MetaFuture Talks Review Inflation 42
MetaFuture, a game journalism analysis site, has recently refocused on review scores from the big gaming sites. The author takes an interesting approach, taking a look at Gamespot's review spread and IGN's tendencies. Unsurprisingly, both sites tend towards the 7 to 9 range, making it debatable whether their numbers are actually useful. The site's eventual goal is to normalize the review scores from the major sites, and actually make them useful. From the article: "Games will still get an average score from all contributing reviews. But a site's contribution to that average will depend on that site's own individual normal curve-- with the immediate left and right of the bell's tip signifying three stars on a scale of one to five. Watch the drama as the biggest sweethearts see their 8.4 score for Gun and Car IV get pegged as three stars." This is the reason Slashdot videogame reviews don't have numbers anymore.
Selection effects? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, the question is, conditional on nonrandom selection of games to release and nonrandom selection of games to review, what should we expect the distribution of quality to look like? My guess is that this distribution is nonormal and is skewed with more observations in the higher quality tail. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the reviews are "fair," but it suggests that the question is more complicated than a simple "grade inflation" argument.
Note that I am also making an assumption that quality is judged in some sort of absolute terms, and not relative to the other games that are released. There are probably some other assumptions lurking in there as well. Just my $.02
Re:Selection effects? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Selection effects? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Selection effects? (Score:3, Insightful)
The great examples are NASCAR and wrestling games. The typical NASCAR game review is like "well, if you like turning left a lot and you have a lobotomy, you may enjoy this... 3/5." Contrast that with Ivan Sulic's exceptionally well written review [ign.com] o
Re:Selection effects? (Score:2)
Re:Selection effects? (Score:1)
Yep, that's all I meant. Your average student will score 70%, becuase the tests are designed for average students to score 70%. So 70% for a game is something that most people can instantly identity with. Most games today, when you come down to it, represent a reasonable ROI for your entertainment dollar (the baseline quality has gone up dramatically in the past 1
Re:Selection effects? (Score:1)
Pardon the sarcasm because I totally agree with you on that. Though, for that reason I think reviews should be done by more than one person. Let's say a team of 5 people review a fighting game, I'd say it should consist of: a Fighting gamer, an FPSer, an RTSer, an RPGer, and a non-gamer (sorry if I didn't include other genres) If all of them looked at the game from their prospective angles, I bet you'd get an amazingly indepth view at t
Re:Selection effects? (Score:1)
The problem with that is that no one ends up completely satisfied. Take warcraft III. I like RTS games and was expecting it to belike starcraft except with orcs and humans instead of zergs and terrans. But instead I got something halfway between starcraft and diablo II. I like starcraft and I like Diablo, but warcraft III didn't work. I could only level up my character two or 3 times so it didn't make a good RPG, but my armies were limited to a couple dozen soldiers so it wasn't much of a RTS game.
A gam
Re:Selection effects? (Score:1)
The same thing happened to me and WoW, what I expected was the ability to play the game as a giant RTS (no, not in the way you think i mean
Re:Selection effects? (Score:1)
hmmm... way off topic now... But yeah that sort of thing is what I'd like to see from a massively multiplayer game too. As it is now WOW isn't much different from Diablo II only it allows bigger teams and meeting up with people is all in a 3d environment instead of in a irc-like room like in diablo. It's just teams of around 30 people playing in parallel, not massive armies having epic battles. A shame really. Maybe that's all current networking technology allows.
I don't see why it couldn't end though. I
Re:Selection effects? (Score:2)
The culture of inflation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The culture of inflation (Score:2)
For me, a "failing" review is a 3/10 or less, not 7/10. I would score a game 10/10 if it could not be improved in any way at all — perfect control scheme out of the box, perfect camera, perfect story and art, etc. Some novelty to a game justifies a 7, but anything that is "just another" should be a 6 at best, and usually a 4 (since "just another" games tend to have a goodly number of minor f
Re:The culture of inflation (Score:2)
Grade Inflation? Or Grade Distribution? (Score:3, Informative)
The center of the distribution is supposed to be around the high 70s/low 80s. (C+/B-).
Back when I was the TA monkey handing out grades, the recommended distribution was 40% Cs (70s) 33% Bs (80s) 10% As (90s), and, well, the Fs (
The distribution looks pretty much like that. Incidentally, the same system c
game companies are strategic actors, right? (Score:1)
Hasn't this been done before? (Score:1)
Re:Hasn't this been done before? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hasn't this been done before? (Score:1)
I don't see how this system is any better.
Reviews are only useful when... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reviews are only useful when... (Score:2)
Re:Reviews are only useful when... (Score:1)
Who cares for hose numbers? (Score:4, Interesting)
When I want opinion on a game, I turn to a friend with a good taste in games, a fat pipe, and lots of time.
I give this article an 8/10 (Score:4, Funny)
And here I thought it was because everyone was always giving you shit for rating everything 8/10...
Re:I give this article an 8/10 (Score:2)
Constant offset (Score:3, Interesting)
Old news (Score:1)
Re:Old news (Score:1)
Increasingly irrelevant (Score:2)
Re:Increasingly irrelevant (Score:1, Interesting)
I agree, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bear in mind that the games industry is not static. Not only are the technologies and concepts used in games and development constantly evolving and improving, but the budgets and resources being thrown at them far outstrip those seen 20, 10, even 5 years ago.
Inevitably this causes the leading edge of the games market to progress faster than our sense of cynicism and ennui, so we are more and more impressed with each new release. That's what ultimately gives a game a great score - how impressive is it? Scores for big releases will tend more and more towards the higher end (especially if we try to rate games comparitively with other fairly recent releases).
The term review inflation is surprisingly accurate in that regard but, while steady economic inflation is not a problem, it is troublesome in reviews where there is a fixed range of possible scores. The dollar can become worth 1% of its original value and there's no issue - as long as it's in line with market growth and currency values in other economies - becuase its value is defined by the market-perception of its value and has no technical limits. The star-rating system in reviews is inherently fixed, so inflation is a bugger.
Allowing the rating-system to inflate freely would get around this problem, but then you're looking at free-flux exchange-rates between reviewers and the issue of fitting 210 stars into a box-out and, frankly, the only sensible answer is for peeps to grow up and take everything they read with a pinch of salt. Hey, it's a valuable life-lesson. Learn to read, dammit.
Re:I agree, but... (Score:2)
While I think that is unfortunately probably true for the review score, the question the gamers want answered is "how fun is it?"
Part of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The first thing is that I think people think of the ratings system in terms of absolute "10 is a great game" "5 is mediocre" "1 is crap" scores. That's not really accurate. In general the score must be considered from within it's genre. A football game with a rating of 10 might be excellent for people who like football games, but I certainly wouldn't enjoy a football game with a 10 rating any more than a football game with a 1 rating, because I don't like football games. Likewise I might enjoy an RPG with a score of 7 or 8, but other people would find it tedious, because they don't like RPGs.
The other problem is that I think people expect scores to fall in a fairly normal distribution. The problem is that game quality isn't a normal distribution. There are a lot of games that are made that people might not consider fun, but they are at least semi-playable. If you consider a game that might get a 1 or a 2 rating, it would have to be something with severe software flaws that kept the game from even being playable. On consoles at least, no matter how bad a game is, it's rare for a game to be so bad that a determined person couldn't play it (even if they didn't enjoy themselves.). If you look higher in the ratings, it's similar. Most games tend to be clustered in the 7-9. To understand why I think you need to really understand what the ratings in that range mean. When I'm looking at a review, and I see a game with a 10, that tells me that the game is well executed and should appeal to the majority of gamers even if they aren't particularly fans of the genre of the game. A 9 generally says that the game is on par with the best games of that genre, and introduces some new concepts to extend it. A rating of an 8 generally tells me that the game is solid and people who are fans of the genre will probably enjoy it, but it might not appeal to people who aren't specifically fans of the genre, or of the series. A game with an 8 might either have a few flaws that lower the overall experience, or it might be a solid game that fails to offer anything innovative. A rating of a 7 generally says that the game is weak. A 7 tells me that someone who was a big fan of the genre or series might enjoy the game, but that there are probably some flaws that other games in the series or genre have fixed, and that the game either has some fairly large flaws that non-fans won't be able to over look, or its very formulaic and will be boring to someone who isn't a huge fan of that forumla. Finally, looking in the mid range of 3 to 6, you generally see games that are lacking something that generally a game should have, but which doesn't render the game unplayable (when I say unplayable, I mean physically the game won't run, as opposed to the game having responsive or intuitive controlls). A 5 or 6 for example says that a game probably has some severe playability issues that interfere with enjoyment of the game, as well as having some bugs and lacking features that are standard for the genre. A 3 or 4 generally says that either because of various bugs or lack of features, there isn't much "game" to the game at all.
What I think it boils down to is that games first of all need to be rated only within their own genre, because it's hard to set a single scale for games across different genres. Using a normalized scale seems intuitive, but it doesn't work because the quality of games isn't a normal distribution, instead it's skewed so that there are generally a lot of "Ok" and "so-so" games in the 7 to 8 range, a lot of games that lag behind because of various problems, and a very few gems that get the coveted 9's and 10's. It's also hard to quanticize fun. A reviewer can really only rate a game based on what he
Money for Reviews (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Money for Reviews (Score:1)
> Shouldn't those be reserved for the truly exceptional?
Yes. Go play "Sacrifice", the last game that honestly deserved that high a rating. (Black and White, I'm looking in your general direction!)
Eh, now I'm in for it, a karma thrashing. Might as well go for broke: Linux and "sux", both end in "ux". Coincidence? Natalie Portman, nice lips, pretty face, body like a little boy. Uhh, Java, yeah, impressive to the natives. When you wake up
Should be more like film critics (Score:4, Insightful)
Extending that to video games; a reviewer who enjoys FPS games is going to give a high rating to the latest shooter with great graphics. I like older FPS games, but hate the direction that the industry has gone with newer games. So, if a reviewer is a fan of the genre, and I'm not, should I use their review? Of course not! I hate RTS games, so even if one had a 10 rating I wouldn't buy it. However, maybe someone does something new and it is worth my time and money to give it a shot. How do I know? I need to find a reviewer who doesn't like RTS games and get their rating - if they give it a 7 or 8, but they don't like RTS, then I should look into it.
So, how do you find these reviewers? Give ratings to the games you have played, maybe separated by genre, and then go looking for reviews that are close to your own and look at the name of the reviewers. Then search by reviewer to see how close their ratings are to your own, pick the closest (or some sort of combination - Alice for RTS and Bob for FPS). Now you have some reviewers you can trust will like the same games you do, and you can shop accordingly.
Re:Should be more like film critics (Score:2)
Bah! (Score:1)
It's not the games as much as it is the reviews si (Score:1)