Why Videogame Reviews End Up Being So Controversial 81
Thanks to GamerDad for its editorial discussing why videogame reviews are sometimes controversial, and "why fanboys have such a hard time understanding that reviews are just opinions." The author explains: "I think it's simply a product of the games being essentially mechanical constructs... The mechanics of a game are often reviewed with their own numerical scores that then produce the overall total score." He goes on: "So many folks believe the pieces that create the game, because of the technology used (good or bad), define how good it can or can't be", before concluding: "Five stars out of five doesn't mean that's the greatest game and no game could be better. It does mean that it's one of the very best your money can buy in the opinion of the writer of the review."
Re:The real reason... (Score:1)
opinions that look like facts. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:opinions that look like facts. (Score:1, Troll)
To the reviewer, the movie/book/game/etc is 'really' bad, because thats what they think, that's what their experience is. Reviewers shouldn't have to state that the review is their opinion, that should go without saying.
As the GamerDad article points out, you should read some reviews by a person to get a feel for what they like. To get 'accurate' reviews {accurate for you}, find som
Re:opinions that look like facts. (Score:2)
Actually, the most important thing to figure out is just what the person's taste is. The most accurate guage for judging whether we will like a movie or not is one of my wife's co-workers. If he likes a movie, we will dislike it. If he hates it, we will love it. Over about 25 films, this metric is perfect s
Controversial? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Controversial? (Score:5, Interesting)
And then Driv3r comes by and proves that they're in it for money.
Seriously, if it weren't for so many blatant whorejob reviews like that, I would gladly excuse a few innaccurate reviews.
Then there are other reviews (good or bad) that are entirely based on the first hour of gameplay. With many games running 50 hours and more, that's like watching the first three minutes of the Matrix and saying how it's all about some guy sleeping in front of a computer in a dirty apartment drooling on his keyboard.
Re:Controversial? (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, it's not like there are a ton of games out there, where you start into the game for the first 1-2 hours, and then all of a sudden, 15 hours into the game, the AI suddenly becomes intelligent, the ganeplay becomes intuitive, and the camera stops going for messed up camera angles that block your view.
It's very easy to project what a game is like 2-3 hours in
Re:Controversial? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Controversial? (Score:4, Insightful)
you just can't trust high profile reviews, not one way or another. often they preview beta quality products and review them as if they were good quality - and then the game maker doesn't improve anything before the release too.
read warez forums.. they have the authentic play-test posts pretty early.
whats wrong with video games (Score:1)
Re:whats wrong with video games (Score:3, Funny)
Rescue Raiders rocked ! (Score:2)
It should be noted that this emphasis on visuals also detracts f
Welcome to life (Score:5, Insightful)
If I go into a shop and ask ten random people something like "Do you like apples?". 5 out of them should in theory say no, 5 should say yes. It won't work like that but it's the basic idea.
Everyone has different tastes (I dont like rap,it out sells everything right now. I can ignore it and shrug), we just have to accept and find a tolerance level for something we dislike.
There will always be "trolls" who just flame for the fun of it, s well as fanboys who would say Myst had the best gameplay ever. This is how life is, as long as no one becomes a zealot then there isn't a problem.
People need to accept that the Earth doesn't revolve around a carbon based life form with the same name as them. If we accept opinions from other people and tolerate things we don't like which they made do then the world runs fine. If we don't... well lets just say lawyers enjoy this sort of world and look where they are now..
Re:Welcome to life (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to quibble with your larger point but -- that is completely untrue. The fact that there are two outcomes tells you nothing about the relative likelihood of the outcomes.
Re:Welcome to life (Score:2)
Re:Welcome to life (Score:1)
Re:Welcome to life (Score:1)
Answer #1 - Yes
Answer #2 - No
My guess is that the answer to that question, with two possible outcomes, will not float around 50%, regardless of the number of people you ask.
In a random situation (say, flipping a coin) with two possible outcomes, yes, the result floats around 50%...but the examples listed so far are not random.
T.
Re:Welcome to life (Score:1)
Re:Welcome to life (Score:2)
The best way to show this is with an example, like... give me a minute...
OK, say you take a random sample of people and ask them if they enjoy going to the dentist. It's totally a matter of opinion - there are some people out there who just loove going to the dentist. Most people hate it. It would not be 50/50.
There are
Re:Welcome to life (Score:1)
2 options you live for the next 5 seconds or you die.
But there is a better than 50/50 chance that you will live.
2 options does not mean 50/50 split.
Re:Welcome to life (Score:2)
Re:Welcome to life (Score:1)
"Do you like to have sex with people the same gender as yourself?"
50/50? Not bloody likely.
Re:Welcome to life (Score:2)
So, if I ask, "Do you enjoy getting kicked in the teetch while watching your children get chopped up with a rusty knife", theoretically, the numbers should float around 50%?
I think you don't have a very good grip on what the word "theoretically" means.
Re:Welcome to life (Score:1)
I so deeply agree with you. Our current content-rating systems (review scores, whether someone is a spammer, how "good" a Slashdot post is) generally provide "absolute" metrics -- they rely on the false idea that a single measurement is appropriate to every person who will read that measurement. An adventure game player will have completely different tastes than a wargamer. There are a few stabs at providing personalized score
Personalized evalution (fixed) (Score:2)
We live in an era where an opinion is taken as fact by most people (Hello TV).
I so deeply agree with you. Our current content-rating systems (review scores, whether someone is a spammer, how "good" a Slashdot post is) generally provide "absolute" metrics -- they rely on the false idea that a single measurement is appropriate to every person who will read that measurement. An adventure game player will have completely different tastes than a wargamer. There are a few stab
Re:Welcome to life (Score:2)
While TV is bad, (Especially the news channels) the internet is far worse. The amount of group think that goes on is insane. If you disagree with the group you are often branded as an "idiot", "N00b", "moron" etc. It's funny how politcal correctness has enveloped our culture yet no one has any respect for an opinion that isn't their own or doesn't mesh with their own ideas. Considering how many gamers are also online fre
Got your reason right here (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Got your reason right here (Score:3, Funny)
I feel the same about NWN Gold + HotU, but it only cost me $70 total.
Re:Got your reason right here (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Got your reason right here (Score:1)
Re:Got your reason right here (Score:2)
I disagree; it's a matter of point of view. For example, as a USian, if I wanted to expatriate, I wouldn't be able to since my debt is in US Dollars. Very few countries in the world have a favorable exchange rate for me to pay off the debt by earning money overseas.
A more down-to-earth example, I have anime as a major part of my DVD collection. Even assuming the actual media is burned and printed locally, if the Dollar becomes "weaker" against the Yen, the Ja
Re:Got your reason right here (Score:1)
What you are talking about is the change in the exchange rate between the Dollar and the Yen _over time_. I'm not suggesting that that change is meaningless, all I'm saying is that the instantaneous exchange rate is essentially arbitrary. If you chose to express the rat
Re:Got your reason right here (Score:2)
The problem is that many retailers and resellers don't pin their prices to the current "official" exchange rate, but use an inflated number to cover uncertainty and risk. The UK is supposedly the country most worse off due to this phenomenon.
For the record, A$99.95 becomes roughly $70.00US at recent exchange rates [x-rates.com], an equivalent to a 40% mark-up from $50 for a typical ga
Re:Got your reason right here (Score:2)
Objective vs. Subjective (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with video game reviews, as I see it, is that they are subjective, by their very definition. There is no such thing as a definitively "good" game, nor is there any such thing as a definitively "bad" game. The same is true of movies, or books--when you read film reviews, you don't see a bunch of numerical scores ranking the film's "special effects" and "acting" and "sound technology" and the "tilt factor" on a (decimal) scale of one to ten. Instead, you just read some of the reviewer's genuine thoughts, and with those, you are free to determine whether or not you'd enjoy it. Game reviews, I think, need much the same thing. Far too many reviewers are focused on, "oh, this review must be under 1000 words," and "oh, I must split it up into sections for each component of the game," and "oh, I need to rate and rank everything and then use a calculator to get the result." No. Game reviews are subjective and should be treated as such.
I think it is the job of the review-writer to just convey a feeling about the game...to get the reader into his headspace, to explain the game, circumstances surrounding the reviewer's involvement with the game, that sort of thing, no numbers involved. It should be an introspective, organic process. For example, as an experiment with this sort of thing, I wrote this [livejournal.com] a few days ago--it is, sort of, a review of Doom 3. It was an experimental thing--yeah, I rambled a lot, I talked about some aspects of the game I liked, some I didn't like, and about some things that had zero bearing on the gameplay. In the end, I revealed that I had mixed feelings about the game--I didn't really like it much, but it was all right, I supposed.
Anyway, I took this review to the Doom 3 message board at GameFAQs, a web site which you will know, if you had been there, is absolutely frigging full of rabid fanboys. There are threads there with titles such as "I can't believe Gamespot gave Doom 3 only a 8.511111" and such. Anyway, yeah, I showed it to people there, and they enjoyed it--they said that my thoughts were, in general, interesting, and that they understood why I didn't like the game much. And these are rabid fanboys I'm talking about.
I guess this means that people tend to get more worked up about numbers--rankings, ratings, all that sort of stuff. Reviewers and readers tend to concentrate on that--on the mechanics, on the cut-and-dried aspects of things--rather than on the subjective things; a review shouldn't be "Whether or not a game is good," but rather it should be "How this particular reviewer felt playing the game." I think that's more interesting all around.
Re:Objective vs. Subjective (Score:2)
Blame the reviewers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Useful game reviews come from people who have similar tastes to your own. Case in point: Tommy Tallarico. Tommy is not mainstream, nor are his tastes. When he reviews games on G4TechTV's show Judgement Day [g4techtv.com], it's clear that he was put there simply to provide a dissenting view. Have him play even the most revolutionary turn-based strategy game, and he'll insult it in the most vile manner he can think of. Thing is, there's a certain segment of the population that has similar tastes, and they will find his reviews useful.
Another issue may be that some mediocre games get cast as "inexcusably awful" or "mind-bogglingly terrible" simply because it's easy for reviewers to get carried away insulting a game. "I'd rather rub my eyeballs with 80-grit sandpaper," is more interesting to read than "It wasn't awful, but there are no remarkable qualities to this game. It really isn't worth the money."
Re:Blame the reviewers. (Score:2, Insightful)
Movie reviewers review movies all the time that aren't the "types of movies they like". Some reviewers dislike heavy drama, or foreign film, or whatever. But they watch them, and they are somehow able to write a review that is at least somewhat objective. Once in a while maybe they'll be way off, but most of the time they get close. They can look at something and say "I may not like this type of movie a lot, but I know good when I see it."
I think if you hire the right p
Re:Blame the reviewers. (Score:2)
That totally misses out on the crossover audience though. For example, I play fighting games (No, I don't mash either and plenty of tournament matchs are pretty slow paced and involve more strat
The reason (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The reason (Score:1)
Because that's the definition? (Score:3, Funny)
I mainly read reviews just to see if the (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I mainly read reviews just to see if the (Score:2)
I did, and only came up with three problems:
1. Sound distortions - which can be worked around by setting sound acceleration to Basic (mentioned on support site.)
2. Lockups in some cutscenes under Windows XP after installing drivers/updates/software. No fix yet, but I've sighted similar things on other games as well.
3. Misc Alt-Tab issues that were
Classic example of reviewing gone wrong (Censored) (Score:4, Insightful)
RPG reviewer reviewing FPS: "Dude this bleeping game is boring as bleep, I have to keep killing the same bleeping bleep over and over again to advance through the game."
Captain Obvious: "Dudes, wtf? You're doing the same bleeping thing."
Re:Classic example of reviewing gone wrong (Censor (Score:2)
Heh. (Score:2)
Look... (Score:2)
What i do when i want good online reviews (for games, music, hardware or whatever) is go for the ones with the lower scores. At least most reviews that dislik
To professionalism! (chug chug chug) (Score:1)
First of all, we have to note that video game reviews are not nearly as "technical" or "critical" as, say, movie or food reviews. Every movie reviewer has his or her specific biases, true, but you can also be well assured that most top critics (say, the Eberts of the world) are indeed watching the movie they are reviewing, take notes
Re:To professionalism! (chug chug chug) (Score:2)
As for bad writing, I haven't seen any of that recently, but maybe that is because I'm reading a quality publication for my games reviews (Ed
Re:To professionalism! (chug chug chug) (Score:2)
To be fair, what usually happens is that the reviewer have seen *so* many movies, that the ones that just follow a formula are dead boring to them, unless they are absolutely exceptional. The artsy ones often have something unusual about them that at least keeps the reviewer int
Re:To professionalism! (chug chug chug) (Score:2)
"Arty" films tend to be "films doing something new". For younger viewers, this newness doesn't appeal (after all, pretty muc
Re:To professionalism! (chug chug chug) (Score:1)
Resolution of scores (Score:3, Insightful)
I could see someone maybe rating games from "1" to "5", without fractional breakdown. It's certainly possible to rate different factors -- graphics, fun, replayability, sound, and so forth (though the idea of "averaging" them to come up with an overall score is broken and pointless -- for example, strategy games generally don't put much emphasis on graphics, and adventure games not much on replayability). However, the idea of rating things based on a 1 to 10, 1 to 20, or even 1 to 100 scale is far too ambitious for any reviewer to effectively handle. Generally, if you start needing that kind of resolution, you should be asking yourself whether, perhaps, your scores might just be inflated and the distribution tilted heavily towards the top.
Re:Resolution of scores (Score:1)
I agree with you, the "74.2%"-kind scores are insane. I honestly can't see how you could balance that.
Not just the subjective elements either (Score:2)
I have no idea how often this happens but it sure has pissed me off before. It su
Wrong. (Score:2, Interesting)
The subjective/objective distinction is one of the most thoroughly abused in both philosophy and everyday life. Heidegger understood this, and developed a phenomenology that avoided the distinction altogether. Much of the debate in moral philosophy is simply the result of getting snagged on just this inability t
Journalism 101 (Score:2, Interesting)
Sometimes, it's all about the advertising.
Re:Reviews should not be opinions (Score:1)
nostalgic controversial videogame review (Score:2)
Web Reviews are Different from Print (Score:1)
Further, reviewers of any subject who use the we
Re:Web Reviews are Different from Print (Score:1)
Re:Web Reviews are Different from Print (Score:1)
Re:Web Reviews are Different from Print (Score:1)
Re:Web Reviews are Different from Print (Score:1)
I'm sure they're lovely people but the editorial overlooks a fundamental aspect of publishing on the web - the ease of publication. The only cost to a reader in stating their opinion -and stating in vehemently - is time. You can't publish a review on the web, include a ' comments' field or a link to the site's forums and then act surprised when people use them. Reviews are controversial simply because the controversy is free. Add some sort of barrier or formality to the reply
Controversial? (Score:2)
This is why when I look for reviews, I make sure I read as many low score reviews as possible to see both sides, and hopefully demo the game before I decide to buy. And by demo of course I mean download.
It's how the reviews are used... (Score:2)
Want to prove that GameCube exclusives are better than Xbox exclusives? I'll go to MetaCritic and show that the top 20 Nintendo exclusives scored better than the top 20 Xbox exlusives. Want to prove that Sega is a better publisher than EA? Why, I'll just go to GameRankings and show the average
what are reviews anyway? (Score:2)
Game Reviews WITHOUT Rankings (Score:1)
I was going to post about the site...heh (Score:1)
Objective reviewing (Score:1)