Gamers to blame for review scores?

Dan

Dan

Makhulu Silverback
When It Comes To Review Scores, Gamers Are Part Of The Problem
By Brock Beauchamp 19th Mar 2010

Lately, Internet forums have gone into DEFCON 5 over several magazines and high-profile reviewers that have bucked the norm and given popular franchises less than stellar write-ups. When one writer takes the time to play a game and post their thoughts to their respective websites and tell you, the reader, what they really thought of the game, many readers seem to ignore this and scroll directly to the bottom of the page. When they see that their favorite franchise has been saddled with the tragic score of 5/10, they immediately begin to hyperventilate and Outlook.exe files across the land begin to fire up in preparation for an assault on that reviewer after what obviously was a lapse of judgement on his part or full-blown mental retardation, depending on whom you ask.

In most reviews, writers point out their likes and dislikes in each game and while I steadfastly believe that they do a rather poor job of maintaining a reasonable level of expectation for what a game can and should be to a player, breaking down a game's contents is of the things they do pretty well, all considering. Yet few pay attention to this in favor of fawning over Metacritic and GameRankings. Both are useful tools in their own right because they put multiple reviews at the tip of your fingers in just minutes, but the aggregate score itself is only second fiddle to content. What does it tell you? It boils down hundreds of thousands of words of text into a number that means little on its own. One reviewer may love the story of Final Fantasy, another may hate it. One may hate the gameplay while the other loves it. Both may score it 7/10. What did you learn from that aggregate score? Here's a hint: absolutely nothing.

Let us admit a simple fact: reviewers are human beings. They have an opinion on something, just like you or I. They will hate games that you enjoy and list as one of your all-time favorites. They will score games 4/10 that you would give a perfect score. I hear people scream about how reviewers should conform to some kind of mysterious standard. What does that even mean? Being disingenuous with their own opinion while reviewing a game is the last thing we should wish for as a gaming populous. That leads to the very problem we're facing now, which is that game reviewers have largely gone the way of groupthink and rarely have the courage to stand up and say that they didn't like a game because most of their peers have already shot it into the 85+ spectrum of Metacritic.

Instead of taking that reasonable approach to reviewers and their opinions, gamers swear off Edge Magazine because they recently gave a big-budget game a 5/10 which is, under their scale, an “average” game. Instead of embracing the review sites that have the courage to say what they believe instead of deferring to a Metacritic aggregate in an attempt to fit in, gamers revolt and throw childish tantrums across gaming forums throughout the world. These gamers are so short-sighted that they fail to realize that these people are the ones we should look up to, not crucify, boycott, and complain about for months on end. Do we have to agree with their scores and reviews? Hell no, but at least they're putting themselves out there instead of white-washing a game's faults because their parent company depends on thousands of dollars of ad revenue from the publisher of said game.

To put it in Old West terms, many of you are actively cheering for the man in the black hat, you just never stopped complaining long enough to realize it.

Do you know how many video games Metacriticed over 90 in 2009? According to Metacritic, across the six major platforms, 12 games were better than the average Best Picture of the past five years. That's one year of gaming and that is only including multi-platform titles once. There's something wrong with this system but not all the blame can be put on the reviewers. We, the gaming population, have to rise above these childish antics and stop score-whoring every game that releases. In fact, I'm of the opinion that no Metacritic score should be used for anything ever again, period. We should stop blasting reviewers for having an opinion and breaking a game down piece-by-piece in their writing merely because they didn't give the score “we” wanted for that game. If you can't spend enough time to read a review to see if the reviewer marked off points for a game element that you consider to be a plus, you should really just shut the hell up and not talk about the review. Or maybe you should read the piece and argue the validity of its points. That would be a novel concept.

For those of you who can't be bothered to read this editorial, let me summarize the above paragraphs so you can go back to bitching about a reviewer having the courage to state his or her opinion:

RTFA.
Click to expand...

(sauce)

An interesting article, especially considering recent backlashes of our own, and another good reason why we shouldn't even bother with review scores in the first place IMHO.

Opinions? Flames?
 
I don't even look at the score. I like to read the reviewers opinion. Some people must wake up and realize that it is an opinion of the game and kinda a guide line.
 
I take my hat off to the guys reviewing and taking bat that gets thrown at them, especially when people start a whole controversial story that their opinion is better and all that, while in the mean time you are only doing what you have been asked to do and you are not being bias about it either because you can't. :) People should not see reviews as one persons comments but a writer, someone just giving an honest view after playing it way before anyone else... :rolleyes:

I like the reviews, I do not read reviews to see a score, I read them to get an understanding of what I can expect out of playing that game and I'm sure that is how everyone else should see the reviews. :)
 
Reminds me of the explosion over at Destructoid recently when Jim Sterling gave Final Fantasy XIII a 4/10. I mean, you'd think he'd personally assaulted people or something. If you read the review, he completely justifies his opinion and score.
 
RustPuppet said:
(sauce)

An interesting article, especially considering recent backlashes of our own, and another good reason why we shouldn't even bother with review scores in the first place IMHO.

Opinions? Flames?
Click to expand...

Very cool find Rusty. Though i like the idea of being able to put games into numerical category for good, ok, crap or, very rarely, excellent. It makes it possible at a glance to see if the game it worth it, if you are especially intresting in a specific franchise or IP then you will read the review to see why it got the score it did. I particularly like Teamxbox.com's scoring mechanism where they will say, for example:

Presentation: 6
< explanatory text here>
Click to expand...

This help to explain to a reader that Game Y got 5 /10 for Sound and this is the reason. As a reviewer myself i must say sometimes it can be really hard giving a game a numerical rating. STALKER Call of Pripyat was especially hard for me. It comes down what the reviewer feels it important to the game, does the added user friendlyness make up for the lack of direction? Something all readers should remember, reviews are always opinions. Get me and Rusty here to review the same title and you will get 2 radically different reviews because me and him look at different aspects of the game. The Assassin's Creed 2 Review discussion is clear evidence of this.

You read a review, maybe a few, then take the collective feeling you get from all of them, and make your decision.
 
sycogrim said:
I take my hat off to the guys reviewing and taking bat that gets thrown at them, especially when people start a whole controversial story that their opinion is better and all that, while in the mean time you are only doing what you have been asked to do and you are not being bias about it either because you can't. :) People should not see reviews as one persons comments but a writer, someone just giving an honest view after playing it way before anyone else... :rolleyes:

I like the reviews, I do not read reviews to see a score, I read them to get an understanding of what I can expect out of playing that game and I'm sure that is how everyone else should see the reviews. :)
Click to expand...

Same here.
 
Azimuth said:
Reminds me of the explosion over at Destructoid recently when Jim Sterling gave Final Fantasy XIII a 4/10. I mean, you'd think he'd personally assaulted people or something. If you read the review, he completely justifies his opinion and score.
Click to expand...

/Swallows Hard

Im reviewing FF XIII for mygaming....
 
Reviews are merely guidelines. No one ever said to take anyone's review as fact written in stone. Could you imagine a World where people are so narrow-minded about everything that they base their own personal decisions on the opinions and tastes of other people? No man. People who take reviews seriously need to really get a life.
 
I get my reviews from the console captains. They are a small bunch of non-profit gamers who post via facebook. They are always dead on with opinions of games.
 
My opinion was always that all reviews shoudl be done by Two reviewers, one player new to the genre and one a seasoned Vet
That would balance out the review for new and experienced players alike
 
i don't pay much attention to reviews. if it's something i know i'm getting, i avoid reviews to block anything spoilerish. if it's something i'm unsure of and there's no demo, i either rent or check a review for more info.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top