Whenever a product is reviewed, there’s a helpful indicator that summarises the overall observations into a simple easily understandable unit, namely the Review Score. The Score is prevalent in the judgement of entertainment products like movies and video games. But is it truly a good indication of the overall quality of a product for time immemorial? Is a score relevant after the product has undergone changes after release, as with video games getting patched? Would a score compare with the experience of a user consuming the product without understanding its context?
What makes the Review Score so Important?
Speaking about video games, scores can be quite a decisive factor when it comes to purchase decisions, so much so that publishers link payment bonuses to a game’s score. There are sites dedicated to aggregating the scores of multiple review outlets to represent what they claim to be an unbiased benchmark for the game. Then there are the user ratings with everyone willing to contribute their personal score for the game, sometimes without even playing it. The argument in favour of this concept is it’s sheer simplicity in conveying the quality of the game, and this simplicity happens to be its biggest flaw.
What the Review Score fails to account for
In my opinion, the Review Score is a flawed concept. As a basis of judgement, it is very much akin to your final exam results in that it merely tells you how your performance was judged at a particular point of time based on a particular set of rules. It completely disregards whether what was true at the time of judgement will hold true in case the rules change or at a different point of time when another is the judge or even whether you would be able to repeat your performance in the same fashion.
Video Games change over time. New Technology enables new experiences. Bugs are patched out and sometimes new bugs are introduced. Unofficial content is generated by the game’s fans. Sometimes a mod is so popular that it brings the base game back from the dead as DayZ did to ARMA 2. Sometimes the gameplay itself changes to such an extent that it’s barely recognisable as the original game anymore as happened to Team Fortress 2. In such a scenario, does the original score even remain valid? The logical answer would be No, which means the score must be updated and revised as time passes, though with the amount of new games and new content being produced, this is not a feasible solution.
How is a Score Calculated?
A review is generally a personal perception based on the capability, experience and technical knowledge of the reviewer and the score is something usually born of gut instinct. A product is judged in comparison with its peers and this relativistic comparison does not stand the test of time. What might be standard today may end up as nostalgia or called old school tomorrow, when game experiences have evolved with a different set of rules. Every reviewer’s score is a personal affair taking into account all their personal viewpoints on a multitude of issues. A game may not necessarily pander to all of them leading to conflicting scores across publications. There are also external pressures from industry players for a good review score in return for favours or future cooperation. This is what the GamerGate controversy is raging about, completely ignorant of the fact that this kind of practice of stakeholders gaming the system occurs unmolested in other walks of life. However, it is rare for anyone with some business sense to create an impartial environment when their potential income is at stake based on a biased person’s judgement, so it would be rather silly to believe there will ever be an unbiased review when the judgement is delivered by a person.
Even when a review score is calculated based on breakdown into various parameters, gut instinct can still be used to manipulate the subscores to achieve the desired score. Besides, the parameters are based on a publication’s perspective and may not paint a true picture of the product. Simply put, you must understand that your experience with a game may not concur with that of the reviewer. The better approach would be to read multiple reviewers and follow the few whose opinions generally tend to agree with yours. With the advent of streaming and videos, traditional games media are on a slippery slope to irrelevance. When you have the option of just watching someone else play through the game you’re interested in, to judge if it looks like an experience that tingles your gaming taste buds and makes your drool in anticipation, why would you bother reading a wall of text with a few screenshots thrown in? This sort of live demonstration can result in you finding that diamond in the rough that appeals to your gamer instincts despite being damned by the critics. Streaming has also opened up a market for the really bad games simply because it’s entertaining to watch people endure the torture of playing them. After all, as the success of Dark Souls shows, many gamers have a masochistic side to them, though that experience is leagues apart from these awfully broken games.
The problem with judging Remasters
This issue with review scores not being resistant to the passage of time also crops up when it comes to the judgement of remasters. While there is a niche nostalgic audience that fondly remembers the gameplay systems that would find no place in today’s games, there will also be players who never played the original, but want to try it out based on its glorious reputation. In such a case, is it truly fair to judge a game to a different set of standards and a different context? Would the new players be as forgiving of the game’s flaws and realise that they were part of its original charm all those years back when it first released? My opinion is that what makes a game a truly fun experience is its core gameplay. This aspect of a game can withstand the test of time easily, as has been demonstrated by various sports and games that have been played for centuries. Good Gameplay will shine through irrespective of the exterior appearance. The adage about beauty being skin deep applies to games too, after all. Story has its place in games too, but rarely do gamers play a game again for its story. The only other relevant criterion in a remaster would actually be the quality of the remastering process and its longevity.
The State of the Industry and its consumers
In the current state of the Video Games Industry, determining what game is worth investing in has become quite difficult. You also have game ideas asking for funds to be turned into actual games through crowdfunding. There are Early Access Games that are incomplete, but showing potential, which are essentially paid alpha/beta tests. There are Always Online games whose experience depends on the number of players putting load on the servers. There are games where only one gameplay mode is popular with the players. There are games that are sold as part of a cheap bundle or discounted so steeply that their quality is ignored in favour of the attractive price. There are games whose marketing has hyped them so much that strengths are overshadowed by the disappointment stemming out of the pierced bubble of hype. Each of these requires a different approach to review that simply can’t be summarised as a simple number.
The other factor to consider is the consumer. Just as the various game types pose a challenge to cover exhaustively, there are different mindsets that perceive a score differently. Some people only want the best experience, while others are taken in by the hype and try to mask their disappointment and justify their poor choice in a bout of self-righteousness. Some gamers love the rough edges of the indie experience and loath the cushioned comforts of AAA games, while others crave the opposite. Some find their fun in mediocrity that has been rubbished by the critics. Others take the word of critics as gospel and base their purchase decisions on reviews. Visual Eye Candy might be cherished by a section of gamers who look down upon anything that’s not pushing the boundaries of realism. There are those who would rather play a game for its story rather than its gameplay. Some gamers love to have diverse experiences playing multiple game genres and others have more of a one track mind and find their call in the variation between games played to the same set of rules with different sets of players. These are just a few of the different perspectives of looking at a game and they can be found among the reviewers too. After all, critics are merely highly opinionated human beings.
So what is the alternative to Review Scores?
Given all the arguments against using this metric of a review score, how else is one supposed to determine whether a game is worth your time and money? After all, it is folly to preorder, but that topic is for another article. My suggestion would be simply to list the most appealing aspects of the game and its drawbacks as well as point out any future benefits you can envision and then say if you recommend it or not. In other words, do a SWOT Analysis of the game. This lets the consumer decide if they wish to invest in the game that you reviewed. If they even bother to read your painstakingly crafted literary work instead of watching a commentated stream, that is. While this system may not be foolproof itself, it does make it easier for one to revisit their verdict after a period of time or put out a new verdict based on the state of the game then, while providing the consumer with a good idea about what to expect from a game.
Some media outlets are switching to a recommendations system like Eurogamer recently or Joystiq before that, while some like Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a policy to not use scores from the outset. While their arguments might have inspired this piece, the true spark that got me thinking along these lines was the conundrum of how to judge a remaster with a score.
You Hypocrites still use the Review Score
Given all these arguments against the Review Score, you might wonder why iLLGaming still indulges in the practice. Strictly speaking, it is the local circumstances that force our hand. The Review Score is something that makes Business Sense to the local distributors and our intellectual argument for dropping it will only hold water once it becomes the norm worldwide. When it comes to review copies, we rarely get them before launch date for the major AAA games. A ‘benefit’ of this is that we then get to review the games in their post-launch state so we can gauge the experience better. We are committed to not being influenced by external pressures on our scores and have suffered for it in the past. However, we do wish more outlets followed this no score policy so we can comfortably switch over to it. Until then we ask, What’s in a Score?
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Disclaimer: This article expresses the personal opinions of the author and may not necessarily reflect the views of iLL Gaming.
