Reviews for video games are almost as old as video games themselves. Ever since gaming became a common household phenomenon, magazines and more recently, websites have been offering their opinions on games, complete with a comprehensive scoring system, or rather several different systems. Everything from a grade-school A-to-F scale to a numeric score out of 100 seeks to gauge the quality of a game for the viewer.
Not to sound nostalgic, but back in the day, games could be about…well…anything. Some of the greatest games of the 80′s and 90′s came out of unlikely genres and titles, games that were the first of their kind. Of course, not all of them were diamonds, there was also a lot of rough too. Because of how broadly games seemed to encompass and convey different ideas, a scalar form of rating was necessary. Moreover, it actually worked back then. Arguably, some of the best and worst games came out during this booming period when every company and developer was looking to one-up the competition with both their hardware and their games, and not in an extra-life context.
Some of the best and worst (in that order).
As a result, there were games like Super Mario 64, triple-A titles, in addition to the horrendous movie tie-in and B-rate games like Superman 64. The quality of games, as it were, was so sporadic and inconsistent that a 1-5 and 1-10 scale of their quality were necessary, if not obligatory, because titles covered all ranges of quality. If we switch over to a modern scope, however, games almost ubiquitously fall within the top 80 percentile of scores. Games have become consistently good, or at least consistent in themselves. Quality is relative, after all. The title that gets a 2/5 or a 3/10, while still an occurrence, is a rare one in the 21st century.
This seems to follow with production cost. Back then, a game could be made quickly and without excessive investment of money or effort. The stream-lined process allowed for rapid and continual development of games, which made the quality of games overall variant. In a modern perspective, however, games are laborious and huge efforts, with hundreds, if not thousands of people dedicated to making a single title for years at a time before its release. If an idea or mechanic behind a video game is bad or poor outright, chances are it won’t be supported or will be refined into a better state before much effort is put in. As such, quality has become static for games, with no titles being superb or stand-out, but all titles being equally satisfactory.
A proper example would be the coveted “game of the year” title. A few console generations ago, if a game truly was great, it would win game of the year almost unanimously. Now, however, “game of the year” can go to any number of great titles, but the line has been hazed. You can go to two different magazines or websites or networks and get several different titles for the true “best.” This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it shows us that games have improved in quality overall, but it also rules out the quantifying of a game’s quality in a numeric manner such as ratings do.
And the winner goes to…all of them?
So when we look at games as they are now, the true “range” of scores is less substantial than the industry makes it out to be. Some of my favorite games fall within the mediocre range of score, but they’re still a hell of a lot of fun. The make-or-break factor than got them in the 70-80 range is the degree of polish put into it rather than the quality of the game. Take Fallout: New Vegas. It fell one point shy of their rating “quota” that would grant the developers a bonus. To think that one point made the difference between a person losing their job or not is a bit suspect. What separates an 84 average score from an 85? Nothing really, it just comes down to how many bugs it has and how severe they are, a game of negatives rather than positives. The game is still fun, but review scores attempt to rate things in an over-simplified manner catered towards keeping every game on a similar scale.
The fact of the matter is games vary, even now, but not enough to warrant a 100 or even 10-point rating scale. If you don’t like a real-time strategy game, you still wont like it even if it’s the most polished, pristine game ever made. That doesn’t make it bad, but it does suggest you would prefer something else. If I see two games, one with an 83 rating and one with an 85 rating, I’m not naturally inclined to buy the slightly higher one. I look at the titles, see what they’re about, get a feeling for the game, and then I make a choice. And yet modern reviews perpetuate just this sort of idea by awarding minute differences in scores to games that ultimately prove incomparable, a victim of over-simplification.
With things like meta-critic, a degree of truth can be reached. If we take the average of all variants of a score, we at least come out with a true-enough consensus. On the other hand, public ratings and even ratings in general seem to be polarized for whatever reason, following a trend of all-or-nothing support. When there’s an 8 point difference between the average critic score and the average player score on a 10 point scale, one starts to wonder which can be trusted. The answer, it would seem, would be neither. Nobody can tell you what game is the best; you, viewer, must determine that for yourself.
I personally hate review scores. However, if I was required, I would take up a binary scoring system, following the pattern of all-or-nothing that seems to marginalize what people should like. A game either gets a 1–it’s worth checking out, try it if you like this sort of thing–or a game gets a 0–there is no reason you should play this game ever, even if you love the genre and the series. What we find then is that most games get that 1/1 score, which makes sense if you think about it. Nobody sets out to make a bad game, and recently games have been good all-in-all. The thing that has lapsed in quality, however, are review scores. After all, you are the only one who can decide what you like.
A very interesting article, and one that we all wanted to see, I’d wager. Made quite a few points I’d never really thought of before, and that binary scale is…intriguing, to say the least (though I’d be more partial to 0, 1 and 2, but hey let’s not delve into semantic bookkeeping).
One thing I’d like to mention is the attitude of players towards scores. Anything less than a 9 that was greatly hyped up seems to be laughed at (8.8), numbers are thrown around more than arguments, 6 or below is generally dismissed (I’ve played a great many pleasant games with scores around the 6 and 7 mark) and so on.
Hell, I had a phase of it myself, whereby I would read the score before the review – but here’s the catch. I also read the summary / closing comments box and last paragraph. If you read the first and last paragraph (and perhaps the first and last line of each paragraph) you’ll actually have a very good idea of what’s going on, if you don’t find you have the time to scour every full review.
And herein lies the major problem with some people – the actual content of the review is ignored in favour of an arbitrary number that is subjective to each recipient. I’ve heard of people who will dismiss reviews that give a ten to a game “because ten is perfect and no game is perfect so the review is not legit”, rather than reading the actual damn review and ascertaining what the reviewer actually says (and to me, a ten isn’t perfection, it’s just a way of saying “This is a really, really good game that fans of the genre will love and may even convert people with a passing interest”). I don’t even think it counts as strawmanning.
Great editorial. I never read reviews, as I’d rather risk buying a bad game than be affected by someone else’s opinion. Mass Effect 3, for example, would have been ruined for me if I had known about certain things beforehand–but because I was ignorant, I finished the game very pleased, unaware of just how many corners had been cut.
The best reviews are those that share as much non-spoiler information as possible in the least amount of words, and then explain what kind of audience would enjoy the game most. Everyone has a kink when it comes to video games, be it great strategical gameplay, a great story, sci-fi elements, fantasy elements, sandbox, stealth, and so on. Oftentimes, it doesn’t matter how mediocre a fantasy game is–if it’s fantasy, there’s going to be an audience that enjoys it a lot just because of the setting. To some people, the music or the story that you gave a “0/10″ to doesn’t matter at all, because they don’t care about those parts of the game. It’s all about helping the audience figure out what THEY are going to enjoy. It should never be about what you enjoyed.
I agree with your sense of being hung up on just how muddled and meaningless review scores are, but I think there are still places for reviews. On one end of the scale, they could get more technical, focusing on how the mechanics work, what the graphics engine is, and other tangible markers of quality (or lack thereof). I, however, love reviews when they are creative, and aware of their own subjectivity. I think Kill Screen does a good job of reviews, primarily because they focus on the experience the game imparts. By that very criteria, they are excluding technical parts of the game that could help a reader make comparisons to other games, systems, or hardware. But in my eyes they make up for it by being cognizant of their own voices, and more importantly, their own experience with the game at hand. By writing creative reviews, there is less of an emphasis on whether things are good or bad, worth your time or not; instead you get a glimpse into someone else’s experience of the game, and how excited (or not) they are to impart the feelings, experiences, and atmosphere of the game into their review. Most people trust their friends when considering buying a game, and I see creative–and totally subjective–reviews as no difference: they make no attempt to be impartial, but instead try to capture the essence of the game in their review. And if that excites you, or intrigues you, then chances are the game will stir those inquisitive emotions.