The problems with the supposedly "unbiased" review

[The Almighty Aardvark]

It's the difference between "The writing is awful, whoever wrote it has no idea how english-speaking human beings actually speak to eachother, the translation made me cringe." and "The dialogue offended me and did not fit with my world view, therefore I'm going to mark it down."

...

It's the difference between "Whoever designed this character was a clown, seriously learn what colours compliment eachother and try again." and "Skimpy outfits, you say? Unnaceptable."

...

It's the difference between "They failed to give the main character one thing a character should have and that is character." and "I don't like the main character being a straight white male."

It sounds like you have an axe to grind. Perhaps we should be calling for more objective reviews of reviews? I can see your personal bias leaking in. A review can be useful to someone even if it doesn't fit with your worldview.

Also, I don't think I've ever seen a reviewer complain about a specific game's protagonist being a straight white male.

OT: I pretty much agree exactly with what you're saying. All you really want is a review that's genuine. Any review that's worthwhile is going to be "tainted" by the reviewers opinion. Just find reviewers who have similar tastes to you, or similar qualifications for good writing, characters, gameplay, etc...

I seriously wish they censored out the word objectively on this site. I swear, the only people I see using it correctly on this site are telling other people that they're using it incorrectly

EDIT:

I'd like to enhance my earlier claims by saying theres a difference between Objective fact and objective opinion.

And objective fact is a blunt statement, an objective opinion is when you internalize information, look at the pros and cons and weigh them together. A subjective opinion is when you go into something half cocked and don't seperate what's happening from your own personal bias, "subjective fact" is what those fucking loons who think science reflects culture believe.

Nobody wants biased/ideologically enforced viewpoints and I can prove it. What if an anti gay marriage bible-thumper started writing game reviews and injected his bias into critique of The Sims?

What if inexplicably characters in the Sims could only marry inside their own race? Would that be something worth considering about the game?

If a game portrays things completely at odds with your worldview then you might not be nearly invested in it as otherwise. If you're on the fence about getting a game and you find out that you're going to be cringing every five minutes because of its content then that's a perfectly fine reason not to get the game.

If the reviewer comes from a completely different place from you in a particular regard, say you want to see skimpy costumes, then you can ignore that complaint from the reviewer.

 

[j4c0b1]

I'd like to enhance my earlier claims by saying theres a difference between Objective fact and objective opinion.

Theres no such thing as a objective opinion, opinions are inherently subjective. What one person dosn't notice or care about are in games are subjective. The only thing a objective review could tell you were technical specifiacations, ie average frame rate with a given system, resolution etc.

Even the genre off games are subjective, as they always involve opinion, as genres have formed by subjective opinions.

Nobody wants biased/ideologically enforced viewpoints and I can prove it. What if an anti gay marriage bible-thumper started writing game reviews and injected his bias into critique of The Sims?

That review would be just as valid as any other as its there honest opinion. You may not like reading things like that, but thats all reviewers should strive for, to be honest.

 

[RagingTiger]

a : expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.

I fail to see how this can be so hard to at least partially achieve, to put it simply, don't politicize your review (e.g. don't push a personal agenda), don't add deeper subliminal meanings to events in game (e.g. like saying Hitman is making me hate woman because I CAN not MUST kill them) and lastly give facts and/or examples to support a personal view point and make clear that it's a personal opinion.(e.g. don't say the story sucks because you felt it did, tells us why you think it sucks and what in particular made you think it does).

Too many people have the "all or nothing" mentality, if it can't be 100% objective we won't bother trying and conversely if it's not 100% I'm not going to accept it. I personally think that transparency is more important than objectivity, but I do think some objectivity is still needed.

 

[Robert B. Marks]

It is a bit funny - we always want to see the most fair and unbiased review, and yet there is no escaping bias.

One of the things I do is work PR for a sword company, and we do occasionally send out swords for review. Our requirement is that the review should be "fair and unbiased," and we define that as taking a "warts and all" approach. Part of this is because a good review that displays the failings of the sword helps us a great deal to refine that model.

But, when it comes to a game, it is an experience. You can be unbiased as far as trying to remove yourself from your own fandom, but any review you write will be informed by your own experiences and tastes. These are important, though - your readers will generally come to know you well enough to know when your own tastes and biases are similar to their own, and when they are different.

Ultimately, the way I prefer to look at these things is to figure out two things:

1. What is the game/movie/book trying to be (as opposed to what you may want it to be)? Is it trying to be a fast actioner, a hard hitting drama, etc.?

2. How well does it succeed in what it is trying to be?

I think that if you take those two points and build your review from that, you can filter out the biases that will get in the way of writing a quality review, while retaining the important and relative aspects of your own biases and tastes.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on it, for what they're worth.

 

[Flatfrog]

I'd also say that many of the people who are complained about in this context aren't even 'reviewers' in the sense most people would refer to it. Yahtzee is not a reviewer in that sense, he is a critic. He examines games according to his own standards of quality and gives personal opinions about them. Anita Sarkeesian is not a reviewer or a critic but an academic, putting a particular political view without any claims of objectivity at all. To judge them on the same basis is to miss the point.

 

[Vivi22]

I keep seeing, and hearing, people talk about the call for unbiased reviews. But really, there can be no such thing from any human being that has ever played a game or has any opinions on anything. At least if you want an honest review.

Yeah, let me stop you there: no one who ever talks about having unbiased reviews is talking about human beings leaving every bit of life experience and gaming experience they have at the door and reviewing a game with no preconceived notions of what it is or should be. Certainly no one that I've seen talking about having unbiased reviews anyway.

But that's not even remotely the problem we have in gaming media right now. The actual problem people want to do away with is the perception of a reviewer being biased, often because they rely on the companies who's games they review to pay their salary. Completely hypothetical example here: is a Gamestop review giving a new Halo game a 9.5/10 unbiased? Maybe. Is it going to look unbiased when the site is plastered with Halo ads, wallpaper, videos, etc. all advertising it's release and likely contributing a fair bit of revenue to the site to pay the employees? Nope, not even a little. Never even mind that now we have game companies even trying to effectively buy out Youtube personalities by refusing to give them pre-release code unless they agree to not say anything bad about the game.

That's the sort of bias people are actually talking about, so how about we save the rant against an argument no one ever made for another day shall we?

 

[shrekfan246]

an objective opinion is when you internalize information, look at the pros and cons and weigh them together.

I believe the word you're looking for is an "informed" opinion, actually.

i've kinda just stopped reading/listening/watching video game reviews for actual information. Now i mostly read/listen/watch them for fun/entertainment. i've always just went and looked up gameplay footage/LP's online to get a good grasp of the game and what it's about.

I still read/watch the occasional review or critique for information (Jim Sterling is the only "reviewer" I regularly follow, though I regularly watch Yahtzee and TotalBiscuit as well) but that's kinda where I'm at as well. If I'm interested in a game, I'm going to be watching gameplay of it before I decide to buy it or not. Actual gameplay, too, not that pre-packaged PR nonsense that publishers push out.

 

[shrekfan246]

an objective opinion is when you internalize information, look at the pros and cons and weigh them together.

I believe the word you're looking for is an "informed" opinion, actually.

What I meant to say is "an opinion formed in an objective mindset". I'm horrible with english.

I mean, I get what you're going for (I think), but I still think you actually mean "informed opinions", not "objective opinions".

I won't say it's impossible to view things from an "objective" standpoint, because I try to do it myself when I can, but an "objective opinion" is something of a contradiction in terms. Like, I hate Final Fantasy XIII. But I can recognize the things it does moderately well and can rationalize the reasons other people might like it. By that token, I can't really make a call on whether it's a "good" game or a "bad" game. But what I can do is explain why I dislike it, and why other people might not be affected by the same issues. I still wouldn't give it a positive review, were I a professional reviewer. That would be dishonest to myself.

 

[Scootinfroodie]

Ah, I see what you're getting at. You're talking about quality of the reviews themselves, which is a completly different thing from them being objective. Yes, reviews can, like all texts, be written in terms of various quality. Good reviews do bring up the good and bad points of a game, but the relevant part here is: Good and bad are subjective qualities.

Yes and no, there's aspects of reviews that are always going to be debatable, however what isn't is the necessity of honesty and disclosure of any relevant bias (such and such dev bought me dinner, I'm a (brand) fanboy, I'm roommates with the developer of X game etc.). When you boil it all down, basically everything you say or do is going to be affected on some level by your perception/ability to perceive it. Semantic arguments over objectivity are beside the point, because they quickly devolve down to existential bickering. The point behind journalistic objectivity is to decrease the amount of bias to the greatest possible extent while still informing the reader.

What you're really asking for is not objectivity, but rather better written reviews, where the reviwer explains their viewpoints in a more concise way, which is fine, but it's not what objective means. See, all words have some kind of value, a classic example is that "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" mean the exact same thing, but they have obviously very different values assigned to them. To one person, a game is "colourful and vibrant" while to another it's "like someone threw up after drinking paint", neithers opinion is more valid, and they're both describing the same thing, but to one person the artstyle improved the experience, while to another one is made the experience worse.

They can mean the same thing, or different things, depending on the overall context. The issue though is not whether someone liked or did not like a feature, but rather that the assessment was accurate. Both examples used are informing the reader that an extensive colour palette is used. If the reviewer describes the colour palette as "offensive" this does nothing, and further confusion is added if the reviewer suggests that a critic's statement that the use of visual media to enhance the gaming experience is offensive is evidence of how incredibly awful the game is.

Plus, my example about deplorable social values was more about how, yes, a message (that you personally find deplorable) being sent through can actually worsen the experience, regardless of how good the story is. What you're essentially asking for is that the reviewers mention that "while the writing is good, the general message is awful yadda yadda", which is definitely a good thing to ask for, but it's not objective in any stretch of the imagination.

What I'm personally suggesting is that the "general message" (IE the reviewer's personal interpretation) be a separate article, in which they are not beholden to expectations of the discussion of a game as a product. A good example would be the separation between Dragon's Crown as a beat-em-up and Dragon's Crown's art style as perceived through the reviewer's own lens. As far as quality goes, it would be nice if reviewers actually looked into the roots of a game's mechanics/art style/etc. but I've learned to not expect anything of quality from most websites at this point.

Also, you greatly overestimate the power reviewers have over a game, I've never met a person in real life that actually has read a single review from one of those famous gaming sites. Everyone I know base their opinions on game footage and youtubers like Totalbiscuit, most of them though base is completly on either hype (that's created solely by marketing) or hearsay.

Again, metacritic bonuses exist. Until they don't, reviews will continue to be a factor in how much a dev team gets paid. On the indie side of things, exposure matters. If reviewers deem your game objectionable, and refuse to write about "objectionable material" you don't get that exposure.

In fact, I'm gonna go with the old copout of "don't like it don't read it".

That's exactly what people have been doing actually, and it's given sites like Nichegamer, Techraptor, Gamesnosh and this very site a large boost in readership. I've personally been recommending GatherYourParty to people simply due to the fact that they have people who are willing to write in depth articles on the functions of more advanced games to facilitate conversation and instruct the uninformed

 

[babinro]

A truly unbiased game review would either be unhelpful to most people or practically impossible.

Want an unbiased review of a video game? Just get someone whose never played one...ever. Enjoy! They'll have no means of comparison and could easily provide misleading comments to even a casual gamer. I remember my parents had a very hard time learning the controls of a game like Super Mario Bros on NES. If they were to review the game proper, they'd have told people the game controlled poorly from their unbiased gaming experience.

Likewise...do you really want someone whose never played an EA sports game and who might only ever watch some of the Super Bowl telling you if the latest installment of Madden is worth the money? Probably not.

I tend to believe that gamers EXPECT/DEMAND a level of bias in their reviews. It's common knowledge that a websites resident sports buff will review sports games. That a horror fan will review horror games. A fan of 4x games will review the next Civ style game.

In response to a numbered score being problematic due to it's weight:
I think there's merit to this comment but I also feel that a numbered score is an extremely beneficial tool. To me, the numbered score represents an overall sense of enjoyment and worth out of the product. A 'GOOD' numbered score shouldn't be an average of a games strengths and faults but rather that of the type of experience you can expect to have.

In this way, I can fully understand why a game might get a perfect 10 score while still having some glaring technical faults. Likewise, a game can have a great sense of polish, control, slick graphics and interface while still offering a dull experience.

Personally, I find the score to be the most useful part of a review and I do place the most weight on it. That said...I don't judge a game solely on it's score and I certainly don't simply compare scores vs other games in the genre to determine what to buy or what's best.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Want to know how to get an unbiased review?

Raise a newborn baby in a sensory deprivation tank until they're 25, and then let them out and ask them what they think about your new videogame. (Sadly they're probably a vegetable due to their brain having developed completely without sensory input and won't be able to answer let alone count to a score for the review)


Everyone has biases, and all experiences are inherently subjective.

So if people are telling you they want an unbiased and objective review what they are actually asking for is a pet unicorn.


What people really want is self reflective reviews which show evidence of critical thinking.

If a game is mechanically and narratively good but you didn't like it because of reason X then your review needs to say that, including a critical analysis of why the mechanics and narrative are good, and a self reflection on your reaction to "reason X", where it comes from, and why it affected your personal experience of the game.

A reviewer is inherently biased by their life experiences, a good review shows awareness of those biases and applies critical self reflection to the way they affected the product being reviewed, and includes that in the review.


And then affix a random number between 7.6 and 9.2 to the end of the review that makes it look like you gave it a score, bear in mind that literally zero people will be happy with this score no matter what it was.

 

[shrekfan246]

Maybe this comes from the word "opinion" rather than "objective"?

I mean, objectivity in thought is possible, objectivity in analysis is possible otherwise we wouldn't have science.

I hold opinion to mean "a conclusion you have come to about a topic" rather than to mean "something you think and cannot help about yourself", which where I think most people ITT are coming from. Correct me, if I'm wrong.

Well, I've always taken "opinion" rather literally--that is to say, it's a personal "view or judgement made about something, which isn't necessarily based on fact or knowledge".

I recognise that there won't be any review ever that is objective fact, but I do want opinions about games to come from a less ideological place, and more of a place that thinks about gameplay, mechanics, visual design and the like. But I do understand that in all things there's good design and there's bad design.

You don't build a house with no supporting wall, yeah? So you don't build a game with no transparent, incomplex, fine-tuned mechanics.

I'm fine with people talking about percieved social issues even if I don't believe they're there, I'm fine with them having those beliefs, I don't have some "axe to grind" like someone suggested, I just wish a game could be reviewed as a game rather than "critiqued as culture".

I wish they'd make more of an effort to understand game design, understand how a player thinks while they're playing a game and how well the game complies to that while they're reviewing.

I can understand that. I get the grievances people have when they say they want cultural critique of video games to be kept to... well, actual critique rather than reviews, though I don't necessarily agree because I feel cultural critique could be just as useful to a reader as discussion of mechanics.

What I take issue with, and this honestly has nothing to do with you because I have seen nothing from you to suggest you're part of this group, is the people who seem to want to stamp out cultural critique of video games entirely. But since that has little relevance to this discussion, I won't dwell on it.

And no, I don't simply want reviewers to agree with me some of my favourite films, songs, novels and comic books have been slammed and ripped apart by critics, this does not affect my enjoyment in the least games are no different.

All I want is that when I'm deciding wether or not I want to buy the game, reviewers would talk more often about game design and how the gameplay actually is, rather than prattling about what I didn't come to see.

I hope that clarifys where I'm coming from in this debate and I won't be seen as some hostile prick.

And that's a fair position to hold, to which I have and would continue to respond with "Don't read reviews that don't provide you with what you're looking for." Sometimes it can be a little difficult, especially since you won't know what you're getting from a new writer before you actually go in, but if you're pretty careful about the places you go and the people you follow, I imagine you'll eventually find a group of reviewers/critics that can provide you with exactly what you're looking for without all of the excess crap you don't care about. That's the beauty of the internet, yeah?

 

[Erttheking]

Ok let's not pretend that the people that say this are misusing the word, because they are. Objective means factual, indisputable. These people don't want objective reviews. They want reviews where the developers personal politics stay out of it.

First of all. If you don't like the politics of the developer, why are you reading their reviews in the first place? I don't go to Christian Family friendly websites to read their reviews of M rated video games. Second. Depiction of women CAN impact a person's ability to enjoy a game. Therefore it deserves to be mentioned. Just because it doesn't bother you and you don't want to hear about it doesn't mean others don't. Third. Asking a developer to leave their personal politics out is basically asking them to lie about their personal opinion of the game and to give a dishonest review. If every female character in a game being a horribly stereotypical ditzy blonde cheerleader impacted a reviewer's opinion of a game, should he or she not bring up that aspect because it would be "biased". Really? Do we really want this? Fourth and finally, when someone says that a reviewer is biased, it is always, ALWAYS, a situation where they disagree with the reviewer. You never see someone calling a person they agree with biased. It's basically short hand for "You're wrong because you disagree with me" Fifth: A game free of personal politics is impossible. Pure and simple. For the simple reason of commenting on the quality of female characters. Did you say that you liked this female character in a review? Well that's because your personal politics helped identify what you think a good female character is, and your review isn't "objective"

Please stop with the whole "Objective" stuff. It's not something worth fighting for.

 

[Something Amyss]

What you don't seem to realize, OP is that there's a difference between having a personal bias and being objective. The difference is the ability to think outside your own shoes.

It's the difference between "The writing is awful, whoever wrote it has no idea how english-speaking human beings actually speak to eachother, the translation made me cringe." and "The dialogue offended me and did not fit with my world view, therefore I'm going to mark it down."

It's the difference between "Whoever designed this character was a clown, seriously learn what colours compliment eachother and try again." and "Skimpy outfits, you say? Unnaceptable."

It's the difference between "They failed to give the main character one thing a character should have and that is character." and "I don't like the main character being a straight white male."

It's the difference between "The level design failed to properly teach me, as a player the mechanics of a game and left me confused about how I was supposed to be playing for the longest time." and "I don't know tits about level design so I'm not going to mention it."

Except your former examples are prevalent within the reviews people accuse of "teh bias."

The latter half of the examples comes off more as conspiracy theory territory.

 

[Scootinfroodie]

Except your former examples are prevalent within the reviews people accuse of "teh bias."

And that accusation depends on context. If someone says "These characters don't know how to talk like people" and the reason for that is that the game is not actually about human beings, but robots and/or aliens poorly attempting to emulate that behaviour then people are gonna get annoyed. If that assessment is based on the reviewer's personal views, then they're going to get accused of bias.
See again: Tropico 5

The latter half of the examples comes off more as conspiracy theory territory.

You're going to have to explain that one

 

[GloatingSwine]

Yeah, I guess so, but you're sort of missing the point - the issue was/is an aggressively peddled, unilaterally followed far left wing agenda which led to perfectly good games getting low scores because the reviewer was trying to make some tedious political point, or didn't like the clothes a sprite was wearing or whatever. Basically a tiny clique fancied foisting it's views on a medium. You just can't really have that, it's not fair and creates it's own unpleasant bigotries.

God dammit! People publicly espousing opinions you don't agree with!

How dare they! The internet is ruined now. Turn off all the servers.

 

[Belaam]

The actual problem people want to do away with is the perception of a reviewer being biased, often because they rely on the companies who's games they review to pay their salary. Completely hypothetical example here: is a Gamestop review giving a new Halo game a 9.5/10 unbiased? Maybe. Is it going to look unbiased when the site is plastered with Halo ads, wallpaper, videos, etc. all advertising it's release and likely contributing a fair bit of revenue to the site to pay the employees? Nope, not even a little.

Then why is this movement playing out where it is? Shouldn't the movement then be addressing the game makers for transparency into who they may be paying? Perhaps creating an ethics plan and publicly asking all reviewers, from professionals to Youtubers to sign on? If the goal of the movement is to get game reviewers to be transparent with who is funding them, why is so little of the movement focused on that? If gamergate created a set of ethical behavior criteria for reviewers, publicized them, and began a public list of reviewers who agreed to sign off on them, wouldn't that be an infinitely better way of actually accomplishing your stated goal?

Never even mind that now we have game companies even trying to effectively buy out Youtube personalities by refusing to give them pre-release code unless they agree to not say anything bad about the game.

That's the sort of bias people are actually talking about, so how about we save the rant against an argument no one ever made for another day shall we?

I'm pretty sure everyone on both GG and anti-GG will agree that this is a problem. So again, how is GG working to negate this problem?

Are the cops in your town corrupt? First, maybe you want to clearly define what is corrupt and what is not. A cop ticketing you for rolling through a stop sign at 4am at 5 miles an hour may really upset you, but would not be corruption. Cops taking bribes would be. Then maybe you call on an independent agency to review questionable behavior. Maybe you have all cops wear cameras and record every interaction with the public. Maybe you fire every cop in town and hire new ones. Whatever you do, you need some sort of plan to directly identify problem behaviors and then rectify the problem.

I hear lots of GG gripes about corruption, but almost nothing about what they are doing about it. They ID'd Kotaku reviewers investing in some games they were involved with, and that was stopped. Great! Awesome! More of this, please. Thousands of whiny pages directed at game players and not game companies or reviewers is pretty much a waste, and leads to all kinds of nightmare PR situations.

 

[veloper]

I understand where the OP is coming from.
I appreciate critics who can also recognize a game that is good for what it is, even when it's not, for example, their preferred genre or the setting is not their idea of utopia.

Or failing that, at least they can stay away from reviewing JRPGs/racing games/whatever when they hate the genre. Politics and issues of course can fuck right off.
The best reviewers want to inform their audience about a game the best they can.

 

[Something Amyss]

And that accusation depends on context.

Yes, and I was replying within the context of the claims someone else was making. The comments you make seem to go to the latter examples, and thus you are ignoring my context (and ironically, asking for explanation later).

Yes, context matters.

 

[Scootinfroodie]

Yes, and I was replying within the context of the claims someone else was making. The comments you make seem to go to the latter examples, and thus you are ignoring my context (and ironically, asking for explanation later).

Yes, context matters.

I ask for explanation because "conspiracy theory territory" claims are not what I'm seeing in the quoted post, and was wondering if you cared enough to justify that claim. I've read the posts (and likely the articles you're talking about), and thus am (as far as I know) aware of the context. If you feel otherwise, feel free to post examples. Just be aware that it doesn't necessarily debunk any claims if some random internet goer makes a false claim of bias