Yes that title is correct. It seems like many people are of the opinion that we should strip away these arbitrary number scores placed on games because they don’t really tell us anything. What does an 88.5/100 actually mean? Well I’m here to tell you that these staples of the industry are actually important and we need to keep them, though not for the reasons you might think.
It seems that in the last few years there has been an outcry of gamers to do away with numerical scores. Solutions vary from simply changing to a star or thumb up/down system (both of which still use numbers) all the way to removing them completely and to force people to read/listen to the content of the review rather than jump straight down to the number. This second solution is actually a great idea and I was totally behind it for a long time. But after thinking of ideas for this month’s Monthly Musing I am retracting my previous stance on the issue and here’s why.
The numerical scores placed on games are actually less about the game and more about the reviewer. Having a score attached to a game helps us to understand the person or people reviewing the game. If you think of the number more as “___ out of all-the-games-I-have-ever-played” rather than ___/100 you may start to see where I’m coming from. Offering a number score to accompany the written or video version of a review offers us more general insight into the person reviewing the game.
But why would I want to know more about a reviewer when there are a billion of them? It allows for trust between you and the reviewer. How many times have you read a review and then saw an unexpectedly high/low score compared to what you thought they would’ve given? By sticking with certain reviewers (or more likely a publication or website) you start to understand how they write. Maybe they don’t spend enough time going over the negatives in the written portion and that’s why the score seems out of place. Or perhaps they used the wrong words to illustrate their opinions. But knowing that they tend to underrate/overate games allows you to trust that reviewer. You don’t need to find a reviewer you see eye to eye with, just one you can trust.
Trust in gaming reviews can of course be broken. The pinnacle of this broken trust and seemingly upstart of the removal of scores seems to have stemmed from the Jeff Gerstmann/Gamespot review of Kane & Lynch. I’m sure most of you are familiar with this and are aware of all sides of the story. But still, trust was broken and GS suffered greatly from it. The bias of all their reviews was brought into question (arguably a bit overboard) and I don’t think they have gained back the trust from a majority of the people they lost it from. This was a horrible time for everyone involved but I believe that it was a fairly isolated incident. Perhaps I think the best of people and am a fool for doing so, but I believe that most reviewers are honest and open about their work.
What else can numbers tell us about a game? Sites like Metacritic can help give us a general overview of the gaming community as a whole, or at least the ones who use that site. There are plenty of trolls, fanboys, and non-justifiable game bashing that go on there but now we know that those people make up a significant portion of gamers. Sadly though, knowing that these people abuse the system gives a lot of people justification to not use numerical scores altogether. Most of the time I think that sites like Metacritic do what it’s supposed to do well enough.. It’s only on occasion, usually with a console exclusive title, that the fanboys come out of the woodworks and intentionally lower the score because they don’t favor that system.
So in review; numerical scores given alongside game reviews are a great idea and one that we should try to keep. The score tells us more about the person or people reviewing the game than about the actual game itself. I do believe in keeping the actual content of the review above the score given but that doesn’t mean we should toss aside the number altogether. The system of course can be abused but I think it’s an example of a few bad apples ruining the batch. Understanding who the people reviewing a game are is just as important as what they have to say about the game. By using a numerical score associated with the review it makes trusting the reviewer(s) an easier process.
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Maybe I'm just being thick here, but how would attaching a number to a review tell us any more about the reviewer than just the text itself? Wouldn't the latter give us insight into the qualities, emphases, tendencies, etc. that you mentioned without having to summarize the whole thing into a single figure? Not trying to bust you here, I'm honestly curious about that angle of the argument.
I find that having a number at the end helps me associate or understand with what the person was writing about. Over at Game Trailers I find that when compared to the video content of a review, the score can sometimes be unusually low. When they say things like "the story wasn't great" but they rate the Story a 4/10 it makes me wonder just how bad it actually was or wasn't. By having the other presentation of thought in the form of a number rather than the written word, it offers more insight into what they determine good/bad. At least for me it does.
@Lurfadur: Or you know, they could challenge themselves to learn how to communicate their points more strongly. If you can't genuinely explain why the story isn't good and give the reader some genuine insight, then a 4/10 only helps exemplify how poor your ability to review the game really is.
Interesting read! This is something I had never really considered before, but you're right that if you read certain reviewers a lot, you would definitely get a fairly good idea of their likes/dislikes based on their reviews and their scores. Regardless of what they say, if they consistently rate graphics or story as low... then you get the idea that they have fairly high expectations for those aspects, but maybe not for something like gameplay which they might rate consistently high.
Eh... I rarely read reviews and am more likely to ask other gamers about a game anyway. :)
Your response reminded me of Jim's recent "defense force" article which stated that reviewers and gamers in general should be more open about their biases, rather than pretending that they don't exist - such a mindset could probably be helpful in these situations, wherein a reviewer who doesn't value graphical quality/story/whatever would have already said so at some point, so you'd know what to expect going into their review. If nothing else, methinks that's a more honest and concrete way to account for individual preferences and such than trying to figure out what someone "meant" by a number/letter score.
I never had an issue with scores, I am very thankful that I have metacritic as a resource. My problem is the scale, though many reviewers will use the whole range, most don't. A 5.0 on Destructoid means the game is mediocre and fans may like it, on Gamespot or IGN a 5.0 is almost unheard of. If you go to almost any half-decent game on Metacritic you'll see that someone gave it a 100. I think we should all be held to the Famitsu standard.