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As the Internet has grown in prominence in all of our daily lives, it has turned many of us into increasingly savvy consumers. Where, in the past, one might rely on a single review from a trusted source - be it a magazine, a TV show or simply a friend - before buying a product, the wide range of information sources available online allows everyone to access dozens if not hundreds of different opinions and experiences before committing.

This is true of everything from life's big purchases - cars and houses, for example - through to smaller ones, like holidays, computers and even, yes, videogames. Indeed, videogames in particular have developed a powerful and complex network of opinion sources. Popular, broad-based consumer websites are merely part of a wider continuum of opinion which stretches from word of mouth on forums, Facebook and Twitter through to mainstream press coverage, taking in a whole spectrum of specialist sites, fansites, YouTube videos, blogs, Digg posts and so on.

Like any complex network, key nodes have also emerged; places where viewpoints from different sources intersect and to which consumers often turn to get an overview. Sites like Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes and even some leading forums fill these roles.

All of this is, of course, wonderful if you're a consumer in one of the core demographics. Never before has it been possible to get quite so many viewpoints before putting down your hard-earned cash, and while that can also seem incredibly daunting, savvy consumers are becoming adept at sorting the signal from the noise, figuring out where they can get viewpoints that align with their own tastes and preferences, to the exclusion of others.

It's less wonderful, however, if you're a parent trying to figure out what games to buy for their children - in which case, sadly, you fall a long way outside of the key demographic of people who talk about games on the Internet.

Talking to the creators of kids' games about game journalism, for example, is usually a depressing affair. While developers are rarely terribly enamoured of writers in the first place - after all, you can't expect hugs and kisses from the people who create the products over which you've set yourself up as an arbiter of quality - those who work on kids' games are most often genuinely bitter, angry, or both.

What's more, they've got every right to be. One need only read reviews of kids' games on top games sites to understand the ire of the developers. It's not that these reviews simply note that the game is aimed at children, and unlikely to be of interest to the teenaged or young adult readership of the site. Rather, it's that the reviews can be unprofessional to an extreme, often adopting an extremely dismissive tone and even showing evidence of being based off mere minutes of playtime. All too frequently, the target audience of the game is forgotten, and any pretence of providing useful information to parents abandoned, in favour of the reviewer giving the game a savage kicking for not being the kind of game he, personally, enjoys.

Needless to say, this is a pretty unprofessional thing for a publication to do - and it's worth noting that not all of them do it. Many have simply chosen not to review kids' games at all, recognising that their staff simply aren't properly equipped for that task - a slightly disappointing decision, perhaps, but certainly better than the alternative of ploughing ahead with having twenty-something Gears of War aficionados reviewing games aimed at eight year old girls.

One could also question, of course, how important it is for a kids' game if a specialist game site gives the product a bad review - and the answer, of course, is that in the past it wouldn't really have mattered at all. Kids' games were routinely bought by parents who didn't play games themselves and had no contact with the specialist sites, so unprofessional reviewing by those sites made not a jot of difference.

As the Internet has developed more complex networks of opinion and influence, however, things have changed. Sites like Metacritic happily aggregate review scores without concerning themselves with the suitability of the review for the product in question, leaving most kids' games - even the most successful ones - languishing at the bottom of the review score pile. Meanwhile, the increased influence of social networks on search results means that a vicious, negative review of a kids' game that's judged to be funny by the young adult audience of the website on which it appeared is likely to be the first thing seen by any parent popping the name of the game into Google.

It's not all negative, of course - parents have their own social networking circles and often listen to word of mouth from very different sources, which allows them to get solid, helpful advice from other parents on games for their children. However, it's also the case that a huge swathe of new parents are gamers themselves, and will turn to specialist publications for their information - only to be put off or frustrated by the often dreadful coverage of games aimed at families or pre-teen children.

Solutions, sadly, aren't immediately apparent - the only effective one being for publications and journalists to develop a respect for the wider audience, rather than simply continuing to write polemic that's aimed at, well, people just like themselves. Film reviewers are usually perfectly capable of reviewing kids' movies without giving them a kicking for being simple, bright and accessible, and the same goes for those who write about books and TV - but then again, these are fields where criticism is much more mature, and rather less dominated by young men in their first job out of school, as is sadly the case with many parts of the videogame criticism business.

It's not just kids' games which are touched by this malaise, of course. Games aimed at niche audiences regularly get savaged by critics who don't understand why every game can't be aimed at Modern Warfare and Madden aficionados. Products aimed at children, women, older adults or minority groups aren't reviewed, they are thrown to the wolves, and those doing PR for those products find themselves wondering whether they might be better off simply ignoring huge swathes of the press and focusing on advertorials and marketing instead - which, of course, robs consumers of the chance to read unbiased opinion before investing their money.

The general treatment of kids' games, along with the treatment of other games aimed at the wider market, should be a call to the expansive media business which covers videogames and purports to be evolving a mature form of criticism: grow up. Good, professional criticism isn't about excess verbiage, flowery language and showing off how many books you've skimmed the summaries of on Wikipedia. It's about being able to see past your own biases, to understand the audience that a product is aimed at, place yourself in their shoes and view the experience from their perspective. Sometimes it's about refusing a review commission because you know you're not qualified to talk about games for that audience, and it's certainly about commissioning editors treating all products with respect, not just the ones that the fanboys will go crazy for.

Good, professional criticism, in other words, is hard work - but if the press is going to remain relevant as the industry expands into new demographics, if it's going to provide a useful service to important groups of people like the parents of young children, and if it's going to act fairly towards the developers whose lives are devoted to creating software for groups other than young men, then that's hard work which the games media needs to face up to.