No Numbers, No Problems

1 - 10, A - F, varying numbers of stars... all of these are scales that game critics use to summarize for their audiences, and these scales are precisely what I do not plan to use.  Why, you may ask? Inquire in the jump beyond!


When a game I am waiting for finally arrives, much like many of my gaming ilk, I immediately head online to see what people are saying about it.  The problem is that more and more, these reviews are losing meaning.  Much of this, I feel, has to do with the attachment of some kind of scale summarizing how much fun a game is.  Prime example: Final Fantasy XII scores a 92 on Metacritic, and was a commercial and critical success.  The problem was that I thought the game was an absolute turd, but bought it because of the high numbers it garnered.  The more these scales are used, the more we assign the numbers/letters/star counts as having objective values when the sources they are coming from, try as they might, are purely subjective sources.

I think Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation is one of the best critics out there, but gets continually panned as a crotchety Brit who simply rants for the sake of ranting.  However, when you see his (admittedly far fewer) reviews of games he LIKES, an image of what variety of gamer he is, and therefore what HE is looking for, becomes clearer and clearer.  Thusly, I find that even if I don't agree with his review, I have a more robust view of A) what the target market is and B) how well they have achieved pleasing that target market.  The problem with then applying this final judgment to a scale is that, even though we don't want to admit it, we do apply a certain level of authority to something that seems to be legitimately quantified (even though rating a game a 7/10 basically means you just said "I had 7 out of 10 possible funs".  It is a meaningless statement).

Now you could say that a reviewer has enough of a voice that people should know to adjust based on the type of gamer the reviewer is vs. the type of gamer they are, but people are very, very susceptible to suggestion.  Numbers, while they may seem concrete, can be manipulated to say just about anything you want them to.  And no matter how well I may evaluate a piece of software, if I give it a number, you'll be thinking "well, that Butler guy gave it an 8" when you try to decide if it's worth your time, with many of my words going by the wayside.  I am a somewhat verbose person, and this effect does less than thrill me.

My point is that a lack of numbers or stars or grades encourages the reader to think about the review's content in more detail than if the complex opinion I have on a complex game were reduced to a meaningless, abstract scale.  Will the reader think about the things I liked in light of the things they like when evaluating the game, or will they ignore the careful construction of my personal argument in favor of thinking "this game is an 8, so it must have been good", only to find that by their own standards, it works out to a 4.  I can't cater to your viewpoints any more than you can cater to mine.  What I hope to do is provide a subjective assessment that is then open to you, the humble internets, to evaluate based on your OWN criteria.  I provide my own knowledge (which as we all know, is power), but the choice rests with you in how to wield it based on what YOU want.

Pretty neat, huh?