Jimquisition: Metacritic Isn't the Problem

[Woodsey]

An old saying comes to mind... now what was it? Oh yes: "don't like it, shut the fuck up and watch something else."

Beggin' your pardon, but I have a question.

Are you saying that people (unlike the person you were responding to) who don't like the show have any less of a right to say what they don't like? I mean, to be fair, Jim IS a critic, isn't he? Turnabout is fair play and all that.

Besides, what do you care if people comment that they hate it?

Its 9 in videos in; there's been plenty of time to whine and complain. People won't like everything on the site - they don't venture in hordes onto the other stuff to write comments that aren't even critical of the actual piece, but simply the show's existence.

But that still begs the question of why you at all care? Really, if people leave negative comments, even if they are ill informed, how do they affect/bother you?

I dunno, why do they bother suspending people who leave "First!" comments on videos before watching them? Probably because its irritating and the rest of us don't want to have to read a bunch of shit before we can find something worthwhile to respond too.

Not everyone is going to like everything. And that's alright. If people want to express reasons why the don't like a show, such as problems they see with it, the first response shouldn't be "Don't like it; don't watch it". The show's existance to them causes as much harm as their comments do to you.

Eugh, I smell a Neutral.

Its not about the comment being negative. This comment can be seen to be negative:

Last episode was good, this one was more in the line of Captain Obvious, like the other episodes. The gist of it was people are assholes and ruin everything. The whole Portal thing was a prime example.

It also has the virtue of not being gloriously irrelevant.

These people are like those who continuously watch TV shows they don't like/disagree with just so they can keep writing in complaints to the fucking broadcaster, when all they have to do is not watch.

Do you know what I don't like? A decent portion of the written content on the site. It doesn't speak to me, and so I don't read it. I don't spend forever calling it out as boring/pretentious/unfunny/whatever (I'm not saying it is any of those things, incidentally, I just don't have any interest in reading it).

Telegram from Capt. E. Blackadder.

Dear Mr Chaplain. Stop. Have discovered only person in the world less funny than you. Stop. Name Jimquisition. Stop. Oh and one more thing, please please please. Stop.

An old saying comes to mind... now what was it? Oh yes: "don't like it, shut the fuck up and watch something else."

I haven't watched a Jimquisition episode since the CoD ep with the short bit on art. And with that being said I HAVEN'T had to watch it seeing as how unlike the other shows here on the escapist you can get the jist of what he said from the title and what people say in the thread that follows. I get that he has opinions on things but also touting himself as gamings biggest douche and acting like it too is what turns A LOT of people off.

Yeah, and that's fine. So don't fucking watch (as you haven't been). I didn't realise the site consisted of a bunch of psychological masochists who like forcing themselves through things they don't like.

 

[Atheist.]

Metacritic Isn't the Problem

Oh you poor, sad little cretins. You are all so wrong. Always. Forever. Jim Sterling illuminates your path, but what good does that do when you refuse to open your eyes? Oh, he's so much better than you.

Watch Video

Hey Jim. Thanks for insulting everyone who reads your post. Could you please treat the people that essentially pay you with a bit respect? Being blatantly offensive only promotes more of it. Also, why can you get away with insulting hundreds/thousands of people on this forum and we can't get away with insulting one member?

Sometimes the Escapist baffles me with their logic.

 

[Srdjan Tanaskovic]

Can someone name the game he showed in this video (other then Mindjack)?

 

[KhakiHat]

I like your "vengeful critic" style better when your playing off a character whose ideals and principals are being violated, causing him to take on the persona of an angry fascist games reviewer who vows to solve all our problems when he takes over the world. Otherwise, you just come off as a douche who needs to have his stupid wallpaper stuffed down his throat.

Also, nice commentary on Wooah. I hate Christan mags, they always seem to be filled with stories about cuddlely kittens and nothing meaningful in any way.

 

[Woodsey]

Metacritic Isn't the Problem

Oh you poor, sad little cretins. You are all so wrong. Always. Forever. Jim Sterling illuminates your path, but what good does that do when you refuse to open your eyes? Oh, he's so much better than you.

Watch Video

Hey Jim. Thanks for insulting everyone who reads your post. Could you please treat the people that essentially pay you with a bit respect? Being blatantly offensive only promotes more of it. Also, why can you get away with insulting hundreds/thousands of people on this forum and we can't get away with insulting one member?

Sometimes the Escapist baffles me with their logic.

It... its not fucking serious! What is wrong with you people?! Has the ability to infer things become a hidden art?!

*head explodes*

 

[SoopaSte123]

Kind of a "well, duh" topic in my opinion, but on the plus side: your "Thank God for me" persona is getting better. The ending made me laugh a little. Keep improving it!

 

[ewhac]

Congratulations, Mr. Sterling, I've watched more of your installments here than I have Lisa Foiles. You may now experience pride.

Leaving aside Mr. Sterling's arrogant thank-${GOD}-for-me turd-in-your-face style, his overall point is nevertheless correct, and he summarizes the issue well. MetaCritic isn't the problem; idiots mis-conceptualizing and misusing MetaCritic are the problem.

However, there may be an argument to be made that MetaCritic should nevertheless make some changes. Too often it happens that what the artist/creator intended is not what is perceived by the audience. MetaCritic may have been conceived as a convenient aggregator by its creators, but the game publishers and, to some extent, the public now see it as something different. From that standpoint, MetaCritic may want to thoughtfully reconsider what it's become, and adjust appropriately.

 

[Atheist.]

Metacritic Isn't the Problem

Oh you poor, sad little cretins. You are all so wrong. Always. Forever. Jim Sterling illuminates your path, but what good does that do when you refuse to open your eyes? Oh, he's so much better than you.

Watch Video

Hey Jim. Thanks for insulting everyone who reads your post. Could you please treat the people that essentially pay you with a bit respect? Being blatantly offensive only promotes more of it. Also, why can you get away with insulting hundreds/thousands of people on this forum and we can't get away with insulting one member?

Sometimes the Escapist baffles me with their logic.

It... its not fucking serious! What is wrong with you people?! Has the ability to infer things become a hidden art?!

*head explodes*

Mr.Fanboy Woodsey. It doesn't matter if it's not serious. If I punch you in the face and then yell "JK NOT SERIUZ!!" it doesn't make a difference to me, you still did it. If I don't know you, you don't get the right to jokingly insult me. It does not work that way. If I acknowledge him as a comedian, he can get away with telling such jokes. The thing is, he's not. He's supposed to be (Or at least doesn't seem to be) a critic, yet he tells offensive and arrogant "jokes."

I don't think he should be on this website. I don't care if you think he does because he's "jokingly offensive" or whatever you want to call it. Pretend to be an asshole for long enough and you'll become one.

Also, insulting other people's intelligence is a fairly poor argument. I can indeed "infer" things. You're just being ignorant in the sense that you cannot realize this show is offense to many people. If I ended this comment saying you're a troll (I'm not saying that), would you realize whether or not I was serious?

 

[archabaddon]

IMPO, this series keeps getting better. Jim a little more self-flagellating, pointing out the hur-durs and the hypocrisy, and making a good point on how people can abuse tools for their own selfish ends.

 

[Eabus]

There is nothing quite like hypocrisy soup is there. This certainly is an inquisition because that was one tortured analogy. But a good overall point that a tool like Metacritic is intended to inform consumers and not to dictate the paychecks of the people who made a particular game.

 

[PunkRex]

Ive never been on Metacritic but ive heard of it. I didnt know publishers took it so seriously. Nice argument Mr. Sterling, just keep on pushing past the haters.

 

[hermes]

The problem I have with metacritic is that it tries to standardize something that is not standard (neither it should). Numeric representations of a review varies from 5 values, . A 3/5 stars in any site is a decent, yet a 60 in metacritic is a bad game (Duke Nukem Forever has a 50 in metacritic, a mere 10% difference with a 3/5 stars (decent) game. That means the difference between Duke Nukem and Brutal Legend is not bigger than the difference between Portal 2 and Dragon Age: Origins).

Metacritic is not to be blamed for bad reviews and publishers and consumers actions because of them, but it can and should be blamed for taking a statistically flawed method to determine the mean of non-comparative measures. If their aggregation method fails at that, then there something seriously wrong or overly simplified with their model...

 

[Noremac60]

I completely agree Jim. Hating Metacritic is an idiotic waste of time.

 

[RJ Dalton]

I've never once looked at Metacritic. I don't place much value on any particular game reviewer group or company and I see their works as largely uninsightful, unartistic pieces of tripe. When it gets right down to it, I go by the words of close friends whom I trust when I make a decision about whether or not I will buy a game.
So yeah, Metacritic hasn't hurt me in any way.

 

[Hristo Tzonkov]

Jim,your haters are also hypocrites because they suddenly like you like something changed in this show.

Also I've been reading your reviews over at Destructoid lately and I saw the FEAR3 review.While I personally loved it I only played the SP and I like challenges so the difficulty didn't bother me.And I have to agree that while the game pretty much perfected what FEAR2 set out to do,the story is no longer scary sadly and it was in large part a story driven bizarre scary shooter.There were a few fright moments but they weren't all that scary.What I did enjoy was that it was all in all unnerving,which is good.I really think they should've incorporated some of the MP modes into the game.That would work quite well.Anyway what I was trying to say is that it so gracefully hit every good point that it missed a lot of others making it both the best and worst game in the series.You gave it a 6/10 and I understand where the score stems from but I also know how it hits that metacritic score everyone is so worried about.What's bad is that publisher pine their hopes(lol at kotick pic xD) in the reviews but the average user doesn't read a lot of reviews,he usually looks up metacritic for that % to see if it's good or not.He doesn't know what makes it good or bad and whether he'd like it enough to overlook flaws it might have like I did with FEAR despite all the points that made me cringe teeth.Which is where the system is misused and fails.I believe it should be a lot more for people's reference and as a sort of documentation of the whole thing.

Bugger that's a chunk of text.Hope you're reading this xD

 

[Thunderhorse31]

A big "thank you" Jim, I've grown tired of defending aggregate review sites like Metacritic against whiny fanboys and people who can't seem to make their own decisions regardless of numbers on a screen.

Metacritic is not inherently evil; even if it didn't exist at all, the general consensus of a game's merit will still exist. Some people just can't handle it if the consensus is different from their own.

Plus now I have a new name for these people too: "Retard fuck-puppets."

Brilliant.

 

[Citizen Box]

Mr.Fanboy Woodsey

Brilliant thinking you have there. Anyone who disagrees with you is a fanboy eh? Hilarious. Also, I am not even getting into the whole "we pay for you to be here" comment.

One thing I noticed in the comments though is, sadly, most people don't understand the concept of satire, which is a shame, because that was something I learned in grade school or is it just the misplaced entitlement people have on free media or the concept of higher brain functions? Who knows, but some people have problems.

OT: Good show like always, the fact that anyone uses Meta Critic as a standard of anything instead of the take away from the reviews listed like the positives and the negatives (which is what they should really focus on), is pretty bad.

 

[NinjaTigerXIII]

Indeed, thank God for the Jimquisition, but more importantly Thank God for The Escapist.

 

[Geeky Anomaly]

You can sometimes see the metacritic phenomenon occuring on other sites, such as IMDB. The system "breaks" when people rate something an abnormally high or low rating based on whether or not they liked a game or movie. It's the people who don't stop and think carefully about their reviews and just slap on 1s for hating the game and 10s for loving it. Hardly any games deserve a 1, on the same token, hardly any games deserve a 10. A game can be bad, but it can still be a 3 or 4. A game can be great, but only be a 7 or 8. It's the people that only think in 1s and 10s that are the ones who break the score.

 

[Aureliano]

Fair enough. You present a reasonable criticism of metacritic's critics (how meta!), but it seems that hoping the video would be entertaining as well was just asking too much.

As a start to making your videos more funny, I sadly have to take a page either from Yahtzee or at a more basic level from The League. To make a creative swear word: combine the root words 'cock'/'dick' or 'tard' with things they do not normally attach to. Most basic form: cocktard. Classic: 'dickface' or more contemporary variant 'cockface'. Or even the ever-popular 'fucktard'. Now you can make your own!