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[s0]

How come no one ever talks about rating movies more scientifically? I mean, most reviewers just rate out of four stars! That's just 5% of the precision that game reviews have. Pathetic!

First, movie reviewers need to start breaking things down into components: they need to have scores for plot, characters, cinematography, sound, and 'other', for anything else that those don't cover. The scores will obviously be decimals out of 10, or percents, just the way all the best games reviewers do it. Then we can set up a highly advanced heuristic (using principles from machine learning) to set up the best possible average between the different components, and between different reviewers, too: we'll need to have a truly objective movie rating if we're going to determine the exact percentage difference in greatness between Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring and the Hurt Locker.

As a bonus, after all this, we can just discard all that pesky 'review text': I mean, a lot of the time it doesn't even seem to bear any relation to the scores games receive! Much better to focus on the numbers. Words are obviously subjective, but numbers are objective.

the problem is: this is exactly how game reviews work at the moment

[dEnamed]

You don't say?

[DavidCaruso]

tl;dr: this discussion is a complete waste of time, read the fucking reviews instead of skipping to the numbers at the end, you illiterate morons

Good idea! *goes to a website with 200 expert reviews, many of works he doesn't know much about, and just reads every single one to find out which ones are worth his time because the reviewer was too incompetent to numerically quantify his qualitative judgment from the start*

All the negative reaction to scores I see in different places seems to be based on shitty reviewers using them in shitty ways (stupid scales, payoffs, disparity between score and text, etc.) There is absolutely nothing wrong about the concept of attaching a score to your review; it's just another method for the reviewer to express his judgement as concretely as possible, and quickly let the viewer know from the start whether he liked or disliked a work. Of course if someone is a shitty reviewer who can't make concrete qualitative judgments they might be against doing this, but I really can't see any other reason not to include them. It sucks that many people care more about them than the actual reasoning of the review text, but that's not a very good reason to get rid of them.

As for the whole scale thing, 5 seems ideal to me. Anything based on the number 10 leads to Schoolyard Flashback Syndrome where 5/10 is awful and gets you grounded by your parents instead of average, 7 is a wonky number, 3 is too limiting. Anything higher than 10 (that includes decimal scales btw, which basically rate out of 20 or 100, sometimes even 1000 in the worst case) is retarded because no living human being can accurately quantify their judgments into such small increments.

Also just for the record, The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring is only (5 stars/3 stars) → 166% better than The Hurt Locker. This is indisputable fact, thanks in advance for not questioning it.

[iffi]

I rate this thread as follows:
Presentation - 3/5
Graphics - 1/5 (needs more JWK5)
Sound - 2/5
Gameplay - 3/5
Lasting Appeal - 4/5

Overall:   /5

[DavidCaruso]

You forgot the value, man! This is a pretty unremarkable thread but it's free to read, I think that alone should be enough to give it 5 stars and proclaim it General Thread of the Year. For the price, this thread is a great read, you aren't going to find that great of a read anywhere else unless you waste gas in your car (costs lots of money, shit value) and go to a public library.

[ink.inc]

 i give this thread a /

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i have no problem with scores, they can be useful in a loose sense of "how strongly would you recommend that your friends play this game" -- fighting over scores is ridiculous though, since recommendations to friends depend on the person recommending the game and on the friends

score does lose some nuance though. for instance i'd rate "shoot the bullet", "super smash bros. brawl", and "final fantasy 6" all at "4/5", but whether someone would enjoy them depends a lot on that person's tastes and gaming history etc. -- so a lot of the details that would be in a review are lost in a score

[noah!]

I guess, deep down inside, I don't feel like numbers are the right way to assess artistic mediums. It's stupid, and while there may be some objectivity to such a thing...there isn't much at all. In one of my dreams I met a girl standing on sidewalk and she was having a panic attack. I tried to stick around to see if I could help but she was already trying to calm herself down, frantically repeating the phrase "quantify the situation." She was probably a games journalist.

And honestly, in this day and age, I'm wondering if game reviews are even worth it. Like, right now I have Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu coming in the mail. I didn't read a review for it, didn't look at any scores. I just watched a YouTube video of the gameplay, looked down at my trousers, and I knew that yes, this is what I want. Should I have measured the size of the stain and posted that as my preemptive score? Should I have typed a big long wall of text in an effort to describe something that's best shown in thirty seconds of footage?

I had another point in this paragraph but Eres already made it so I'll just keep the

plug.

There's a way to make good points without using numbers or walls of text. I know there is. I'm gonna go find it now.

In summary, this thread gets a solid Two Jerads:

   

[:^)]

Noah, thank you for all you do.

[PleasingFungus]

the problem is: this is exactly how game reviews work at the moment

that is the punchline to the joke

But seriously. Off the top of my head, Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku have unscored reviews, and a number of other sites have scoring systems that... at least aren't decimalized / percentile, which I think is one of the more absurd things games review sites do.

Kotaku being a champion of good games journalism practice is the other punchline to the joke.

tl;dr: this discussion is a complete waste of time, read the fucking reviews instead of skipping to the numbers at the end, you illiterate morons

Good idea! *goes to a website with 200 expert reviews, many of works he doesn't know much about, and just reads every single one to find out which ones are worth his time because the reviewer was too incompetent to numerically quantify his qualitative judgment from the start*

All the negative reaction to scores I see in different places seems to be based on shitty reviewers using them in shitty ways (stupid scales, payoffs, disparity between score and text, etc.) There is absolutely nothing wrong about the concept of attaching a score to your review; it's just another method for the reviewer to express his judgement as concretely as possible, and quickly let the viewer know from the start whether he liked or disliked a work. Of course if someone is a shitty reviewer who can't make concrete qualitative judgments they might be against doing this, but I really can't see any other reason not to include them. It sucks that many people care more about them than the actual reasoning of the review text, but that's not a very good reason to get rid of them.

Games are art. They're a subjective medium. Incredibly broken, unpolished games can be fantastic, for someone who's willing to push past the broken parts - STALKER, for example, or Crusader Kings. These games tend to get low review scores at launch, and not by 'bad reviewers'. On the other hand, extremely polished, tightly-scripted games can very easily end up turning people off with their artificiality, while still - again, justifiably - getting high review scores. (I'm sure you can think of a few examples.) These aren't the results of shitty reviewers misusing the rating systems - these are examples of important qualities in games that can't reasonably be conveyed in a 1-10 rating scale. (Or 1.0-10.0, or whatever.) These aren't isolated cases - they happen again and again.

I guess I'd back away from my earlier position (and my invective - sorry about that, got carried away), and say that some kind of review scores do make sense for the mass market. However - anyone with a passing familiarity with the industry who puts any weight on scores, especially 'objective' scores, is making a fool of themselves.

I agree with everything after the quoted section.

[SirNiko]

You can get some of those ambiguous qualities through equally ambiguous criteria. Nintendo Power used to put "Fun" as a criteria for their reviews. "Replay Value" is another score which can catch a lot of that.

My dilemma is that explaining the score is only useful when the game is bad, and therefore you don't feel guilty ruining the experience. If the game is good you either get a really ambiguous answer ("Look, the atmosphere is really good!") or you get an answer that spoils the whole thing. I'd really rather get a vague number with a single line of explanation to tell me to go for it unless it's awful.

[baconman]

Only two things have ever come of me reading reviews:

1. People can generally agree on what a TERRIFIC game is, and it's appeal is usually able to shatter pretenses of gaming genres; and if this 10/10 score is given, there's usually a DAMN GOOD REASON WHY.

1. People can ~usually~ agree on what an ATROCIOUS EXCUSE for a game is, and kick the horse in the teeth when it really deserves it. Generally this is written off at 6/10 or 6.5/10 for the sake of positivity and PR. Every once in awhile you'll luck out and see the deservedly-brutal 3/10 or 4/10 - and that's usually because there's a good consensus among the staff about it.

But generally, anything lower than a 7.5/10 (or even an 8.5/10) is something you can always find a "better than" for; unless it's a specific flavor of game you REALLY EFFING LIKE A LOT, and have no better/new fixes for available to you on your system at the moment.

This is why it sucks to be a PS3 gamer who likes DDR right now, for instance. There is ONE available release on PS3 right now, and it's clearly a 3.5/10 overall title.
____________________

This also makes me curious what would happen if elementary schoolers wrote game reviews, do you think they'd see them differently? Didn't you, as a kid, ever wonder how come pretty much all movie-games kinda sucked, or what made Mario, Sonic, Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, and MegaMan so much better than their plentiful platformer competition?

Do you think they'd see older games as crappy, because of their dated graphics, limited (and sometimes sketchy) controls, total lack of tutorial levels, and being absolutely tough as shit?

[AshfordPride]

Hereitis Factor:
9.7 - It was like I was really there in the game.  Everything was presented to me in a way that was good.  I was enveloped in this intricately crafted dreamscape in a way that the dozens and dozens and dozens of games I have given this exact same score could never hope to do.

Looksgood:
11/7 - The game with graphics so nice, they made them twice.  Let's how your computer is up to the task of running a game that was a mod for an engine that came out in 2004.  Better bust out your screwdrivers and mother processors, gamers, you're in for an upgrade.

Soundloud:
0.009/0.01 - At first I was very disappointed with the sound of this game, but then I turned my speakers up.  The person talking to me talked to me good.  The sound came out of both of the sides of the speakers and sounded like they were good sounds.  Forgot .wav, gamers, this sound is .wow!

Playswell:
★ ★ - It's not even a game, idiot.  But you probably knew that because it's art.  The complete lack of fun notwithstanding, you might be able to get all sorts of kicks out of how great all the talking is.  Ignore this part and look at the other ones, because they're number one!  Just check out how good everything sounds.  Anyway, I dunno, it had a lot less shooting than Mass Effect 3 demo but I guess that's why it isn't that.  It plays to it's strong suits and it knows where to get a pal off on the bus.

Playtime:
Two thumbs, WAY UP - Short and sweet and worth TEN WHOLE DOLLARS FOR THE RELEASE OF A ONE HOUR MOD.  If the game seems short, or if you're mad that you bought a shitty mod, just play the game again.  You can actually play the game as many times as you want if you want to.  So, I guess that this game actually has enough replay time to be replayed all the time.  Better get some ice for those sore thumbs you're going to have from all the hours and hours of tireless fun you'll be looking at when you pick up our GAME PICK OF THE WEEK OF THE MONTH.


UNDER-OVER GAMEY-WAMEY
THIS NUMBER IS BIGGER
(Out of ten, not an average, unless it is and how freaky would that be?  Can someone check that...?)

[AshfordPride]

review of bayonetta the character forthcoming



but i wrote this instead
(its for rugrats: scavenger hunt)

more...........
will rise of the imoprtals get a rise out of this reviewer?  read on and decide.........

[s0]

i semi-agree with pleasingfungus. i dont think theres anything fundamentally wrong with review scores, they only become a problem when they're more important than the text (i.e. the actual review) which is the case in game journalism at the moment. fuck metacritic. or actually don't fuck metacritic, just fuck the enormous influence it has in the videogame world. reviewers are more or less bullied into giving certain "blockbuster titles" similarly high scores so the precious, precious metascore isnt damaged.

i disagree with this though:

Incredibly broken, unpolished games can be fantastic, for someone who's willing to push past the broken parts - STALKER, for example, or Crusader Kings. These games tend to get low review scores at launch, and not by 'bad reviewers'. On the other hand, extremely polished, tightly-scripted games can very easily end up turning people off with their artificiality, while still - again, justifiably - getting high review scores.

i dont get it. why should games automatically get pats on the back for "polish" and "tight scripting" (esp the latter )? do you think a michael bay movie deserves a positive review just because it has elaborate special fx? does the new lady gaga album deserve 4 out of 5 stars because its well produced?

[eyeliner]

i disagree with this though:

Incredibly broken, unpolished games can be fantastic, for someone who's willing to push past the broken parts - STALKER, for example, or Crusader Kings. These games tend to get low review scores at launch, and not by 'bad reviewers'. On the other hand, extremely polished, tightly-scripted games can very easily end up turning people off with their artificiality, while still - again, justifiably - getting high review scores.

i dont get it. why should games automatically get pats on the back for "polish" and "tight scripting" (esp the latter )? do you think a michael bay movie deserves a positive review just because it has elaborate special fx? does the new lady gaga album deserve 4 out of 5 stars because its well produced?

He just might. You don't. Isn't that talk of "reviews are personal opinion" all the rage?

[AshfordPride]

He just might. You don't. Isn't that talk of "reviews are personal opinion" all the rage?

If we're thinking of videogames as pure craftsmanship, than I guess we could applaud someone for coloring inside all the lines.  If I was to review Skyrim based purely on how well it was made I'd probably give it four or five stars.  If I was to review Skyrim as a video game I'd probably give it one or two stars.  I think it's kind of dangerous to not look beyond the fact that a game was assembled with competence, because then you end up kind of rewarding people who just know how to produce the same kitsch.  It's like how a robot would review a game or something, it seems to strive for an objective and almost scientific evaluation of the game.

(This is how you review an Uncharted game so you can give it all 9.5's so you get more advertising from Sony and Naughty Dog)

[senorbarborito]

I'll bite.

I'm in favour of reasonable score systems, like the following.

only three options:
-rubbish
-meh
-buy

that is all.

[Christian Knudsen]

There are already sites that use a "Bad", "Worth a Rental", "Worth Buying" system (or something similar). I think it muddles things up even further, since that seems to rate it from a monetary value point of view. I prefer games that are rated based on their qualities only, since if a game isn't worth buying, I'd not rent it either, so that type of rating doesn't make any sense to me. Also, some people would never buy a game of a certain genre regardless of rating.

[Superb Joe]

well new releases are worth the most. and the older ones are worth less. but when they get really old sometimes they're worth even more? i agree its a very confusing system and that obama is so inert on the issue is a true scandal.