I don’t pen a word without 20 hours invested in the game unless it is a short title. I talk about the game with friends conversationally to get my thoughts in order, then I actually do a write-up if the game seems to deserve some word-of-mouth for innovation or refined design.
Sometimes, 20 hours isn’t enough for a game’s whole story, and it needs further investment to have a real analysis of scope - path of exile, elite:dangerous, any given mmo or fighting game, some 4x and rts, plenty of titles have zoomed-out takes that really take familiarity to understand.
Nothing bothers me more than clear beginner takes on a game written flippantly. Impossible to tell if someone is sharing an experience or just parroting what they read about the game when people talk about some titles recently, like gaming discussion has become infected at large by /v/ bandwagon culture.
It’s rare, but sometimes in talking or writing out how a game felt to play, I kind of change my mind about the experience. In the past few years I had the opportunity to just pick up a bunch of AAA titles as they dropped frivolously, since I sold a lot of dota 2 items from early TI events for mad steam bucks. I’ve noticed new IP in particular get a lot of hate from people who didn’t play the game at all and decided that without seeing any actual gameplay whatsoever, and going in to them I was kind of flippant myself, but by the end of the experience the gameplay always matters more than whatever the huge negative press cycle is focused on. Shitty dialogue? Level design woes? Random focus on a feature the genre typically does not have anyway? Sure, whatever, but I hardly remember anything from a game except for where the fun was derived when all is said and done.
Stephen King said the secret to being a good writer was to “Read a lot, write a lot” and keep that up. If you want to articulate your thoughts about a game, or even just improve at playing one, the same concept (practice) works all around here. I’m not going to say a disciplined approach is required for truth or validity, especially when it comes to games, but it sure helps you reach it in ways that literally just repeating what other people are saying cannot.