I think a lot of people really do want to read and talk about good criticism we've just created an atmosphere where numbers drive the conversation instead. "Compare that to, say, comments on an review from Kotaku or Rock Paper Shotgun, and it's night and day. We'd much rather speak for ourselves, and only ourselves, and believe our current system is the best way to do that.""When I read through the comments on an IGN review, for example, all I see is people talking about the score," outspoken scoring critic and Kotaku News Editor Jason Schreier told Ars. "We don't want someone else to define our score, weigh the value of our feedback, and use our experiences to form a meta-score. "We're very happy to keep the meat of our reviews in the text itself, where it belongs," former gaming editor Ben Kuchera wrote. We didn't do it then, and we're still not doing it now. Still no scores at ArsThe last time Ars Technica spoke on the matter of adding scores to our own game reviews was in 2010. Gamers pore over relative scores to the point of obsession, arguing over whether one game really deserved a better score than another or what various scores really mean ad infinitum. But video games are somewhat unique in just how much focus is put on these scores.
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Reviews of music, movies, TV shows, and even tech gadgets routinely sum up the text with a number, a set of stars, a letter grade, or some other shorthand for classifying the work in relation to its peers.
The idea of adding a score or grade to the end of a review isn't unique to games, of course. "More importantly, it's not helpful to our readers." Last year also saw a few smaller outlets turning against the gaming review score: TechnoBuffalo in September and GameXplain in April. "Between pre-release reviews, post-release patching, online connectivity, server stability and myriad other unforeseeable possibilities, attaching a concrete score to a new game just isn't practical," Joystiq's Richard Mitchell wrote of that decision. Before Joystiq regrettably folded last week, the site made a similar decision to throw out review scores last month. Add an inflated understanding of the scoring scale in many quarters-whereby 7/10 and even sometimes 8/10 are construed as disappointing scores-and you have a recipe for mixed messages."Įurogamer isn't alone in this decision. "A flawlessly polished game with a hackneyed design? A brilliantly tuned multiplayer experience with dreadful storytelling? If you expect the score to encompass every aspect of a game, the task becomes an exercise in futility. "How should we score an excellent game with severe networking issues?" Eurogamer asked rhetorically. While Eurogamer's editors say review scores have always been somewhat reductive and antithetical to nuance, they now argue that the concept of scoring is particularly ill-suited to the way games are made and released today. Among the largest of those signs: popular gaming hub Eurogamer announced earlier this week that it's dropping its long-standing ten-point review score scale in favor of a vaguer "recommendation" system. But there are a few recent signs that the practice of sticking a number or a letter grade at the end of review text may be losing some of its appeal. January 2009.Since before GamePro started using cartoon faces to measure "fun factor" back in the '80s, review scores have been an integral part of the game industry.