There has been a lot of discussion lately as to the value and relevancy of written criticism. While I don’t agree that YouTube will be the death of traditional games coverage, I do believe that written game reviews will become irrelevant sooner rather than later. When the coroner examines the corpse of the games criticism, he’ll note on the toe tag that the death was caused by emoji.
Emojis. Everyone loves them. When I go to a restaurant now, I don’t write a 500-word review on Yelp. Instead, I just send out a simple message on social media that conveys all of my feelings in less than 140 characters. A simple message like “Nico’s pizza =  and the waitress" ” better conveys my thoughts than if I had ran through my meal and actually discussed what I liked about my experience. It doesn’t matter that my meal was brought out on time, and my water with lemon was consistently filled. What matters is that the service was kept 100. Everyone understands the simplified elegance of emojis, and that’s exactly why it’ll make criticism obsolete. After all, there’s a lot of confusion when it comes to written reviews. This is due to that dreaded subjectivity and how every site uses a different review scale (and trust me, if I’m not even bothering to read the review I’m not looking at the scale). Thankfully, there’s no confusion when it comes to emojis. Everyone knows that the  is the highest praise tha...