spend the last couple of days going over submissions for the 2004 Society for I/O Psychology (SIOP) conference and reviewing them. These are scientific papers (lots of dissertations, theses, research reports, etc.) and proposals for symposiums and roundtable discussions. I submitted one myself.
Comparing the review process for video games with those of scientific papers is interesting. In both cases I’m asked to determine if it would be worthwhile for the audience to consume the media. Game reviews are a mixture of objective (feature set, bugs) and subjective (how fun it is, how good it looks). The SIOP reviews are also objective (scientific rigor, adherence to a specific format) and subjective (interpretation of results, contribution to the field).
The emphasis is flip-flopped for the two, to be sure. Games, being entertainment, are more focused on subjective factors, while scientific research is more focused on hard, objective facts and methods. But, if each one is done well, they’re not as different as you might think.
And you know what the really unexpected thing is? GameSpy provides about as much guidance for evaluating games as SIOP does for reviewing conference submissions (2,216 words for GameSpy vs. 2,356 words for SIOP). Guess both these people have their stuff together.