Earlier this week, David Braben – boss of Frontier Developments, the guys behind such critically-underrated titles as Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo, Dog’s Life, and a bunch of other stuff – criticised the processes of game criticism in an editorial over on Develop-Online. Irony meters on location did not detect any significant surges in the vicinity.

While he does make one or two interesting introductory observations about the difficulties inherent in writing game reviews for different audiences, the whole argument trips and falls over the edge of reality with this:

“The best reviewers give spot-on reviews pretty soon after a game is released. They do not wait to see what others say, but nevertheless consistently come very close to the final average score.”

Ostensibly enough, it probably looks like a sensible statement. But what’s a “spot-on review”? And, assuming everybody else waits to see what everybody else says before saying anything, what’s that “final average score” really worth, anyway? By his own argument, that aggregate is maintained – at least in some part – by those reviews he suggests are poorly written.

The most immediate problem of a so-called “spot-on” review is that there’s simply no real way to quantify quite what that is, exactly, because what constitutes a “spot-on” review is always going to be subject to enormous discrepancy between readers.

The fundamental nature of game reviews – much like every other aspect of gaming, really – is a topic of some controversy*. Broadly, there are those people who expect a more objective approach to reviews, while others favour more subjective analyses. For all the space in between these positions, there is – apparently, paradoxically – not actually very much space for any sort of compromise. Both demographics are largely convinced that everybody should do things their way. Obviously, this means a lot of reviews are, simply, “wrong”, just because.

That “whooooooosh” sound is about 50% of Metacritic’s content hustling out the proverbial window.

But wait, there’s more. Confirmation bias theory posits that people tend to endorse information that supports their own personal conclusions – in the context of game reviews, this means that readers are much more likely to prefer those that reflect their own opinions, regardless of their relevance.

That “fweeeeeeeeeep” sound is maybe 20% of Metacritic’s previously-discarded content being hastily reeled back in the window and heaped on another 30% of it, while the rest of it is summarily dumped.

And we’re back at around half the available reviews, and that’s before repeating the same tedious procedure over again to account for every other conceivable vagary, including – but not limited to – platform and exclusive fascism, 12-year olds, and drearily cynical luddites who insist that everything released since Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is rubbish**.

Braben’s solution is that reviews should, in turn, be subject to review. But bearing everything I’ve just said in mind, who should be responsible for this? Who could be? And to whom would they be answerable? Is anybody even qualified to review the reviewers who review the reviewers’ reviews?

I think this concept of a “spot-on” review, then, is a hypothetical ideal, and an exceedingly unrealistic one, while the value of any title’s review aggregate is necessarily almost entirely up to the reader to determine on their own terms. For example, Just Cause 2 commands a pretty formidable 81 on Metacritic – I decided it was a big bag of balls. Where’s the “spot-on” review? It’s probably the one you most agree with.

For my own part, I’m one of those radical, postmodern writers who would much rather do away with a scoring system for game reviews altogether. I’m also a predominantly subjective writer, because that’s the kind of review I prefer reading for one reason or another. Other people will, of course, disagree. QED.

* Cf. PS3 versus Xbox, casual versus hardcore, fun versus Counter-Strike.
** I know one of them.

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