MetaFuture Talks Review Inflation

MetaFuture, a game journalism analysis site, has recently refocused on review scores from the big gaming sites. The author takes an interesting approach, taking a look at Gamespot's review spread and IGN's tendencies. Unsurprisingly, both sites tend towards the 7 to 9 range, making it debatable whether their numbers are actually useful. The site's eventual goal is to normalize the review scores from the major sites, and actually make them useful. From the article: "Games will still get an average score from all contributing reviews. But a site's contribution to that average will depend on that site's own individual normal curve-- with the immediate left and right of the bell's tip signifying three stars on a scale of one to five. Watch the drama as the biggest sweethearts see their 8.4 score for Gun and Car IV get pegged as three stars." This is the reason Slashdot videogame reviews don't have numbers anymore.

Comments

Selection effects?

[JackBuckley]

I agree that fanboy magazine ratings should be viewed with scepticism, but I also worry about "normalizing" the reviews. There is an underlying assumption here that the population of games is symmetric in the distribution of quality. This may not be true, if, for example, games which are in the low quality tail are not released (game companies are strategic actors, right?) at a higher rate than games in the high quality side of the distribution. In addition, gaming magazines do not necessarily choose which games to review at random either--they either review interesting games with a higher probability of being of high quality (if you want to be kind to the industry) or else review in response to payola/swag (in which case it is the companies strategy which matters again.)

So, the question is, conditional on nonrandom selection of games to release and nonrandom selection of games to review, what should we expect the distribution of quality to look like? My guess is that this distribution is nonormal and is skewed with more observations in the higher quality tail. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the reviews are "fair," but it suggests that the question is more complicated than a simple "grade inflation" argument.

Note that I am also making an assumption that quality is judged in some sort of absolute terms, and not relative to the other games that are released. There are probably some other assumptions lurking in there as well. Just my $.02

Reviews are only useful when...

[mikeisme77]

Just looking at the end score in the review for ANYTHING is useless. The usefulness in a review is in reading the comments of the reviewer and understanding the reviewers preferences in games by looking at their reviews of other games you're interested in. The trick is to find a reviewer with similar thoughts on genres and such as your own, that way their review is relevant to you. The other trick is finding well thought out, well explained reviews--ones that tell you EXACTLY what the shortcomings and pros of the title were, this way you can decide if the shortcomings are shortcomings to you or if you just think the reviewer is being anal.

Should be more like film critics

[Bender0x7D1]

People should rely more on reviews from people that have the same gaming opinions as they do instead of some number. Consider: How many poorly rated movies do well at the box office, and how many highly rated movies do poorly? A lot. Check out Yahoo! movies or similar site and compare the critics to the people. They are never the same and rarely similar. Why? Movie critics see a lot of movies, so are biased towards the storyline and acting instead of a big action sequence. So, they view movies differently than I do.

Extending that to video games; a reviewer who enjoys FPS games is going to give a high rating to the latest shooter with great graphics. I like older FPS games, but hate the direction that the industry has gone with newer games. So, if a reviewer is a fan of the genre, and I'm not, should I use their review? Of course not! I hate RTS games, so even if one had a 10 rating I wouldn't buy it. However, maybe someone does something new and it is worth my time and money to give it a shot. How do I know? I need to find a reviewer who doesn't like RTS games and get their rating - if they give it a 7 or 8, but they don't like RTS, then I should look into it.

So, how do you find these reviewers? Give ratings to the games you have played, maybe separated by genre, and then go looking for reviews that are close to your own and look at the name of the reviewers. Then search by reviewer to see how close their ratings are to your own, pick the closest (or some sort of combination - Alice for RTS and Bob for FPS). Now you have some reviewers you can trust will like the same games you do, and you can shop accordingly.