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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."
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.
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.
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.