Review scores are utterly meaningless
Whenever games journalists review a game, it’s commonplace to tack a score on the end. The traditional ten point scale gives readers a measure of quality in an easy to digest format. Yet, at the same time, those scores are utterly meaningless and it’s about time we got rid of them.
I got to thinking about this when Arlo recently announced he’d be dropping scores. First off, if you’re not getting your Nintendo news from a blue monster, I’m not sure what’s wrong with you. Second, he brings up a lot of valid points about just how silly the scoring process is, how challenging it is for him, and how little those numbers ultimately mean. Particularly when it comes to reviewers only using half the scale.
Consider Jim Stirling’s now infamous “7/10” he gave to Breath of the Wild. The Dr. Frank-N-Furter of gaming was torn a new one by Zelda fans, who considered the game to be nothing short of a dime. Upon reading the review though, it was more than fair. A lot of the issues Stirling encountered were reflected in my own play through experience. However, people seem to really get their backs up whenever a game gets a score that’s less than what they think it deserves.
In reality, no game is ever going to be perfect, and 7/10 is more than a passing grade. Yet we’ve fallen into this system where review scores should match the school grading system. Where anything less than a 50% is a complete failure with no redeeming qualities, and anything lower than a B is still unacceptable. Games are much more complex than that though. A 7 simply means that the game is 70% good, 30% flawed. In that reviewer’s opinion. However, the good still outweighs the bad.
The whole problem with review scores is that, in being easy to digest, they miss a lot of nuance. If people actually bothered to read or watch the entire review, they could get a better picture of whether a game is worth their time. What most people do is just skip to the end to the summery and score. Heck I’m guilty of that, and I do the bullet summaries in my own reviews as well. But these don’t tell you much about the reviewer’s full experience with the game.
What you’re trying to do is distill down something highly subjective into a somewhat standardized format. Except, review scores aren’t even close to being standardized across the games media landscape. Which is why aggregators are useless too. While I do think it’s possible to objectively review something, as an expert in the craft, most people writing about games do not fall into that category. Be they amateur or “professional”. Though you’re arguably going to get a more honest opinion from the amateurs, as they’re less likely to be influenced through sponsorship and access deals.
By eliminating review scores, it forces people to actually read or watch videos, and get a better picture of what the experience will be like. Which in the end will allow gamers to make more informed decisions. At least in theory. If they do skip to the end, at least they’ll a summary paragraph will tell you more than a couple bullet points and a few stars ever would.
