Metacritic Co-Founder Calls on Reviewers to Rate More Bad Games

[Logan Westbrook]

Metacritic Co-Founder Calls on Reviewers to Rate More Bad Games

Games reviewers have the top end of the scale down, says Metacritic, but now they need to work on the bottom.

Marc Doyle, one of the founders of the review aggregation site Metacritic, says that reviewers need to start using the entirety of their scales. He wants to see more detailed scoring in reviews for bad games, in order to balance out the precision seen in the higher end of the score scale.

He compared the way that videogame reviews are scored at the moment to the grade systems used in schools, where a seventy was about average, and anything under fifty was a failure. Currently, he said, reviewers didn't really differentiate between a game that was one point under fifty, and a game that was forty points under fifty.

"What I keep telling critics," he said. "Is, 'you're so careful with everything from 50-100. You know exactly what an eight means versus a seven; you know what that nine means. I want people to say, what is a four versus a three? Tell me what a three is, versus a two.'" He compared game reviews to movie reviews, saying that film critics knew what every number on the scale represented, and that reviewers needed to review "all the shit," in order to make the whole scale useful to consumers.

Doyle won't be the first person to say that there are problems with the way videogame reviews are scored; people have been taking issue with the "7-10" review scale for years. While Metacritic might seem an odd champion for a more transparent and intuitive scale - especially when you consider that it gives extra weight to certain outlet's scores in the overall metascore - but if it works, it doesn't really matter who got the ball rolling.

Source: A Jumps B Shoots [http://ajumpsbshoots.com/2011/07/episode-12-critically-speaking/] via VG247 [http://www.vg247.com/2011/07/12/metacritic-co-founder-says-game-ratings-are-inbalanced/]


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[vxicepickxv]

I can see this is a rather interesting idea. I'm sure that some people will take this offer to a new extreme. I can't wait to read some of these reviews.

 

[Woodsey]

"Tell me what a three is, versus a two"

'Tis naught but a difference of one!

 

[Svenparty]

Game reviewing has always seemed slightly more generous than movie reviews tend to be. I often find that game magazines seem to focus on whatever is currently hyped with only minor games ever given really bad reviews.

 

[mjc0961]

They do rate bad games. They just give them high scores anyway because of direct payoffs of not wanting to offend advertisers.

Unless it's a Kane and Lynch game, then it gets the low score it deserves but someone gets fired.

 

[FalloutJack]

Sorry, but the Examiner doesn't require me to review any 'specific' titles. It's up to me and mine, and that's all.

 

[Icehearted]

"Tell me what a three is, versus a two"

'Tis naught but a difference of one!

God I hate the 10 point scale :\

Was that glib of me just now?

 

[Dr_Horrible]

He's absolutely right, I feel that it would make things more accurate. If you can't have a review score of 1-10 instead of 7-10, then Force Unleashed 2 is only one or two points away from, say, Assassin's creed.

also, WTF is with the new captchas? weird...

 

[Irridium]

I feel this picture is appropriate:

Spoiler

And I agree. I'm tired of seeing crap get passing scores, and I'm tired of great games being considered crap because their score isn't an 80 or higher.

 

[koroem]

Metacritic needs to die a fiery death. Anyone dumb enough to rely on metacritic should be in that fire.

Adam Sessler annoys me, but this video sums up nicely : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QsXrswJ-yM

 

[Red_Serpent]

I ignore all points in a review games and movies alike. I prefer the "3-point" system.
1 point = bad
2 points = average
3 points = good

Then you back up the statement with elements that support it. Bugs, graphic glitches, good story, memorable characters and so forth.

Nowadays games get 8, 9 and 10s and often the review downplays any downsides or ignores them all together. Especially 10 bothers me, seen by most as "perfect".

 

[BrotherRool]

I have to admit, school system here 70 isn't average, 50 is. 70 is good and 90-100 is very good.

But I don't mind really. 7-10 works out just as well. The thing is, I don't think there's much point working on the low end, because the kinda game that gets 1-6, you don't really evaluate using reviews and if you're going to buy it, it won't be because the game got a 5 and not a 4.

I guess it would be more a tool for developers than anything else. But even then, games normally get 1-6 because they're quick low-budget jobs and the developers know they could do better but can't because it's not the sort of game you have time to work on

 

[mjc0961]

I feel this picture is appropriate:

Spoiler

And I agree. I'm tired of seeing crap get passing scores, and I'm tired of great games being considered crap because their score isn't an 80 or higher.

That makes me even more upset because ilomilo is a pretty fun game, and sadly people will ignore it just because it didn't get in the 90 range.

 

[hansari]

Can't we just go with the binary "thumbs up/ thumbs down" approach?

 

[Zeraki]

I think game reviewers should call on Metacritic to go to the deepest depths of Tartarus. I've never liked Adam Sessler, but the man spoke the truth with his rant on Metacritic.

 

[Stealthygamer]

I feel this picture is appropriate:

Spoiler

Wait Raskulls is only a 75?!?

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

This again.

The difference is that game reviewers aren't compressing their scales yet. The reason movie reviews span the entire range is that, in terms of absolute quality, a huge amount of the scale is compressed into the first star. The first star is used for things that are bad, but it's also used for things that are terrible.

Games are just still using an absolute scale. That made a lot of sense when gaming was young (just as it did for films when films were young) because there was less concentration at the high end of the scale. People complain that AAA games are almost never on the low end of the rating scale, but that's because AAA games are essentially never terrible anymore. We haven't had a proper E.T. situation in gaming for a very, very long time.

As time goes on, the scale will push further and further toward a logarithmic curve just as it has in virtually all media.

I feel this picture is appropriate:

Spoiler

This picture makes the point pretty nicely actually.

Black Swan was a great movie and Season of the Witch was pretty terrible by most accounts. But consider all films ever made and ask yourself: is Season of the Witch really in the lowest quartile of all films ever? Of course not. It's not even close. There are so many movies that are so unfathomably terrible that in the grand scheme of things Season of the Witch is probably in the top 10%. But that's not particularly useful when we're trying to decide between seeing it and Black Swan, so we compress the low end of the scale radically.

TL;DR: The problem with video game reviews isn't some sort of bizarre irrationality, it's the problem every new medium faces once it suddenly shifts from an even distribution of quality to the point where even the "bad" well-known games are actually pretty good compared to the truly bad games.

 

[Kargathia]

Possibly one of the reasons for the generally more positive reviews of video games is that the appreciation of games works slightly different than the one of movies.

If we break down grading then movies consist of: Story, Characters, Aesthetics, Graphics, Soundtrack.
Games would be: Story, Characters, Aesthetics, Graphics, Soundtrack, Single player Gameplay, Multi Player Gameplay.

And generally reviews don't detract all the flaws from a perfect score, but add up all the good things. A bad review isn't because there are too many bad things, but because there aren't enough good things.

And games just so happen to be cheating slightly with two more categories contributing points.