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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.
I think that in the reviews, the writers comments and experiences are the most important aspect. Rating with numbers or percents is dangerous, because it seems to be a rule, that all games are rated between 80% to 100% and if any game receives any lower rating, it is automatically labelled as a bad game even if the game is billiant and the lower rating is given only by techincal reasons (bugs etc.). Also, it's tempting to compare numbers between different reviews even if there isn't any common rule set between different gaming magazines for giving these ratings (so the comparing is actually pointless). Numerical ratings are too subjective to be taken as a meter for the quality of the game (idea, storyline) itself.
I give the article a 62.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
We have ten or eleven values in a 10 point system, yet 7 often means average quality and anything below that is bad. Great games always get 9 or 10. That leaves the numbers 0-6 for bad, 7-8 for more average and 9-10 for great games. That means we can differentiate between 7 flavours of bad games but only 2-3 (depending on your interpretation of 8) different levels of great. However, as the article mentions, people aren't interested in bad or lower-average games, so you'd need one, maybe two different descriptions (bad and REALLY bad) for those games. I mean, who cares whether Teletubbies Adventure is better or worse than Jar Jar's Fun Games? People care for comparisons like Zelda vs. Metroid (to name a close example), which might get problematic if you consider both games a ten (yet most people would agree that one is better than the other, but not on a scale that would justify a full point in a ten point system). Sure, you can use a percentage score or other concepts to split the range up further, but then you still have 60%-70% nearly useless possible ratings. Also, such fine differentiation (especially single percents) often isn't possible and numbers are assigned within a certain range with some arbitrartity (93, 94 or 95? Roll a dice).
Note that average game here doesn't refer to statistical average, but perceived average.
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.
I think that number scores are important for what they are: A distillation of opinion. That's all it is, and all it should be treated as. If you want the justification of the opinion, then that is what the review is for. The way I think about is like this: A random art critic can say 'Van Gogh is the greatest artist, ever.', and that is like a numeric opinion. If I want to know why he thinks that, then I'll read further. If I hate Van Gogh, then I'll be curious about how his opinion could be so different to mine, and if I love him, well, to be honest I probably won't care too much to read a gushing review of the man's work.
I think that the review method in Zzap was the best I have ever seen. They would give it a % rating for several categories and an overall rating, then if they thought it was worth buying by most people, it got a Silver medal. If you didn't like that type of game then maybe you still wouldn't like it, but the very best games got a Gold medal. These ones should be at least looked at by everyone. The best bit though, was the boxes that had the other members of staff commenting on the game. This meant that you got three or four different opinions on each game. That made their review method the best in my opinion.
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.
A discerning gamer should never base their game impression (and ultimate decide on whether to buy... or sadly, pirate) solely on these singular values because they abstract away all the qualitative properties of a game. That said, *-star ratings and final numbers /10 or /100 or percentages are all there to give a very quick and summative value on a product.
As someone mentioned earlier, many people want a general impression of what they're about to read. Personally, I like how sites like Gamespot and Gamespy throw the rating right up front, whereas a place like Firingsquad with its insightful yet girthy reviews requires navigating through a drop-down list to check out the "final verdict." I suspect most would rather spend time reading and learning about a "4-star" game than a "1-star" one.
Of course, that leads to the perceived notion that there is some grand quantitative scale when you see something like 79 and 81 / 100. Is the 81 game really better than the 79 reviewed on another site? Ultimately it's up to the reader. It's sometimes good to have bias -- if you're a hardcore genre or platform player, you may be more inclined to accept the given idiosyncrasies (i.e. directed linear levels vs. free-roaming, checkpoint saves vs. save anywhere, etc.).
These are ordinal values at heart, and should not be compared at interval levels.
Now with respect to that article, the author makes a good point about reinforcing the qualitative, descriptive muses of the reviewer. However, it's often preferential to give different abstraction levels of your information to pull in a greater volume of readers. The rating/percentage is a good start. It's doubtful that many readers will engage a lengthy game review (no matter how elegantly written) without having a hint of the final mark. Why read eight pages if it's a really crusty game? Conversely, why do that with a game that's already known from other sources to be great? Just a quick check to verify assumptions, and you're off to go get it. Game reviewers are not supposed to write elaborate and astounding essays for which its effect will fail if abstracted into a single value. They are supposed to aid in (and perhaps entertain) the decision to acquire a game for which the player will ultimately decide whether or not it is of good or sufficient quality.
It's necessary to have and utilize both a summative value and a qualitative review. Relying exclusively on a single value leads to game misconceptions, while a written piece alone cannot realistically convey your information to all but the committed (or bored) readers.
-Victor Chow (Elder_MMHS)
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.
"However, it is a proven fact that people rating pretty much anything (academic performance, produce quality, car safety) become wildly inconsistent when rating on a scale above 3-point-something."
... it's an inconsistent set of values and the application of those values that causes the ratings systems to fall apart. In order for arbitrary numbers to work, you need to have a list of criteria for how to assign the numbers. Are we starting at a total of 100 or 10 and working BACKWARDS (essentially subtracting points for flaws)? This would cause most games to get a relatively high score. Do we start at the low end and add points for positives? You could end up with a lot of low rated games. How do you decide how many points each good or bad trait is worth? Ah, there's the catch.
... some reviewers just like certain types of games better than others. That's again why we have multiple reviews. We want people to find a reviewer who has tastes similar to theirs, because that's the best barometer for choosing what you'll like ... find someone like YOU.
I can't get over how entirely wrong this is. Proven Fact? Cite your source.
It's not the depth of the rating system that makes it inconsistent
You need to now have a list of those, and make sure that your reviews consistently evaluate those traits. Dock a point for a bad camera here, you need to dock it for every game with a bad camera. What if the game only has a half-assed camera, compared to the completely unusable camera in this other game? This is exactly where it all starts to fall apart. You can not be consistent when dealing with something as subjective as ART. It's not the number system that causes the problem. It's the HUMAN factor.
You also have to take into account that each REVIEWER is different. Many people absolutely hated the camera in Kingdom Hearts, but I never had a problem with it. I would rate the game higher, but the game is still widely accepted as brilliant.
FWIW, my site recently got some complaints about how we are GameCube biased. Note that we are a GameCube specific website. The specific complaint alledged that we gave "perfect 10" scores to F-Zero GX, Soul Calibur 2, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, and Zelda: Wind Waker. (These are also the ONLY games to be given 10's at the time of that complaint)
The complaintant ignored the fact that we give MULTIPLE reviews for most games, and that a score of 10 is not PERFECT on our scale, because nothing can be perfect. The only game on that list to be given 10's from EVERY reviewer was Wind Waker.
He also ignored the reviewer slant