In quiet moments over the last few weeks where I have been reading through parts of the gaming press, my brow has become furrowed over the furore concerning complaints about the review score system.
As a brief background to anyone who has missed the mess, Eurogamer gave Uncharted 3 an 8/10 score and were internet-crucified by a series of commenters claiming that Eurogamer were attention seeking, trying to get extra hits, and generally saying that they were wrong and irresponsible to give it any less than a 9/10. Incidentally, most of these often incredibly harsh and unrepeatable-before-the-watershed comments will have come from people who hadn’t played the game yet.
That doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me, but then I could chalk that up to the fact that I barely understand the desire to leave comments in general. I do however think it’s fair to say however that it’s insane and sadly not existing in a vacuum. The issue has been discussed and dissected in other places, most recently by Jim Sterling at the Escapist and by Checkpoint on PATV a while back, both worth a look if you are equally perplexed about the issue.
Game journalists complaining about game journalism is actually becoming a bit of a cliché now and is nothing new. The complaining about review scores has been bubbling away for ages. One of the main issues is the conflict of interest that can arise in the course of the symbiotic relationship between PR and journalist with the PRs under no obligation to send review copies of games and journalists needing copies of games in order to review them and maintain a readership. I’m sure most establishments could afford to arrange a game-buying budget to circumvent this but regardless, it can make it a little awkward when it comes to reviewing an absolute stinker.
This is nothing new and in my mind review scores have always been a bit dodgy. Before I was quite so plugged in to the gaming media, I would occasionally see a game, check for a review online, see that it scored around 7/10 and assuming that meant it would probably be ok buy the game. More often than not, it turned out to be an awful buggy piece of rubbish. From what I could tell, a 7/10 loosely translated as ‘this game isn’t very good but we don’t want to upset the publisher in case they don’t give us any more games to review’ and anything higher tended to mean that it was actually genuinely ok.
As a reviewer, it can be difficult to assign an arbitrary number to a game. I struggled with it at Bit-Tech, often feeling it diminished the prose I had written (although at least they do issue scores outside of the 7-10 range) and I won’t do it on this site for my reviews. I prefer qualitative content for opinion pieces about things that are subjectively assessed. Although there’s an argument to say that a lot of game design is either good or bad, these reviews aren’t generally of that nature and the academic level discussions over a game’s performance is usually reserved for the more B2B-centric publications such as Gamasutra or Game Developer.
Some sites do shy away from a numbering system. Rock Paper Shotgun are pretty much a poster child for longer and involved opinion pieces instead of dry reviews. There’s also a lot of ire towards Kotaku for some of the questionable things they post, but at least their reviews are focussed on what they liked and didn’t like without a simple number to sum it up. I have a copy of Saints Row the Third on its way to me to review and I just can not imagine trying to sum up the experience of a Saints Row game that bears any resemblance to its predecessor in a number. I don’t really see how you can review anything that isn’t a list of right or wrong answers as a numbered score. I’m still not sure how you mark a humanities essay with a percentage.
Even if you do accept the scoring system, which it looks like we’re probably stuck with, I’m staggered that an 8/10 is considered a bad score by anyone. Is this an educational problem where people don’t realise that equates to 80%? Is it an issue of media overload where the market has become so saturated with wonder and amazement that with so much competing for your wallet and your time people have come to expect only absolute perfection? Actually, that’s not even the issue: This isn’t even people being put off by an 8/10 score and not buying a game, this is people complaining that a game they want to buy got an 8/10 score before they’ve bought and played it in some attempt to justify that their time and money is going on something that is perfectly formed. Actually, you know what, I don’t even know what this is.
I can only imagine it’s an expectation thing and all down to the way some people’s minds are wired up. I’m staggered to hear slurred-worded inarticulate trying-too-hard-to-impress-each-other teenage boys in the cinema behind me commenting after the trailers ‘why would you want to see it in 2D if it’s in 3D?’ and it just highlights different tastes and expectations. There’s all matter of opinions that I don’t agree with and just because some of them are wrong doesn’t mean people don’t have them and doesn’t mean people can’t be happy with them. If gamers expect an 8-10 system where 8 means bad and 10 means ‘yes ok you can buy this now’ then that’s probably what they’ll get and those that don’t want that will just tune out, or establish a splinter element of the games press, or just ignore it all together.
I can see review scores eventually boiling down to a binary tick cross system, or possibly even a buy-it skip-it maybe-it recommendation, both of which lose a certain amount of nuance and depth, but are probably about as helpful as the current system.
I like reading game reviews. I often find my opinion of something alters after I’ve read a review which worries me slightly, but most of the time I just like hearing someone else’s opinion on something, even if I haven’t played it yet. As far as consumer advice goes, in recent memory I’ve only been persuaded to buy one game (Dark Souls) on the basis of a review, but that’s because I sub-edited the copy and was sat opposite the reviewer who throughout the working day periodically stopped what he was doing, stared into the middle distance and started talking about how good it was, which is generally a good sign. A number doesn’t help. A number isn’t really interesting. A score out of 10 or a percentage really doesn’t tell me much.
The review score controversy, like the PR/Journalist relationship and press release churnalism issue will probably never go away. All of it is probably a by-product of the modern aspects of journalism that have been brought into being by the internet and most of all by letting anyone have their say, forever changing the reader/writer relationship.
I suppose the real thing that I wish people would take away from this is that more people should shut up and listen occasionally instead of having their say.