Review the Reviews
CSU Cauldron
There are ratings and reviews and summaries everywhere we
look in this ultra-mediated society. What purpose do these serve? Whose do we
choose to listen to? What’s with all the different scales? How does a reviewer
distinguish between a 6.5 and a 6.6 or perhaps a 6.7? Why the hell should I
care if game X or movie Q or book 3 got three adorable kittens out of five?
What arbitrary placeholder should I be using as a reviewer? What if I disagree
with any given reviewer, can I find them and kick them in the junk for calling
the newest twilight movie trash? Should professionalism be a quality one
searches for in a reviewer? Is there such a thing as an objective review?
Should there be such a thing as an objective review? Why should I even care
what any reviewer thinks of a game regardless of the opinion I hold?
At the end of the day, reviews and ratings are ultimately
arbitrary. Some people live and die by the ratings a trusted source give a
product (whether that product is a book, a movie, a game, or a bigger item such
as a television or a camera), while other people put absolutely no stock in
them and would prefer to choose exactly what they please regardless of another
opinion. I write this article specifically about video game reviews and
ratings, but the same disdain could certainly apply to ratings or reviews about
movies or books.
How is one to decide upon a game based on reviews? Take
Halo: Reach for instance as the game in question for all intents and purposes
of this article. It’s received virtually universal acclaim from critics, and
received a rating of ‘Buy it yesterday’ from The Cauldron. Yet while searching
this series of tubes we call the internet, I have found plenty of less than
stellar reviews by users as well as a few critics for the same monumentally
stunning game. Obviously, I have not looked all over the internet, but luckily
Metacritic.com has done that for me. For those unfamiliar, Metacritic finds
reviews of everything possible from everywhere possible and compiles all of
them for an aggregate score out of 100, then assigns that number to the item in
question. Halo: Reach got a 92 out of 100, or universal acclaim from critics
based on 87 reviews, and 7.2, or average or mixed reviews (or I suppose a 72 to
use the scale they have created) from users based on 341 reviews.
With this discrepancy, which review should gamers look to?
Should we trust the ‘experts’ who may or may not be giving an opinion free of
bias to stay in favor of the game companies who continue to make their jobs
important, or the gamers who have no need to sugar coat any opinion they may
have because they do not get paid for said opinions. I would tend to lean
towards any opinion given free of bias, but this presents another problem; the
problem of similarity with the person giving the review. Is gamer X a hyper
nerd who plays WoW religiously, or does he/she play Halo all day and nothing
but Halo?
Another issue with reviews is the arbitrary number system
each different site/magazine adopts, a 100 point scale, 10 point scale, a 5
point scale, including fractions of points, disregarding numbers altogether in
favor of an equally arbitrary good/bad/mediocre (of whatever else one would
like dressing that up as). As of this moment, I’m giving this article three
broken down tractor trailers out of five.
No comments:
Post a Comment