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Game Reviewers Review Game Reviews
by Chris Remo, Dec 13, 2006 3:17pm PSTGamasutra has a lengthy transcript of a podcast segment discussing video game reviews, in the form of a roundtable consisting of Gamasutra's Tom Kim, 1UP's John Davison, GameSpot's Greg Kasavin, and PC Gamer's Greg Vederman. The group discusses topics such as various approaches to review scores, the relative importance (or lack thereof) of sites such as GameRankings.com, how developers and publishers should be treating the gaming press, and more.
Greg Vederman: [laughing] I was going to throw in there that there's a lot of debate these days - online, on message boards, and even, to a certain extent, from developers and publishers - about review scores in particular, and I don't think that the problem really is any one institution's scale, necessarily. I think that the bigger issue is - are, rather - sites like Game Rankings. There. I'll actually blame Game Rankings. I can be the first one to do that. Because they take all of our scores and all of our scales, and assume that all of our scales are the same. For example, what was a 50% in PC Gamer would suddenly become exactly what a 50% was on some other scale. But that doesn't actually work, because, for us, a 50% is merely OK, where for another outlet, 50% could be "Miserable. Stay away." And so Game Rankings ends up - because so many people use it, and so many publishers use it - it ends up confusing things.
Comments
Of course, adding discussion on the shack to that helps, too ;)
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This is the big problem in reviewing game. A lot of people don't care about what you said about the game, they just glance at the numerical rating and that's it. I remember when we switch from a 0-100% to a 0-10 (discrete) rating system, it was a relief. But now we realize that 75% of all games are rated 6,7 or 8.
I'm pretty sure the next step in gaming press will be to forget about the numerical rating. That's what they did in a lot of movie magazines and now people take the time to read the review and draw their own conclusions based on their personnal taste.
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Giving out a 9 or 90% to a game that is really good or is great is the problem. a 90% should be an amazingly great game and of course a 100% should be the perfect game. Fumitsu is one of the only publications to accurately judge a game and not subject to score inflation. Just about everyone other publication and online review site has a fucked up perspective on what it means to be a 50%, 75%, 90%, 100%.
1%-100% is a large enough spectrum to accurately assess games yet you rarely see much activity in the -50% range. Why? Because your perspective is fucked up.
In a 10 point system how is 5 a bad game? In a 5 point system how is 3 a bad game? It isn't a bad game yet because the prespective is so fucked that is perceived as a bad game. Unless an average game is bad to you 50 % should be ok.
Personally I like a 10 point system but am just as happy with a 5 point system. It's easier for people to read... even when they are all the same thing when broke down by percentages.
Everyone should move to a 5 star system. A 10 point scale is worthless when you only use 7-9.5. With 5 start, you're far more likely to give 1-2 stars. You've never give a game (a real game), a 20-40 on GameSpot. The lowest they dip to is about a 6 (3 stars).
10 point scales are stupid. But in games, it's all about the "9". That's the holy grail and all anyone cares about. Less than a 9 is crap in most people's eyes. Below an 8 means "pass". 4 stars doesn't seem that bad, does it? Even 3.5 doesn't seem bad.
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Even if you go to the 5 star scale, people start giving half-stars (some don't, I've noticed, which I think is good).
I'd rather see a game review site come out , and say "look, we inflate grades blah blah blah", but stick to their guns when reviewing, and make sure they explain "oh sure, this game's an 8, but here 2 pages why it's an 8 on our scale". The publisher will generally be happy, they only care about that magical number, but gamers of note will be able to actually read and understand that that 8 is really more a 5 and the reasons why it's a mediocre game. Too many game mags take some titles and only give half-page, 200-300 word reviews which seems way insufficient to tell the reader what's wrong with a game (as note, most of my reviews fall about 10,000 words give or take a few thousand).
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of course...i guess you gotta deal with marketers creating fake user accounts and stuff..but hopefully real users will out number the fake ones.
As others have suggested, and I agree, the typical movie rating of 1-5 stars is clear as daylight and really should apply to games, but I've never seen anyone do it. Anything deeper is worthless and pretentious. 3 stars = average, whereas at most games review places (except maybe Edge) 7 seems to be average, which is absurd.
And please don't break shit down into presentation, sound, graphics and so on - who gives a toss? NO ONE looks at anything but the final score, why rate that shit when those separate parts aren't going to individually influence anyone's buying decision? It's anal and pointless.
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I bet Command & Conquer 3 for the Xbox 360 will get reviewed by a bunch of console gamers who think it's really awesome and deserving of a high score because it'll be like the only RTS game for the system, and it'll probably also be a somewhat decent game (but mainly for the former reason). True RTS players will know that the PC is the platform for RTS games, since they have superiour input devices and higher graphics resolutions, which are able to display more information, enabling developers to make the game more sophisticated, and frankly, better.
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http://www.pcgamerpodcast.com/?p=92
As it turns out, a number of people who work for PC Gamer also hate the rating system. Some members of the staff have been there since the beginning (or know/remember those who were) were against it all along (PC Gamer was originally a consolidation of a number of other computer game magazine). But the problem now is - they're stuck with it. It serves the magazine better to be more consistent over time with their rating system than it would be to change or abandon the system altogether.