Editor’s note: As the former reviews editor at Electronic Gaming Monthly, I used to spend way too much time thinking about game scores. My blood pressure still shoots up whenever I read the phrase “perfect 10” on a messageboard. -Demian
Numbers are funny things. A number can get someone summarily dismissed, incite people to rage on the Internet (easily), and act as the deciding factor in a purchase. Numbers almost always appear at the end of game reviews, and although those reviews may also contain thousands of descriptive and evaluative words, most gamers seem to focus on the score.
GameSpy Reviews Editor Anthony Gallegos recently wrote a review for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and awarded it a 4.5 out of 5. Naturally, a few particularly rage-intoxicated gamers called for him to be raped and killed, in part because score aggregator Metacritic, which converts scores to its own percentage scale to calculate an aggregate score, considered that 4.5 as a 90%. And far too many gamers see anything below a 95% as utter shit.
The key issue here is not the score itself, but the emphasis so many people put on the score. Screw the words and to hell with the context of the article and the written opinion of the author: All that matters is the score.
Surely the threats of rape and murder are just hyperbole. But in the real world a threat is a threat. If Starbucks made you a coffee and you thought it was so weak that you storm to the counter and threaten the attendant with sexual assault and death, it’s obvious what the real-world outcome would be. You’d need a lawyer.
Gaming sites seem to subtly encourage gamers to affiliate themselves along console lines — sites such as Giant Bomb, 1UP, Gamespot, and IGN all have console-specific sections and often console-specific forums. On Giant Bomb, you can even choose a specific affiliation that alters the color of your username on their message boards.
A sample comment from GameSpy’s Uncharted 2 review.
And it’s on forums that most of these battles play out, where gamers will discuss why or how Uncharted 2 could receive a low score of 90, or 9.5, or 4.5, and if that makes it only as good as Resistance 2, not as good as Gears of War 2 with its 100, or 10, or 5.
These numerical values are hardly a science. They’re dependent on the author, the website and its scoring system, the time a particular game was released — and yet they’re compared as empirical values. Consider IGN’s 1999 Quake 3: Arena review, which rated the graphics at 9.5; obviously, if you were evaluating that game now it would be a different story, unless you were accounting for the the year it was released. Games continue to evolve and develop new ways of interaction, player immersion, storytelling ability, and fidelity, so it’s important to understand that scores are in relation to standards at that particular time.
A 10 does not mean that this is the greatest game that ever was, is, or will be. In the same regard, a 9.5 is not bad, nor is a 9 or even an 8.
Console exclusivity is one of the driving factors in online review hysteria — if you own just one console, you may feel pressure to justify your purchase of both the $60 game and the $300 console to play it on. For some gamers, that console is their team, to defend or cheer on with every news announcement, preview, review, and messageboard thread. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.
As soon as Warren Specter’s Epic Mickey game was announced as a Nintendo Wii exclusive, hundreds of comment posters claimed the developer, Junction Point Studios, had shot themselves in the foot, how the Wii is shit and on and on, despite Mickey Mouse being a large commercial product in Japan and USA and the Nintendo Wii having an install base of over 50 Million worldwide.
This all makes me very happy to be the type of gamer I am. For years now, I specifically look at a development house, sometimes a specific individual developer, the type of game it is, perhaps read a preview or a few press releases, check out a trailer, and those things inform my purchase decision long before a review even comes out. If I am on the fence and want to read a review, I read the actual words of the article instead of hitting the bottom of the page to see what score it earned.
Unfortunately, gamer rage and fanboy wars seem baked into the Internet as part of gaming culture. And not only do most gamers want to see scores, but a controversial score can mean lots of traffic for website owners. I just take comfort that I am not the only gamer who really does not care about a numerical value between 9 and 10, and the decimal points in-between.