There’s been some hubbub lately over the popular topic of videogame review scores, thanks to a recent column by Simon Parkin. In his GameSetWatch thought-piece Mr Parkin makes some rather astute observations about the troubling numbers, but he also comes up with a rather contentious assertion.
The average reader (even if they don’t know it) is after a complete objective, scientific comparison between game x and game y with data and statistics and, finally, a numerical point on a linear scale by which they can compare, for example, Mass Effect with Rock Band and see which one is empirically better.
Oof.
I’d argue for something quite different. I think that the median of readers actually wants a subjective opinion, even if he doesn’t know it. In fact, I get the feeling that Mr Parkin actually goes some way to saying that in his article when he addresses the subject of hype, which he thinks conditions readers’ expectations.
Scores then become a reference to a game’s preceding hype. An 8/10 for a game that was hugely hyped to hobbyist gamers is a punch in the stomach for excited fans (see the anguish exhibited in the MGS4 comments thread). Conversely, an 8/10 for a game nobody cares about is viewed a gross over-generosity.
What the hype topic does is raise the question of how much someone has been exposed to this or that marketing ecology, and to what degree they are susceptible to its influences. And anyway, haven’t we all kind of agreed that word of mouth is what really carries the most weight? It’s this that leads me to the idea that in fact all gamers want is a subjective description, even if that description is simply a number attached to the game. And let’s be clear about this, the number is a description, in some sense, because it’s trying to attribute some kind of quality to the game. (A “seven” kind of game.) I remember seeing one Zero to Ten score system given verbal equivalent. “0 = Unplayable, not a game. 5 = Okay, but boring or badly made, 10 = Amazing, brilliant in many ways,” that kind of thing. And I think that’s an honest way of looking at them. There’s a reason why most people look at that score at the end of a review before reading: it’s the gist of the review, the most general description we can give. (Perhaps attributing that 8/10 becomes more perceptual than anything else, like saying it’s a red-brown coloured game, when you thought it was more rust coloured.)
Readers want a description, starting with a number, because it allows them to better define their own thoughts on a game, whether or not they’re in-line with the conclusion of the review. If undecided it might nudge their feelings one way or the other. Or, if they’ve already made up their mind, it allows them to express their thoroughly ingrained opinion – strikingly illustrated by Oli Welsh’s Metal Gear Solid Review. Readers get to argue why the review is wrong, or why their description is more suitable. It’s not exactly dialogue, but the result is similar: we get to make up our minds about something, either by changing our description, or confirming that what we thought was right all along. And there’s not much that’s objective about that.
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Yes, I was thinking of Jubal Early.
objective/subjective is an easy-to-grasp concept, and is useful only as long as you don’t scrutinize its meaning too closely.
If the experience of games were entirely personal, there would be no point in talking about them. There must be some shared element that serves as the basis for discourse. I’m a fan of experiential exposition, which is why I read RPS. But if I were to quantify a game, I would do it along the lines of asking “What does this game set out to do?” and “How well does it succeed at it?” That would never be enough, so I’d have to toss in something about the overall aesthetic experience, and that’s where it gets messy. But generally, the question isn’t “Did I like the game,” but rather “How will my readership receive it?” If you write pompous, turgid prose, your readership will appreciate certain manifestations of the ludic art. But if you keep it real. It’s gonna be sumthin else.
So it doesn’t have to involve “subjective experience.” It can be an honest assessment with reference to what the game is, what it seeks to be, and who would want it.
P.S., Overusing the passive voice doesn’t constitute “Journalistic Puffery”
P.P.S., They can say things like “The writing was bad”, but if they do, they’re not doing their job. Much better to say:
“I walked into the operating room; the nurse came up, and with perfect Oxbridge enunciation said, “Mr. Doctor, the sufferer stands in the ante-bureau.” Evidently Babelfish handled the localization.”
“Edge’s system, where scores are fixed in perpetuity and try to gauge if a game has DONE AN ART (leading to a mass of 6-8 scores of games with wildly varying levels of quality, because most games are not developed with the intention of meeting Edge’s approval) is less useful to the reader.”
Yeah, but do people who read Edge pay any attention to the scores? I suspect they only include them because it’s the done thing in games publishing.
Naurgul, at least half of the things you mention in that list are far from objective, and the rest tend to be included in subjective reviews anyway (apart from texture resolution – are you taking the mickey?).
Alco75: You speak truth. We’d all be a lot happier if you just submitted to my diktats.
Naurgul: Perhaps surprisingly, I’m not entirely without sympathy to your position, but when you’ve got things like “Emotion Provoking” on your list of objective things, you have to realise you’ve gone awry somewhere. I take the position that James mentions – that a review should contain enough enough objective description of the game’s experience that you can decide for yourself whether it’s something that interests you. Even when I slag a game, I try to explain what it’s like and how it actually operates.
(In terms of technical elements, I tend to take the approach that if something is exceptional (either good or bad) it’s useful information and should get a mention. With a limited word-count, omission tends to mean “standard”.)
I also slightly bristle at the idea that people who let subjectivity inform the review aren’t taking it seriously. Because frankly, I suspect the opposite is the truth. Writing a list of the games’ qualities is fucking easy.
Thiefsie: When the game you’re reviewing has two hour-plus cut-scenes, I think a little florid ending is probably the way to go. For the record, the MGS4 review situation – specifically, the response Ollie has had to deal with, absolutely disgusts me. People are pilloried for giving the big games 10/10 and when someone doesn’t, they’re crucified.
KG
I hope you’re playing the wind up merchant, Naurgul. Half of your examples are from from easily objectifiable, the other half I would venture cannot be validated in any unbiased manner at all.
I would love to hear how emotion-evoking can be measured or be considered in an objective (and as far as I understand it, you’re taking objective as in ‘unbiased’) manner?
As far as Edge readers go, I still skip to the scores before reading the review, but only because of habit. Not that they are anymore or less meaningful than elsewhere. At least Edge wears its artsy fartsyness on it sleeve – and takes a genuine interest in games as a medium, rather than as products. I read it, knowing what kind of angle I’ll be getting, and ‘cos of the pretty pictures.
Just to play with the specific example. I understand that emotions and logic are two separate things but that does not say anything about being able to evoke emotion not being an objective thing or a process. Don’t advertisements by design evoke emotions; desire for the advertised product to be specific? Emotions are an action-reaction thing. Certain stimuli can produce certain reactions from humans. Emotions can be produced that way. But I digress. Aren’t books and films out there that bring out emotions out of the majority of their readers or viewers? Can’t that be an objective measure of how capable something is to produce emotion? I’d go as far to say that this is one of the easiest things to measure. You know when you feel emotions and you can count how often it occurs in an audience.
To summarise the flaw in your argument, I’d say it’s a straw man. My position was “The capability of a piece of art to produce emotion is objective” (at least up to a degree, I didn’t say anything about precision or quantifying or even comparing, to be fair). To prove that wrong, all you did was say “Objective things have to do with logic, emotions and logic don’t go together; therefore the proposition is wrong”.
The examples are just examples. I have no wish to defend them on a one by one basis but I will do so if you need it so much.
I really wish, however that reviews were just a list of well thought-out, as-much-objective-as-possible values assigned to attributes. I think it’s far from easy; that’s why instead of thinking things over, reviewers just write down what they felt about it. I don’t want to know your opinion, I just need enough information to form my own.
PS: I’d love to see how things like gameplay originality and graphics scalability can be “far from easily objectifiable” at best, as Cooper seems to imply.
@KG
Thiefsie: When the game you’re reviewing has two hour-plus cut-scenes, I think a little florid ending is probably the way to go. For the record, the MGS4 review situation – specifically, the response Ollie has had to deal with, absolutely disgusts me. People are pilloried for giving the big games 10/10 and when someone doesn’t, they’re crucified.
To be honest, Kieron, I rather think that Eurogamer bring it on themselves.
First, EG takes to pretending that it has some ‘fair and balanced’ scoring system, and puts a few “low” scores on games like Gears of War until everybody starts believing them, and then suddenly ruins it all by spunking 10s on Oblivion, Halo 3 and any other bit of overhyped shit that comes its way.
And the situation could be completely avoided by not requiring the reviewer to offer a mark out of ten. Even the breathless fanboy frottage of Rob Fahey’s Halo 3 review was (slightly) more subtle than the OMG 10/10 LOL mark implies.
With Edge and Gamer I’ll generally look at the score first. It doesn’t really tell you anything about the game, but it does give a general impression of whether or not the reviewer liked it – sets a ‘tone of voice’ for the text if you like.
As for the response to the MGS4 review – disgusting? Yes. Surprising? Sadly not. Some games series seem to attract the worst of the rabid fanboyism (whereby people who don’t adore the game are not just wrong, they’re subhuman) – and MGS is one of them.
It seems to be an innate need of humanity to have someone to hate, preferably someone different – people who look different, people who believe different things, people who don’t enjoy hour long cutscenes, etc…
Nobody enjoys hour long cutscenes. Except the people who make them.
surely?
One thing I think people are overlooking is that everyone (that I saw here, anyway) who is arguing for numerical scores also says that you have to get to know the reviewer or group to get a feel for what that score really means. That is, the score itself is – at best – meaningless without the context of the reviewer’s background.
Well, I have to agree with that assessment, but step back and assume the role of the “average consumer” for a moment. NB: If you’re reading this, you aren’t in that group.
Especially now that MetaCritic is taking over, it’s highly unlikely that the average consumer will ever get to read a given review or know where that 67.3 came from, much less build a rapport with the writer based on a series of reviews and shared opinions. Even on a given site, it’s not always a given that you will know who wrote it, what other games they have reviewed, and what direction they are approaching the game from. I’ve read hundreds of reviews myself, and I could only name a handful of reviewers. The best reviews will work hard to establish that context within the review itself, but the number, of necessity, doesn’t contain any of that.
So, without that context (which isn’t that simple to create in the first place), we have just removed the one thing that makes that number/letter meaningful to the consumer. Why, then, do we want to keep the “scores” around?
Naurgul
Taking here objectification to mean an allusion to a measurable reality of a game’s attributes, I couldn;t really disagree more.
To run with the same example; it’s not about logic, so much as irreducibility. Emotions, as much as they are biological, are not easily reducible to a set of measurable phenomena. Sure, measurable phenomena such as hormonal levels, heart rate, neural activity, etc. are indications of the affective power of cultural artefacts. I’d hardly expect (or want) game reviewers to wire themselves up to measure these phenomena when playing games. More importantly, the affective power is not reducible to those. Neither is ‘counting the number of affected poeple in an audience’ a desirable measure, given that those affects will vary widely and, anyway, what does it mean, in a form whereby all the respondants will be answering the same question, to ask (as opposed to propose) ‘are you emotional’? Comparability, largely the point of quantification in relation to game scores, becomes nigh meaningless in such a situation. Naming games, or a game’s attributes ‘Good’ and ‘bad’, or on a scale thereof becomes meaningless in the face of fanboyism, languages, personal gaming histories, genre (game and setting / narrative) likes / dislikes etc.
And, remember, we can discuss emotional engagement because we’re gamers. We, to various extents, share forms of cultural knowledge, which not only shape, but largely determine, emotional engagement in games. Without that, things would be very different.
Ok, so that’s pulling part one example, but similar arguments about cultural knowledge (which differs between gamers as much as between gamers and non-gamers) makes quantifying UI intuitiveness, pacing, ‘understandability’, coherence of narrative, immersion etc. etc. just as fraught. Moreover, it’s no small cliche to say no one plays the same game. As with film, no one watches the same film – we bring all manner of memories, affective dispositions, cultural knowledges to the cinema which shape our engagement. This is doubly so with games, whereby the interactive, feedback nature of the media is not hidden, but largely the point of it.
Ok, backpedal somewhat. There is clearly more common ground upon which critique is based than I am suggesting. If experiences were as fragmentory and disparate as I’ve made out, game reviews would be even more pointless. But the cultural knolwedges which makes us ‘gamers’ as thus able to discuss games with a certain level of familiarity – the ‘common grounds’ upon which an objective review may strive for are shaky, unfirm, nebulous things. We can allude to them, we can recall them, we can aim for them, but they cannot be fixed, written or known. Though it can be alluded to, in order to give some semblance of coherence and comparability (and to give game reviewers a job); there is no common ground between gamers stable enough to be the lode stone against which games may be objectively measured.
As for scalability, performance – those are more easily measurable in the traditonal sense. I would have no problem with frame-rate analysis of games over various system, other than it’s pretty damned dull.
Sound effects? Objectified how – by closeness to reality? What if a game isn’t striving for realism? How do you measure the ‘good or badness’ of the sound effects for peggle?
Ditto textures, level design etc.
In such instances, being, or appearing to be “as-much-objective-as-possible” is not only fallacious, but misleading. It purports a knowledge, an unbiased, non-subjective measurement – an insight – by which a reviewer may have the final word on a game. We know that’s certanly not the case.
I wonder if there’s this much hand-wringing over scoring movies and such at non-game publications? For some reason, people make a big deal about this as it relates to games, but don’t seem to care that almost every movie and music review includes a score.
Steve: I wonder about that too. There certainly isn’t in music where I do stuff*. Is it an audience thing (i.e. Games players are a little more anal than most consumers) or is it something about the medium (i.e. There’s more in a game that people think can be measured objectively)?
I dunno. It’s a kettle of the proverbial fish.
KG
*Admittedly, the only place I write music reviews for now doesn’t use marks full-stop.
With most PC releases these days being console ports, it’s really crucial these days to have a review that does something as simple as tell whether the PC controls actually work. Lego Indy they’re totally broken like all the other Lego games, that was all the information I needed on that one. Assassin’s Creed, they’re crap, again all I needed to know.
Steve and Kieron: I think some of it has to do with the fact that videogames are *our* medium. Music and films have had earlier generations who have wrestled over what makes canon; what the rules and language and boundaries are when establishing the good from the bad and the ugly. But games are so young, and there’s so much crossover between game culture and internet culture (i.e. the demographic that primarily use the internet also play games – see Digg.com where videogames are one of the eight sole categories into which ALL NEWS must be filed under) so I think everyone feels like they want to be a part of that process. Maybe. I dunno, I’m thinking out loud here.
I’d also just like to point out that the impetus for the original article was MS’s decision to use aggregated and averaged scores to decide the fate of titles on XBLA; the point being that, if we all agree different publications use scales in different ways, then surely those numbers aren’t so much the wisdom of crowds as the foolishness of random data. Nowhere is that better exemplified than in the example of the reviewer who gave Penny Arcade Adventures a 4/10 for Edge and a 68% elsewhere. I think, because of that decision, of all this discussion and more is worthy.
Simon: Yeah, but previous generations didn’t get so hung up over bloody numbers. What is it about games and gamers which reduces it to arithmetic? It’s an interesting difference about the form. Other medium got hung up on the discourse – we don’t, so much.
KG
In reading through these comments, I’ve been thinking back to art school critiques, wherein the most damning thing I could say is also the most vague:
“I’m not really feeling it.”
Now, this would usually, if the critique is done right, be accompanied by other, more technical things. The colors HERE aren’t quite right. This bit’s foreshortened weirdly. The contrast between the figure and the background kind of make that guy look like a phallic silhouette. But either way, what it comes down to in the end is either “I like it” or “I don’t, really.”
Now, THIS is a real thing. The effect of a piece, on me, is real and (albeit vaguely) quantifiable. A good critique, and by extension a good review, looks at this impression and analyzes it, and tries to figure out which elements of the piece contributed to it. You might call this subjective, but I’d call it specific. The effect the piece had is specific to me, and is a result not only of the piece itself but of my own history, tastes, and prior experiences with the medium.
If I do a good job, I’m looking at that effect objectively. I’m figuring out, and then pointing out, what it is about the piece that affected me positively and negatively. I’m also pointing out what aspects of my own personality interacted with these, so the artist I’m critiquing knows how I fit into his idea of his intended audience.
But still, none of that changes the fact that the effect of the piece is specific to me. Because the effect of a piece is dependent on how it interfaces with me, and I’m the only person I can speak for. A video game, as a form of entertainment (art, whether it’s got a capital or not) is trying to create that effect . . . and I’m the only affected person I can speak for.
So, Narugul: even in a perfect, ideal world, you will never get an “Objective” review of the game’s merits. This isn’t even a matter of “Oh, everyone’s subjective to some degree” . . . the very thing that the review is trying to MEASURE is specific to the reviewer. This examination can – and should – be done as objectively and logically as possible. But all a reviewer can do is say “These elements worked for ME, and these didn’t,” because (again,) the success of the elements is contingent on them interfacing with him, and he’s the only mind he has access to.
And through that, as James G said, you get an idea of what the reviewer is bringing to the table, and how similar or different you are from them. And from that, you get a good idea if the game is one you’d enjoy or not. Granted, this sort of analysis of a review is something that requires a little bit of thinking, and it would be much, much easier if someone could just give you a judgement that you could adopt wholesale.
But until our culture becomes at least a LITTLE bit more of a dystopia, that’s not really going to be possible.
And Kieron: I think that’s what it is, actually. We, as a culture, like to share opinions. Not share as in “give to other people,” in the sense that we form a sense of community based on shared views. So we’re voracious consumers of judgements; we want to be able to say “This game was GOOD. And this game was CRAP” so that when we’re talking to someone, we’ll be able to provoke a “Yeah, totally!” response and reinforce our sense of kinship.
I think this is something, if not new, has definitely grown in scope in recent years. It came with global connectivity, and the internet; we’re in social situations where the only thing we can have in common, and the only thing that defines us, really, is the views we hold on forums and comment threads. And it’s much easier to hold a number as a view than a complex and nuanced opinion: I can get a much better reaction, both positively and negatively, by saying “Twilight Princess Deserved an X.Y” than I could by saying “Here’s the things I liked and didn’t like about the game.”
Noc: Yeah. I didn’t pick up Narugul’s points as I’m a bit too busy to go too deep into it but… well, all you can do with any story story is say whether it was emotionally moving for you. I always recall someone arguing anyone who found Dance in the Dark moving was mentally subnormal, in an entirely serious way. Conversely, that was a film I needed multiple vodkas afterwards before I became even vaguely human.
In games, I laugh at – say – MGS’s extents. They’re terribly written, subnormal rubbish. They mean the world to some people.
All a critic can do is talk about the effect a piece of culture has had on them, and try and focus no the exact elements that managed to make them feel like that. It’s based on the subjective experience, but it shouldn’t be a wishy-washy “This is how it made me feel”. It should be focused, determined, intelligent, human. HOW DID THIS THING WORK AND HOW DID IT DO WHAT IT DID TO YOU? That’s what it’s about.
I’m drinking!
KG
On huge games that are massively hyped, or for games that very little info is released about (see Alan Wake), score really don’t matter to me. What matters is the content, what looks interesting, or what would be good to play. However for games that have great gameplay mechanics, but everything else is on the surface (e.g. GRID, or Gears II), a score can help you decide whether the game is just worth it or not. The new PoP I would definately read a review or three of, but Battlefield: Bad Company I would generally glance at the review and check the score rundown of, if it got repeated good 8’s or 9’s, I would consider buying it.
Now that our blog is up, and we’ve started on reviews, I’ve found that scores seem needless and trivial once you’ve written an entire review. However- so far I’ve only written film and music reviews; in past game reviews I’ve done, a score seems much more fitting. (Byline: I’m of the opinion that an out of 20 system is the most(?) strongly balanced scoring system. It has the clarity of /10 (without decimal points), and loses the pointless unit of the percentile system (what’s the difference between 81% and 83% yadda). I usually give things an /20 if it comes to it.)
EDIT: I had the pleasure of encountering a lad on the IGN boards who claimed that reviews should NEVER be subjective, and that they should NEVER be based on opinion :D
Its that bloody DnDs fault with its D20s and D4s, and Axes of 6 thoat damage.
Pcs and programmers love numbers, but they cant handle ambiguity and they try to quantify things absolutely, but they keep ending up with a point.
Damn, that MGS4 thread is amazing. I thought I’d seen everything with Zelda.
We need some version of Poe’s Law for fanboys; No parody of extreme obtuseness and outrage in the face of disenting opinions regarding a given popular computer game series or platform can exceed, and therefore will be indistinguishable from, the real thing.
Taken at face value though what they say is sort of defensive and protective. You called my baby ugly to his face, before I could cover his ears and he’s old enough to know what it means! Bad reviews are gonna damage the platform, damage the game, damage the site for being a disenting voice etc so you shouldn’t do it for everyone’s sake.
That is generally how I look at these things; fanboy-ism plain and simple. This is a tad simplistic though, as I was the opposite about Halo 3 and, to some degree, Bioshock; I was like ‘ten for Halo 3 is like ranking Independance Day alongside The Godfather’. Which of course is horribly horribly wrong and yet perfectly fine and offers no kind of argument and is exactly what people are talking about.
The score, I suspect, is just a convenient focal point for debate and as such would probably just move somewhere else if there wasn’t one (this is me pursuing the ‘blame the fanboys’ line still). The average Eurogamer thread not devoted to beloved-fan-classic-getting-too-low-a-rating contains a good deal of debate about whether the review matches the score; “That read like a seven not a six” “Man I was sure it’d get 4 after that screed” etc etc. I would be interested to see what happens if there wasn’t one. Would that mean there’s nothing to talk about? It would make it more difficult to talk about, but I think it might still happen.
Going back in time, there was that notorious Gamesdomain review of Deus Ex which basically trashed every little annoying detail about it. As we know you can’t say bad things about Deus Ex, you just can’t. So there was…consternation. Everything the guy said was true about the game; it’s ugly, it’s buggy, it’s generally clunky, runs like a dog, has quite dodgy voice acting etc etc. All things that are bound to annoy people, and aren’t reviewers people too? The reaction generally attacked the credibility of the review for failing to acknowledge the game’s good points and, perhaps most importantly, ambition (did the positive reviews pay appropriate attention to its bad points I wonder). This was a contravenion of what reviews are supposed to do, it was mean spirited and subjective. This was a site without review scores and often used multiple reviewers (this might have even been a second opinion review. Not sure). Actually they might have had a star rating at some point and certainly had awards, but the rage was about the appropriateness of the review’s content (well, the rage as projected through nerdy rationalisation of feelings). I’d be interested to see what happens if Eurogamer stopped giving scores anyway. I dunno if I’m missing the point of the discussion somewhere, but there you go.
The part about XBLA deleting low rated games is bloody terrible though. Why bother moving into the digital age at all? It’s just like everything that was lost when film went to video and when VHS was replaced by DVD. Or the race to bottom caused by Walmart not carrying R-rated content etc. They’re determined to create Gamespot-esque PR hell around every game and review with that idea. Even if ratings were somehow objective and absolute there’s been an immeasurable contribution to culture from, for one example, really really abysmal horror films. Complete idiocy.
““That read like a seven not a six” “Man I was sure it’d get 4 after that screed” etc etc. I would be interested to see what happens if there wasn’t one.”
That’s definately a good point. If there was no score we probably wouldn’t be hearing the fanboys at all- but there is a chance a bruhaha would be raised about the review’s lack of score of course (probably from the… fanboys who want a score? Damn). Also mind that MetaCritic say “If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review.”
I personally love the MGS series (playing through numero 3, Subsistence again, and loving it), and I wasn’t really disappointed with the Eurogamer or Edge score. From these critics an 8 is a fairer score; it’s really very good, but not great or revolutionary. For a lover of MGS a high 9 might be appropriate, but not too much.
The score would make more sense in my eyes if it was written as a 16/20.
The kerfuffle about scores for games is nothing compared to how seriously they apply to restaurants.
multiple hour-long cutscenes? That’s no game; that’s a television miniseriies event!
IMO the subjective part of game ratings is where it fails. A rating system should be created and universaly used that is based on only measurable/provable criteria … let’s call it the “Myros Scale” just for a moment ;p
ie
Game originality
Game length
Stability
Replayability
etc etc
While not all reviewers will agree and come up with the same score at least for the gamer there will be a known basis for comparing the reviewers and a common understanding of what a “5″ or a “10″ means.
Kind of the Richter Scale but for games :)
Myros
The point of a numeric score for many outlets is not so much to provide an aggregation of the review as to draw traffic and increase advertising revenue, which is why you’ll occasionally see IGN (and others) giving games anything but a perfect score or somewhere there around.
Most games journalism amounts to little but PR on behalf of distributors or platform holders (main advertisers) anyway, so I wouldn’t take any of it particularly seriously.
Everybody should adopt the ‘One Life Left’ school of scoring games.
also, I rate this article [7]
Myros: lets look at that for a second, shall we?
- Game Originality: Umm. This is pretty subjective. Check the article on Crysostasis further up the page: We’ve got a bunch of people saying “Bioshock Rip-Off” and a bunch of people saying “No, it’s original” and a bunch of people saying “It’s drawn from these different sources entirely.” Rating this, of all things, is entirely dependent on the scope of the subject’s familiarity with possible influences. So THIS varies tremendously from person to person, even from objective, well educated person to objective, thoughtful person with similarly broad horizons.
- Game length. Alright, this can be measured pretty well, in terms of hours of content.
- Stability: This is INCREDIBLY subjective, but in a different way than usual: this time, it depends on the subjects computer. Different computers that share identical statistics can have wildly differing reactions to a game, based on any number of nonstandard cards, programs running in the background, etc. You can see this were you’ve got threads full of people saying “This game keeps crashing” and a similar amount of people saying “I’ve had absolutely no problems with it.” Giving a score for this would involve a survey across a wide variety of players, and is hardly something that’s part of a review.
- Replayability: Right. This is “How much fun do I have playing the game over again?” Now, sometimes games are the same each playthrough. Other times they’re different. Either way, “How much fun I had” is a COMPLETELY subjective issue.
Now, with your list of things that are ostensibly able to be “objectively” quantified, we end up with this:
The point I’m making here is not that reviews don’t mean anything. It’s that you cannot divorce someone’s experience from them as an individual. You have to do some THINKING here, like it or not, and draw a conclusion for yourself that is likely going to be different from that given by the reviewer. A good reviewer will give you, in the review, the tools needed to do this easily without having to make too much conjecture on your own part. (”He found that the game was too dialog heavy, but I know that I haven’t found issue with extensive dialog in the past, so I should be alright” as opposed to “He doesn’t like RPGs so he didn’t like this game, but I DO like RPGs so I . . . might?”)
But you are not going to be able to have a be-all-and-end-all number that you can stick on to a game and that is that. Or even a similar be-all-and-end-all SET of numbers.
And anyone who claims to be giving one is either bullshitting you or not thinking clearly.
Good call, Noc. It’s (in most cases) literally impossible not to be subjective, to at least some extent. However, you forget that it’s only the land of PC gaming that has an issue with subjective stability; on Console, everybody get’s the same experience. That’s one of the things I feel console gaming has one-upped PC gaming on. If they were ever at odds anyway =D
I think it was a good point that scores are more objective than the body of the review though. Your words might seem biased, but surely you have more of a handle on the numbers you tag at the end?
Given Edge’s anonymity, I’m curious as to how Gabe from Penny Arcade knew that it was the same reviewer on both magazines?
One of the first issues of Edge I ever bought, back in 2003, featured an article discussing games reviewing and scoring – how no review can be called “definitive”, etc. It still stands out in my mind as one of the most Edge-y articles they’ve ever done, and one of my favourites. In the same issue, as an experiment they removed the scores from the end of the reviews, replacing them all with question marks (but they didn’t go all the way; the scores were all listed on a single page elsewhere in the issue). Edge’s 10th anniversary edition a few months later also featured an article examining the reasoning behind the four ten out of tens that had been awarded to date.
Personally I don’t think that review scores should be removed entirely, but they also don’t need any more “precision” than 5 stars – once you get to scores out of 10 or percentages, you hit that strange “seven is average” prejudice that’s hard to break. Having said that, I do like Edge’s system of having enough marks available that the the highest score can be very prestigious and rarely awarded (well until last year it was anyway :). So someone’s suggestion earlier of a Halliwell’s Film Guide style system would be interesting to see applied to games reviews.
Oh so many things:
1) Yes, the fact that we seem to have had about as many Edge 10s in the last year or so as we did in the previous decade is ludicrous.
2) Everything Simon says is right, on principle.
3) Everyone has to stick a score on the end, or you won’t get linked by Metacritic. And that’s a fete worse than death.
4) Oh dear Lord, I get offended that 7 out of 10 was average. That it’s now apparently 8 (or 79%, whatever) is even worse.
5) The real problem with the Eurogamer review, as I understand it, is that it’s pretty much the entire MGS series that’s getting a ‘mere’ 8/10. By many accounts it’s the best MGS game yet. If you like MGS games, you’ll adore it. If those problems like insane plots and feature-length cutscenes annoyed you before, they’ll do it even more now. So the reviewer is damned whichever score they give, really.
I know I won’t be buying MGS4; I never made it through MGS2 as far as the gameplay (not the most sensible purchase I’ve ever made, I admit). Even if everyone had given it 10/10.
Umm, 6 I think) The even bigger problem for reviewers with MGS4 is that a series of disasters (Heavenly Sword, Lair, Haze etc.) have left it as Sony’s Great Greyish Hope. Fanboys of any nature have too much invested in the number to care what the text says, they just want evidence that it’s “better” or “worse” than Halo 3 to shout at other teenagers with different purchasing priorities.