Comments on: He Shoots, He Scores

By: iainl

iainl — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:36:59 +0000

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.

By: Nick R

Nick R — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:50:13 +0000

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.

By: The Shed

The Shed — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:25:33 +0000

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?

By: Noc

Noc — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:50:10 +0000

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:

“BloodQuest II: Titans of the UnderMage”
30 Hours of Gameplay

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.

By: fearian

fearian — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:34:32 +0000

Everybody should adopt the ‘One Life Left’ school of scoring games.

also, I rate this article [7]

By: propanol

propanol — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:53:52 +0000

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.

By: Myros

Myros — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:02:57 +0000

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

By: Dinger

Dinger — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:38:21 +0000

multiple hour-long cutscenes? That’s no game; that’s a television miniseriies event!

By: Robin

Robin — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:56:53 +0000

The kerfuffle about scores for games is nothing compared to how seriously they apply to restaurants.

By: The Shed

The Shed — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:54:26 +0000

““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.

By: Muzman

Muzman — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:44:06 +0000

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.

By: Calabi

Calabi — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:20:38 +0000

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.