Game Reviews and Scores
Academic Question ...
How much stock do you put in scores attached to game reviews (or reviews of anything, for that matter)? Do you read the full review, before the score, or do you check the score first? What is your "never buy" point for scores on a 10-point scale? 5-point?
Personally, I hate scores, because they never tell you the full story. They never adjust for fans of a particular genre, they never compare directly against competing products, and they give no indication of reviewer bias. At the same time, I find myself frequently looking at scores first (and sometimes only scores), so I guess I'm part of the problem.
Would you prefer to see a simpler scale ... thumbs up and down, or Buy, Rent, Skip? Does that make the problem worse?
2 comments:
I'm not a big fan of scores, but I think you know that. I do look at them, but I always look at them relatively compared to what the review's author has given other games. Finding a reviewer with your tastes is key.
When I do short form reviews for my blog for anything (music, movies, games) I use letter grades under the following scheme.
A+: Really amazingly excellent
A: Excellent
B+: Really great, not quite excellent
B: Very good
C+: Slightly good
C: Mediocre
D: Really bad
F: Catastrophically bad
It seems like a lot I suppose, but numbers seem so hard and to me letters are slightly more flexible. I try not to use the plus scores too. Thumps Up/Down is a good system to. I like sites like Rotten Tomatoes that aggregate all the reviews into a simple good/bad answer.
When I review games, the score is usually something that I ballpark based on past experiences. The more I reviewed, the less I looked only at scores and started to really pay attention to content.
The thing is, no matter how you change the scale, it's still a scale and people will still judge it soley based on their own mental system.
I figure, if you can make the content good enough where the reader wants to read it and not just skim over the scores, you've done your job and you're working towards getting people to stop score-peeping.
As for a thumbs up/down thing, I don't think simplification is the solution when the problem is that scores aren't specific enough.
Ack, I'm just ranting here. Scores < content, it's just that most people are lazy, myself included.
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