[Rant] Game review scores feel meaningless to me
What does a '9' even mean?
In addition to game recommendations I also plan to write topical rants about subjects related to video games that I find interesting or feel I have something to contribute. I thought it would be interesting to dedicate my first rant to a topic near and dear to my heart. The topic? Objectivity vs subjectivity in art critique culture. Specifically, but not exclusively, in how we rate our video games by reducing our personal experiences with them down into enigmatic scores.
When someone says, “This game is awesome,” we know that is an opinion. Maybe a lot of people say it. Maybe a majority of a population says, “This game is awesome.” Do we still recognize that as an opinion? I’d think so. Mass appeal is no substitute for “objective” reality, right? What is awesome? Can we quantify it? Is it 8, 9, or 10? Is it 9, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 9.6, 9.7, 9.8, and 9.9 bundled together in a range? Is it just an abstract experience we have while playing? Is that abstract experience exclusive to that range? It depends who you ask, right?
What if I think a game is a 9, and you think that game is a 4? What if at the same time, you think a game is a 8, but I look at it more like a 7.5? What if I think it is 5 stars, and you think it is a 100? What is the difference? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?!!?!?!? Sorry, I had an existential crisis just then. I need a quick break from my own nihilism here for a second so let us take a moment to examine this whole game review thing.
The basic idea is this:
You walk in the tall grass.
A wild new game appears.
You ready your $dollar bills and prepare to catch it.
WAIT! What if this thing has terrible stats at max level? Maybe you consult the website that tells you whether or not things are good.
The numbers check out! Time to let the $dollar bills fly.
It sure sounds simple in theory except for I feel like nobody I know makes their game purchase decisions this way. I am not sure how much weight, if any, people actually give to it when push comes to shove. Consider this hypothetical scenario:
Congratulations! You won one of those all you can shop contests, but instead of having a limited time to stuff the shopping cart with whatever you want you get one game for free. Hey, a free game, that is still a nice reward. Next the grim reaper appears and says, “This is the last game you will play before you die, and it has to be one you’ve never played or watched before.” Daaamn. Just ONE game, the last game, and you don’t even get to partake in that classic love for the last time? Mortality, am I right?
Pretend all you have left is the last game and no family to spend your last days with or any other way to spend your time. So there you are. In the aisle. One voucher for a game and staring down a display case filled with all the games you’ve never played or seen played. In this moment how much do you value a game review score? Does it even come into the calculus? I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I know if I were in that situation a score would be totally meaningless to me. I’ll explain why I feel that way.
If you go to IGN’s website right now by clicking THIS link, you’ll have the opportunity to read their gaming review practices and see the scale on which they use to judge games. They admit up front, as I am saying to you now, that the whole thing is not a science and not objective. They admit scores are just a baseline for opinion, and that you can’t measure how good art is with any kind of objectivity.
Still an effort is made to use words like awful, train wreck, and even unbearable to justify categorizations and rankings of other people’s art as though the groups they’ve created are somehow any less subjective than the scores. Painful tier games with a 2 ranking are described as, “Not only are these games not fun, but they’re outright infuriating or insulting.”
Let’s digest this description by focusing on the following words:
Fun.
Infuriating.
Insulting.
IGN has attached to this group a set of emotions, but they haven’t really defined them relative to gameplay experiences. Also what is fun to me isn’t necessarily fun to you. I mean did you really laugh at the mortality joke earlier? Do we think everyone who reads this will? Certainly not. What makes something fun? Where is the line drawn where a one degree difference of “fun” determines what games qualify for a Painful categorization? What is the standard unit of “fun?” Well, like IGN and I both agree on, there isn’t one. The same can be said of things that make us feel furious or insulted. Everyone has different internal value systems and we all react to stimuli in different ways.
Metacritic takes some aggregate of review scores from all of their trusted publications and respected reviewers when generating their own “proprietary Metascores”, but what exactly are they aggregating? Game reviewers, like every other kind of person, are biased to the types of experience they enjoy personally. An art critic is never representative of any universal opinion they only share their take. Individual writers at game review publications aren’t capable of individually representing the views of their peers, much less consumer opinion. I doubt every writer at these publications even agrees on the forward facing score that gets published, but it is somehow supposed to give consumers any clearer of an idea whether or not a game is right for us?
So what is it really accomplishing? What is it even communicating? I don’t get it. Does it tell us a 50 is more worth trying than a 40? Not really, because there is no rubric on how those numbers are assigned, it’s all personal emotion. Does it tell us that IGN recommends a 7 to us more than a 6? Perhaps the corporate entity does, but the actual writers who work there may not agree. Can Metacritic really help us make thoughtful purchasing decisions with a score that is effectively a distillation of many distillations of an experience? I’m not sold on the idea.
I don’t think you can distill a complex opinion of an even more complex experience down into a number any more easily than you can distill your experience with a novel or into a single word or a film down into a single frame. It just doesn’t communicate any nuance or specificity about the actual reaction. There is no context. If there is no context how am I supposed to derive meaning? It certainly doesn’t make purchasing decisions any more convenient for me when you ask me to roll the dice on the hope that the review score or “Metascore” number has been assigned simpatico to my own personal value system. Unless I read a more long form assessment I have no way of knowing.
Personally I think it makes more sense to abolish the scores. Let interested individuals read the reviews and articles in full and decide within the text and the subtext whether or not they feel solidarity with the emotional perspective of the writer. We who write about video games are not philosopher royals who can render judgment on what experiences are and are not worth having to everyone. All we can do is say how we felt and what we liked personally, so why not just stick to doing that rather than trying to reduce our perceptions to an enigmatic number?
If you enjoy seeing review scores that’s okay. I’m not trying to create a mandate or a boycott here. I'm just saying what does and does not makes sense to me from my perspective. I don’t view astrology as having any meaning either, but I don’t have any problems with other people enjoying it and wanting to engage with it. You do you, but now you know where I stand on the subject.
I give assigning video game review scores a Y out of 10.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this piece and want to support me, you can do so by doing the following:
(A) Subscribing to my Substack.
(B) Following me on Twitter @NixKillsMyths.
(C) Sharing this post on social media.
(D) Sending this post to a friend.
(E) Liking this post and leaving a comment.
(F) Joining the community Discord server.
or
(G) All of the above! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Be a G, do all the things.