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Why Videogame Reviews End Up Being So Controversial
Thanks to GamerDad for its editorial discussing why videogame reviews are sometimes controversial, and "why fanboys have such a hard time understanding that reviews are just opinions." The author explains: "I think it's simply a product of the games being essentially mechanical constructs... The mechanics of a game are often reviewed with their own numerical scores that then produce the overall total score." He goes on: "So many folks believe the pieces that create the game, because of the technology used (good or bad), define how good it can or can't be", before concluding: "Five stars out of five doesn't mean that's the greatest game and no game could be better. It does mean that it's one of the very best your money can buy in the opinion of the writer of the review."
Why Videogame Reviews End Up Being So Controversial
Because many of the readers are frustrated teenagers? Or 30-40 year olds who behave like whiny teenagers, acting like *everything* is soooo horrible.
The problem with reviews isn't that they are opinions but that they seem to be facts. Many reviewers and critics make it look like a movie or game or book really is bad rather than they just think it's bad. I personally don't look at reviews because the opinions are so ubiquitous that I the "facts" become meaning less. If I like it I like it. What others think is irrelevant.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
I wouldn't use the word "Controversial" for a video game review. That is too strong. I would say that people get upset when they read a good review of a game only to get it home and see it's filled with bugs and not very good gameplay wise.. .. you begin to wonder if these people are really in the field to do reviews or to get kudos and free games... oh an money.
Anyone who has ever played Rescue Raiders on the Apple II can tell you it is one of the greatest games of all time. The graphics were very plain. But it was all about the game play. god I swish prorammers would get with it. to many sheep programming the next shooter upper. PUT SOME STRATEGY BACK IN THE GAMES
http://Lenny.com
We live in an era where an opinion is taken as fact by most people (Hello TV). They cannot get that it doesn't matter who is right but that the truth is expressed by someone.
If I go into a shop and ask ten random people something like "Do you like apples?". 5 out of them should in theory say no, 5 should say yes. It won't work like that but it's the basic idea.
Everyone has different tastes (I dont like rap,it out sells everything right now. I can ignore it and shrug), we just have to accept and find a tolerance level for something we dislike.
There will always be "trolls" who just flame for the fun of it, s well as fanboys who would say Myst had the best gameplay ever. This is how life is, as long as no one becomes a zealot then there isn't a problem.
People need to accept that the Earth doesn't revolve around a carbon based life form with the same name as them. If we accept opinions from other people and tolerate things we don't like which they made do then the world runs fine. If we don't... well lets just say lawyers enjoy this sort of world and look where they are now..
I like muppets.
http://g4mes.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/08/ 2340241&tid=127
No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'
Video games are expensive. If I read a glowing review for a game, say Prince of Persia: Sands of Time or Doom 3, and I drop A$99.95 on it only to find that it sucks so bad it could pull the moon out of orbit (in my opinion) then I feel a lot more annoyed than if I'd only spent A$29.95 (the price of a new-release album). If I hadn't bought any of the games that I subsequently thought were crap, my bank account would be near a couple of thousand dollars healthier. I therefore think I've bought the right to bitch about crappy reviews.
The problem with video game reviews, as I see it, is that they are subjective, by their very definition. There is no such thing as a definitively "good" game, nor is there any such thing as a definitively "bad" game. The same is true of movies, or books--when you read film reviews, you don't see a bunch of numerical scores ranking the film's "special effects" and "acting" and "sound technology" and the "tilt factor" on a (decimal) scale of one to ten. Instead, you just read some of the reviewer's genuine thoughts, and with those, you are free to determine whether or not you'd enjoy it. Game reviews, I think, need much the same thing. Far too many reviewers are focused on, "oh, this review must be under 1000 words," and "oh, I must split it up into sections for each component of the game," and "oh, I need to rate and rank everything and then use a calculator to get the result." No. Game reviews are subjective and should be treated as such.
I think it is the job of the review-writer to just convey a feeling about the game...to get the reader into his headspace, to explain the game, circumstances surrounding the reviewer's involvement with the game, that sort of thing, no numbers involved. It should be an introspective, organic process. For example, as an experiment with this sort of thing, I wrote this a few days ago--it is, sort of, a review of Doom 3. It was an experimental thing--yeah, I rambled a lot, I talked about some aspects of the game I liked, some I didn't like, and about some things that had zero bearing on the gameplay. In the end, I revealed that I had mixed feelings about the game--I didn't really like it much, but it was all right, I supposed.
Anyway, I took this review to the Doom 3 message board at GameFAQs, a web site which you will know, if you had been there, is absolutely frigging full of rabid fanboys. There are threads there with titles such as "I can't believe Gamespot gave Doom 3 only a 8.511111" and such. Anyway, yeah, I showed it to people there, and they enjoyed it--they said that my thoughts were, in general, interesting, and that they understood why I didn't like the game much. And these are rabid fanboys I'm talking about.
I guess this means that people tend to get more worked up about numbers--rankings, ratings, all that sort of stuff. Reviewers and readers tend to concentrate on that--on the mechanics, on the cut-and-dried aspects of things--rather than on the subjective things; a review shouldn't be "Whether or not a game is good," but rather it should be "How this particular reviewer felt playing the game." I think that's more interesting all around.
Quite frequently, publications and/or shows get entirely the wrong person to review the game: Someone who is a button-mashing fighting game player is probably not going to appriciate the slower pace of a tactics-RPG. Similarly, the heavy-duty RTS fan probably won't find much to like in rhythm-based dance games.
Useful game reviews come from people who have similar tastes to your own. Case in point: Tommy Tallarico. Tommy is not mainstream, nor are his tastes. When he reviews games on G4TechTV's show Judgement Day, it's clear that he was put there simply to provide a dissenting view. Have him play even the most revolutionary turn-based strategy game, and he'll insult it in the most vile manner he can think of. Thing is, there's a certain segment of the population that has similar tastes, and they will find his reviews useful.
Another issue may be that some mediocre games get cast as "inexcusably awful" or "mind-bogglingly terrible" simply because it's easy for reviewers to get carried away insulting a game. "I'd rather rub my eyeballs with 80-grit sandpaper," is more interesting to read than "It wasn't awful, but there are no remarkable qualities to this game. It really isn't worth the money."
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
The reason video game reviews draw so much "controversy" is that all of the controversy is generated by a small minority of extremely vocal idiot fanboys. Their allegiance to their chosen game is without question, and any reported flaws in the game are either problems with the reviewer's hardware, much less important than the reviewer claimed they were (therefore the game deserves a higher score), and anyone who could possibly hate this game must be a moron anyway because it is obviously perfect. Throw in the fact that there is essentially no penalty for being wrong, being incredibly stubborn, or endlessly prolonging an argument on the Internet, and you have communities which erupt at anything short of glowing praise.
True story.
game is a buggy piece of shit, and I read a lot to make sure it just isn't the reviewer's machine. I started doing this after ST: Armada, anyone ever play it? I sure did and 5 minutes later it would crash to the desktop. Other than that I could care less what the guy/gal has to say.
FPS reviewer reviewing RPG: "Dude this bleeping game is boring as bleep, I have to keep killing the same bleeping bleep over and over again to level up."
RPG reviewer reviewing FPS: "Dude this bleeping game is boring as bleep, I have to keep killing the same bleeping bleep over and over again to advance through the game."
Captain Obvious: "Dudes, wtf? You're doing the same bleeping thing."
All your base are belong to Google.
Video Game reviews are controversial? What?
schild
editor, f13.net
What i do when i want good online reviews (for games, music, hardware or whatever) is go for the ones with the lower scores. At least most reviews that dislike an item go to the lengths of actually explaining why they didn't, instead of glorificating gratuitously.
First of all, we have to note that video game reviews are not nearly as "technical" or "critical" as, say, movie or food reviews. Every movie reviewer has his or her specific biases, true, but you can also be well assured that most top critics (say, the Eberts of the world) are indeed watching the movie they are reviewing, take notes, and put some thought into what the good, and bad, of the movie they just saw was. And then they tell you. Now you know that a movie review is simply an opinion, but because most top reviewers give you both the "technical" things about the movie, as well as personal thoughts, you can often draw out the "technical" pluses and minuses (the plot is done well, etc.). Game reviewers usually can't play through a whole game - they play for a few hours, and then give their verdict. Which is why some games that we've seen lately have had a great first few hours, then suck - why not, if you know the reviewers will only see those.
In addition, movie reviewers we know will be reviewing the actual final movie. How often has a game gotten a score of 9.3/10, only to be absolutely terrible, and the reviewers defend themselves by saying "Oh, but they told us the one we played wasn't finished, and that the bugs would be fixed, and that the graphics would be better, in the final release!" All the time.
Game reviews are often sensationalist - a game is either a 8.5+, or like, 5.0 or below. There's no "Yeah, this game is good, but not great." If it's "good" it'll get that 8.whatever the publisher wants. Any respected movie critic recognizes that some things are just "Good" or "OK" and that's why you have ratings like "two stars". And that's neglecting the whole thing about games like Driv3r, where the company obviously paid off reviewers to give the game a good review.
And then there's the writing. Despite hearing that a place like IGN or Gamespy or various magazines have "editors" it sure doesn't seem like it. At least they could have run Word's horrible grammar and spell checker on their articles (sorry, you're using the passive voice!). Game reviews are usually very poorly written, even when coming from the "top" review sites out there. The Chicago Sun-Times doesn't expect Ebert's review to be crap...but IGN seems to have no trouble with it. (And let's not get into some sites' recent decision to just cut-and-paste reviews for a game multiple times when the game is on multiple consoles, instead of reviewing each on the merits).
So in review: Major newspaper movie critic doesn't watch movie, writes review - fired. Game reviewer plays 2 hours of game, writes review - praised by bosses! Major newspaper movie critic writes crappy articles every time - fired. Game reviewer writes gramatically terrible articles - published unedited! Major newspaper movie critic gives every movie either 1 star or 4 stars - fired. Game reviewer gives everything 8.5+ or 5- - great way to get payola from publishers! Movie reviewer writes incorrect review, says movie company said movie would be edited before release - fired. Game reviewer gives glowing review to buggy game, not mentioning any of them, says publisher told them the bugs would be fixed before release - No problem!
In movies, there's always critics giving a spectrum of ratings for movies, but there's no "controversy" because you can usually at least believe there's some professionalism behind the article, and can accept that everyone has some likes and dislikes. In games, it doesn't exist.
I've always thought that game reviewers have a far too ambitious resolution on their scores, given the subjective nature of such scores. What person A likes "84%", person B may easily like "75%".
I could see someone maybe rating games from "1" to "5", without fractional breakdown. It's certainly possible to rate different factors -- graphics, fun, replayability, sound, and so forth (though the idea of "averaging" them to come up with an overall score is broken and pointless -- for example, strategy games generally don't put much emphasis on graphics, and adventure games not much on replayability). However, the idea of rating things based on a 1 to 10, 1 to 20, or even 1 to 100 scale is far too ambitious for any reviewer to effectively handle. Generally, if you start needing that kind of resolution, you should be asking yourself whether, perhaps, your scores might just be inflated and the distribution tilted heavily towards the top.
May we never see th
If this quote was more appreciable by non-game-review-readers, it would be a dead ringer for the fortune database. Beautiful.
May we never see th
Seems I forgot to end my italics.
We live in an era where an opinion is taken as fact by most people (Hello TV).
I so deeply agree with you. Our current content-rating systems (review scores, whether someone is a spammer, how "good" a Slashdot post is) generally provide "absolute" metrics -- they rely on the false idea that a single measurement is appropriate to every person who will read that measurement. An adventure game player will have completely different tastes than a wargamer. There are a few stabs at providing personalized scores -- Slashcode lets people provide a minimal amount of metadata along with the score, like "Offtopic" (and, at least in theory, if you don't feel that Offtopic is a bad thing, you can make Offtopic have no effect for you). Google's Pagerank uses your current search as a bit of a "profile" for you to try to determine appropriate pages. TiVo contained some rudimentary stabs. But, in general, we are still using pre-computer-era evaluation mechanisms.
There is no technical reason for me not to have a review score based more heavily on the feedback of people who, in the past, have had review scores similar to my own. There are some organizational issues -- this sort of thing requires a large population of users/reviewers to be effective, which means that unless a single website is massive, like Amazon or eBay, it really needs to take advantage of user reviews written for other sites.
May we never see th
I have no idea how often this happens but it sure has pissed me off before. It sure makes me question the professionalism of said reviewers. (Why do I keep thinking of IGN when this topic pops into my head?)
Folks, anyone who tries to insist that opinions are 'just' opinions and that arguing about them is a mistake is just plain wrong, and you should run as fast and as far away from them as you can.
/.ed) trying to talk (non)sense into people, preventing them from getting emotional about things we value highly. That's why I said you should run as fast and as far away as you can from such a person: ultimately, he's asking you to deny your humanity.
The subjective/objective distinction is one of the most thoroughly abused in both philosophy and everyday life. Heidegger understood this, and developed a phenomenology that avoided the distinction altogether. Much of the debate in moral philosophy is simply the result of getting snagged on just this inability to see anything in between straight-up subjective and straight-up objective. It therefore becomes a 'problem' for moral philosophy to explain whether or not there are really objective moral facts when so much of our moral experience seems subjective.
If you're wondering why I bring up morality, it's because questions of what one should or ought to do are, like videogame reviews, the subject of much controversy. What needs to be understood is why.
Just as we have a moral faculty that allows us to make judgments about right and wrong, we have an aesthetic faculty that allows us to make judgments about good and bad for things like, not just videogames, but books, movies, paintings, music, and so on. And when we announce "this is good" or "this is bad", we are putting forth an opinion about what is, or should be, objectively true. Anyone who insists that all statements of "this is good" really just mean "this is good, in my opinion" or "for me, this is good" is making a mistake. It denies our human nature, our language (or interlocutionary) instinct to justify ourselves in our entirety to others (even the belligerent who tries to argue why he doesn't need to justify himself to others is contradicting himself).
It's true that sometimes a person will say "this is good, in my opinion" or, often on the internet, "this is good, in my humble opinion". Such a person is either convinced of the fantasy that opinions are 'just' opinions (but will inevitably contradict his own position later by expressing a more forceful opinion about something he feels more certain about), or he is anticipating the dangers of insisting what is good to people who may disagree (a long and bitter argument, for instance).
If you're not quite convinced, I only need point out the futility of articles (like the one
All the ideas posted above are good (raving fanboys, opinions presented as fact) but there's also another reason: controversy = page hits. If you're a site that can afford to trash a game (i.e. you're not in the publisher's pocket) the best way to get page hits is by slagging a popular (or well-remembered) game. We just saw it here on Slashdot a couple of days ago with the article about Dragon's Lair.
Sometimes, it's all about the advertising.
The problem with reviews and reviewer's "opinions" is that they should be journalists first and foremost, and theefore they should be objective in their reviews.
There's nothing worse that reviews by guys like Tommy Tallarico (Electric Playground) when he says on camera "I don't like X type of games" and then slams a game as a result of him just not liking that genre. Who does he think he is, the game buying public's savior? I guess all of us who LIKE genre X just need to be educated by Mr. Tallarico...
Seriously, if a reviewer is not into a certain genre of game, that reviewer shouldn't be reviewing it. Let someone who knows the genre review it.
Anyone remember the Game Fan jap bastards incident? Game reviews were more interesting back when game magazines were hiring teenagers off the street and had poor editorial oversight.
Further, reviewers of any subject who use the web as their primary means of distribution are crippled because there are so many web critics out there. So much of what is written for the web is terrible drivel! Most of it seems to be thinly veiled commercials for the games and hardware they are suppose to be "reviewing." It's like radio in the 50s, 60s and 70s - it's all about the graft and swag offered by the publishers.
If you can put together a review site and get a few thousand unique visitors a month, I doubt you'll ever need to purchase a game again.
If you want to have your reviews read without comment. Get a job writing for a newspaper or magazine. While I'm sure there will be a few "letters to the editor" it won't begin to approach the volume of response from something posted on the web.
Wow, I really loved playing that. Kept me busy for God knows how long back in gradeschool. Sure, the graphics were unamazing. (In fact, took me quite a while to figure out what everything was, without a manual) But you're correct about the strategy involved. The games market puts far too much emphasis on the graphics. This is as much the gamers' fault as anyone elses...I was drooling at early 3D accellerated games like the rest of us.
It should be noted that this emphasis on visuals also detracts from our review process. Half a rewview is now basically just screenshots. It gives takes the critical thought out of a rewview, since the graphics can be measured pretty objectively. (And quickly)
--LordPixie
This is why when I look for reviews, I make sure I read as many low score reviews as possible to see both sides, and hopefully demo the game before I decide to buy. And by demo of course I mean download.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I think one of the reasons fanboys view these reviews as some sort of mathematical construct is that they very often use them in that way to strengthen whatever IGN Board argument they're trying to make at that time.
Want to prove that GameCube exclusives are better than Xbox exclusives? I'll go to MetaCritic and show that the top 20 Nintendo exclusives scored better than the top 20 Xbox exlusives. Want to prove that Sega is a better publisher than EA? Why, I'll just go to GameRankings and show the average score for every EA game over the last year vs. every Sega game! The list goes on and on.
It's silly -- nobody tries to "prove" that Sam Raimi is a better director than Tim Burton by averaging their movie scores on RottenTomatoes.com. But using that same kind of logic in the videogame world is completely acceptable.
Of course, I'm not sure if there's really a way to fix this. Asking sites like GameRankings to shut their doors so that people can't perform these calculation is just a case of shooting the messenger (and I'm guessing GameRankings might not agree to my request).
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
im confused. are game reviews the reviewers opinion, or should he/she be critically commenting on the gameplay elements present and how the game achieved what it set out to do? what i mean is that if it was going to be a semi-tactical shooter, and the AI was crappy (a complaint occasionally leveled at far cry), or if it was supposed to be a multi-pathed game that ended up being overly linear with your decisions doing little to affect the game (deus ex 2), then you can be critical of the fact that it didnt succesfully do what i was obviously trying to do.
or is it all a line so blurred that game reviews are just pointless?
i dont care about gamespot giving doom 3 8.5, cause the review reads like a forum post half the time anyway. but to be honest, i agree with the score, and i would possibly be tempted to make it even lower. the game is supposed to have the basic shooting that worked so well in doom 1 and 2, yet its removed the one thing that made it work in doom 1 and 2, and all the doom wanna be's like serious sam and painkiller; tons of enemies attacking at once. its all well and good having a basic shooting game, but if the enemies are slow as anything and weak as piss even on veteran, and are presented on a plate to you via endless mini set-pieces where they broadcast their presence to the world via a scream or teleport, what fun is that.
either im making no sense or im all alone in suggesting that game reviews should be the reviewer commenting on how the game achieved what it set out to do, describing the gameplay elements involved and the graphics, controls and sound etc. include specific comments and stuff if required, and maybe a little bit of areas that the game could have been improved, being careful to not attempt to talk about things that would alter the specific genre of the game, and then leave it at that.
reviews nowadays have just become an opinionated mess of people simply describing the plot, saying whether or not they liked it based on whatever, and then what they would have done to make it better, regardless of whether or not they would fit in with the existing game style.
in fact, they've probably always been like that.
hey all there is a game review site out there now that reviews games without rankings, in fact its all about the reviewers Opinion and about the kinds of games that the reviewer likes to play. check it out at www.gamersinfo.net ?:>
Some sites believe in subjectivity - that the review SHOULD be about the player's experience and more importantly who the player IS. We try.... http://www.gamersinfo.net/aboutUs.php Not just a plug, but so the cynics know there are other ways of thinking.
Game reviews are not always subjective. A review could point out bugs in the game, describe the style of play, or explain the controls. Such things are facts and not subject to interpretation, and can very well influence somebody's decision to purchase.