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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."
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.
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.
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.
Strategy is that thing that I use when I decide if I want the gun that shoots lasers or the one that shoots rockets, right?
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.
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
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.