The Review Critic
Reviews. To the best of my knowledge, nearly every big gaming site has them. They exist to provide the reader with a well-detailed explanation of a game's inner workings, coupled with a consensus on what makes the game good and what makes it bad. In fact, most people use reviews as key references for deciding the purchase of games.
Unfortunately, the standard review system is plagued with many problems. The glaring inconsistencies in the writing and the total lack of need for a scoring system stand out especially as key issues. These problems have created a relatively standardized system, a system inherently flawed.
Missing The Point(s)
One key problem that arises with the standard review system is the fact that with a score to look at, readers are tempted to skip all the way to that score and ignore everything that was written about the game. Sadly, most are probably not just tempted, but are simply too lazy to actually read the review itself. In a discussion with IGNCube Editor (and former N-Sider writer) Mary Jane Irwin, she informed me that the first and last pages of their reviews get about twice as many hits than any of the other pages.
If you're not familiar with IGN's review system, the last page of their reviews contains the score breakdown and closing comments. I'm fairly certain you can see the same trend that I do. Most people are clicking on the link to the review, then skipping ahead to the last page. As a writer, I would not only find this insulting, but very discouraging.
The review process generally works like this. A reviewer sits down with a title for as long as they possibly can and examines the details of a game, gauging its pros and cons. Trying to take everything they can into account, they begin formulating thoughts and then an opinion on what they like and what they don't like. The reviewer then takes those thoughts, and attempts to translate them into elegant writing, outlining their opinions and supporting them with good arguments. At the end of the review, the reviewer brings out their most important thoughts and laces them together to form a conclusion on the game as a whole. Finally, if this review is being written for a site that uses a scoring system, the reviewer then tries to condense those thoughts into some form of number, letter, star, etc. - a rating system.
That sounds like quite a lot of work and of course, it is. Now, think about putting that kind of time into a piece of work and having the majority of readers avoid the largest portions of it. It's not something that sits well in my mind and I'm sure that if you were in the same position, it wouldn't sit well with you either.
All Reviews Have Inconsistencies... Sometimes
The entire idea of a review scoring system is pointless. The final score is inherently context based. Whenever you look at the score of a game, you have to keep in mind the circumstances that the game was reviewed under. It's almost as if every review score should come with a disclaimer.
The prime example of this is Super Mario 64. Anyone who was reviewing at that time gave it a perfect score. The game was unlike anything we had ever seen before. It featured vast, fully 3D environments with an incredible sense of exploration. Many other things made the game great, but looking back on it and comparing it to what we have now in terms of technical prowess and general refinements, it's quite mediocre. Think about it - the game had camera problems, graphical glitches, funny looking polygons, etc. What I'm getting at is, if the game was released today and compared directly with other platformers, it wouldn't score that well at all.
You might think of this as a fairly weak example, as I'm comparing an old game to new games. So, let's look at something fairly recent.
Animal Crossing has scored fairly well among reviewers. While it was a re-release with marginally updated graphics, it really doesn't look that pretty compared to everything else out there. Did that seem to matter that much to reviewers? Obviously not that much if it scored so well. Therefore, the following question arises: When exactly do graphics not matter? Personally, they don't factor in that much for myself. I appreciate gorgeous looks, but that specific quality is definitely not at the top of my list for what makes a game great. For others though, graphics do matter... sometimes.
Another example of inconsistent review nature can be found in the reviews of sports titles. While one could argue that they change significantly enough every year to warrant a new purchase, one cannot deny that you're essentially getting a very similar game to what you had the previous year. Oddly enough though, if a sports title plays well, looks good and includes some great features, it doesn't matter what came out the year before. It still gets a decent score. Now, I really don't think that you can deny that games from other genres, in comparison with sports titles, get criticized greatly if they don't produce some sort of significant change with each subsequent release. Therefore, significant changes in a game from sequel to sequel do matter... sometimes.
Expectations also factor greatly into the equation. Most of the time in the industry, these games are broken down into two categories:
"Over-hyped Games" and "Surprise Hits".
If a game with high expectations turns out to be terrible, it is knocked down quite a few notches on the reviewer's scale. This is known as an "Over-hyped Game". Conversely, if a game with low expectations turns out to be amazing, it is knocked up quite a few notches on the reviewer's scale. This is known as a "Surprise Hit". However, this really only affects the games on either side of the spectrum. What about the ones in the middle? The ones where the high expectations and low expectations have found some sort of balance. Well, by luck of the draw (or press coverage), these games are not affected that greatly by either extreme level of expectation. You could almost say that these "Middle-ground" games were under hyped games that never attained the status of "Surprise Hit". I can provide examples of all three.
- Over-hyped Game: Turok Evolution
- Surprise Hit: Viewtiful Joe
- Middle-ground: Mario Party 5
While all games have expectations, you can easily find ones that have been labeled neither "Over-hyped" or a "Surprise Hit". This means that the expectations placed on a game do matter... sometimes.
The obvious trend here is that nothing is certain. There is no single pattern to scoring which allows a reader to directly relate a score that a certain game gets under one set of circumstances to a score that another game gets under a completely different set of circumstances. And how then, do you even get around to calculating the score that a game deserves? I'll battle with that next.
Pointing Out The Score
Think about people who purchase games based on score alone. What if that reviewer weighed most of his or her opinion on a certain aspect of the game that the reader didn't care about? The reader would of course never notice, because he/she never actually read the review. I'm hoping there aren't a great percentage of people who do this, but I know for a fact that it does exist.
I've always enjoyed asking others the following, so I'll do it here.
If we assume that we're not taking the average of a collection of terms, how does one determine the difference between say, a score of 8.1 and a score of 8.2? For example, if you're talking about two sports games, released by different developers/publishers within the span of a couple weeks, should that 0.1 difference really influence your purchasing decision based on score alone? I would hope not.
Even those scores that are derived from averages, you have to look at the origin of those scores. For instance, let's say you had 4 categories: Gameplay, Sound, Graphics and Replay Value. Now, let's say you weighed each score to the best of your abilities and judgement, on a scale of 1-10 and came up with the following breakdown for that game.
- Gameplay: 9
- Sound: 7
- Graphics: 9
- Replay Value: 4
Sounds like a pretty decent game, does it not? Well, by simple math, you find that the average score is 7.25. This is the obvious reason why most sites do not take an average when calculating the final score, but I think I've shown well enough that even that doesn't help much.
The Spoiler Effect
There's a delicate balance in giving just enough information, but not giving so much that it spoils the game for the reader. While most spoilers are seen as plot elements, surprising and interesting gameplay elements can be spoiled for the reader as well. A perfect example of this is the "Insanity Meter" in Eternal Darkness. You know, the one that would make wi3rd 7hing5 h4pp3n when your sanity level dropped? Wouldn't the game have been so much better for you had you not understood how it worked?
And that in itself, may actually be a reason to have a review score. Earlier, I discussed the idea that people skipped over the bulk of the review because they're lazy. There is however, the chance that they want to know how good a game is based on its score alone, just so they can get the full experience.
Score alone though, is nowhere near something one would call a proper attempt at defining the quality of a game. Hence, this is most certainly not a good way for people to go about deciding whether to buy a game or not. For these types of "media blackout" people, rental-first is probably the only way to go, therefore completely negating the need for a score.
Words + No Score = Solution?
While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a review score is certainly worth a lot less. Is there any real point to having something of such little value? Obviously not. It's an ill-conceived attempt to give the reader something nice and simple to look at, rather than a bunch of confusing words. The way I see it is, the system is playing to the lowest common denominator. You're not required to follow the standard method of reviewing, but if you don't, you risk losing readers to that site over there.
So, what can be done? Well, most of these thoughts arose from discussing the nature of reviews with fellow N-Sider staffers. We've played around with our review system a lot, mainly because we've never been completely satisfied. We're still actually trying to get something in place that is both efficient and score-less, yet informative. It's hard to find a system that allows creativity for the writer, while limiting the number of possible ways to fall into the standard review trappings.
Such a venture may not be possible, but one thing is clear. A review should be based on someone's opinion, but it has to be their entire opinion. You should express what is important to you in a game when reviewing, they you should relate these opinions back to the game in question. If you had higher expectations, so be it. Just make sure you illustrate that point well enough.
Scores do not reflect those kinds of opinions. Rather, they restrict a reviewer's ability to express their opinion to their full capacity. Hopefully, sometime in the near future, you'll see a review system on gaming sites that escapes from these restrictions and downfalls.