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Videogame Reviews - Playing With Numbers?
Thanks to NTSC-uk for its editorial discussing the possible confusion in using numbered rating schemes for videogame reviews. The author rhapsodizes: "No number can possibly capture the striking vision of the sun setting over Hyrule Field or the ingenious brilliance of Metal Gear Solid's interactive references to reality", before going on to conclude: "Treated as numbers with a defined value, they will always be looked down upon as having deficiencies. Yet when you read them as you would a word and open it up to your own interpretation, they begin to fully deliver the explanatory potential that is locked within." Do you think numbered ratings have an important place at the end of game reviews?
I think this person has missed the point of number ratings; they don't puppourt to sum up the entire game in a digit.
Hint: That's what those weird-looking "paragraphs of descriptive text" are for.
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
We should do away with the star system for hotels (how can one number possibly describe a whole hotel?). We should do away with film genres (how can one word describe a whole film?). We should do away with races (how can one word describe a whole person?). We should do away with ages (how can one number describe the experiences of a whole lifetime?).
What a stupid article. It's not like the whole review is being replaced with a number. It's something to quickly glance at to see if it's a load of shit or a really good game. If there's a review of a game I've never heard of before, and it's got 2/10, then I'm not going to waste my time reading it.
The purpose of the summary ratings is not to let you pick "the best" item, it is to draw your attention to the outliers. For example, if a game (or car or whatever) from a company you have never heard of receives a really high overall rating, you might take the time to look at it. And if a game (or car or whatever) that you just assumed was good and were going to buy based on its brand receives a really low rating, you might check the review and maybe investigate alternatives.
The greatest thing about number scores in reviews is that they let reviewers get their entire message out, even in a confined space. For instance, a lot of the magazines reviews for Prince of Persia started with a small blurb about how the reviewer absolutely LOVED the game, but the rest of it was usually dominated by the warnings that the reviewer felt were very important for every player to know: the camera has some problems, the fighting can be repetitive at some points, the difficulty is very uneven, it's as short as some GBA games, etc. Taken as a whole, the review is very negative; 80% of it is a list of complaints. But taken as a whole and with a score attached, the reviewer is allowed to use his very limited writing space to give the reader a head's up about the game's short-comings while still stressing how wonderful the game really is.
Magazine reviews don't often have the luxury of including a "bottom line" sentence like this one, let alone one that's in a separate paragraph (like this one!), so the number score really helps them sum up their view on a certain game without forcing their opinions of a more obscure game off the magazine's review section and into the ass-end of their website. It allows them to cover both the super-hyped AAA games like Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes or Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and mostly unknown cult hits like Disgaea in the same issue without charging more than $6 an issue.
On a separate note, it also helps when comparing games. If you generally agree with a reviewer and follow them over a period of time, in the same way that many people follow Roger Ebert's movie column and TV show, then you can use their scores to compare different games that they've reviewed. For instance, if you loved Devil May Cry and Shinobi and a certain reviewer gave them both a 9.0, then it's worth looking at the scores to see how that reviewer sizes them up against a new game that you want to buy, especially something similar like Crimson Sea 2 or Samurai Warriors. He could really like those games and find very little to complain about when reviewing them, but still give them a 7.0, meaning that there's nothing wrong with them, but that they're not really top tier games, either.
And really, it's not as if having a number there hurts the review in some way.
As someone who writes for a videogame website, we had this exact same debate. Numbers are ultimately meaningless and arbitrary, for all the reasons that the original poster said.
However, we use them anyway. Why? Because as much as we hate to admit it, there are a LOT of people out there who simply WON'T READ THE GODDAMNED REVIEW. In order to do most games justice, you have to write a great deal, and these Ritalin cases simply can't sit still long enough to read it all.
I experimented with this briefly, and the result was a flood of e-mails from people asking, "So, what did you THINK of the game?" No matter how plain I made my opinion, or how basic my vocabulary was, it was clear that they simply weren't READING the review.
We have our point ratings there basically as a way to shut those people up.