Numerical game reviews (and why they suck)

This one isn’t going to be a 500 word page word essay like my last posts were, but I just want to say that I hate the ditch game reviewers have gotten themselves stuck in.  Most of the time a game is rated less than 7.0 out of 10, it is automatically bad. 6.9? Awful. 5? “Don’t buy this game.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I do take aggregate reviews from metacritic.com to heart, but I have to keep that dumb cardinal fact in mind, although I wish I didn’t. And it’s not the reviewers’ fault. This is a mindset that has been created largely due to the general consumer’s belief that games are based on school grades, i.e. anything lower than a B- is bad. Not average, but bad.  After all, video games are not school students. They do not deserve to go through primary and secondary education, and maybe even college if they score highly enough.

So, I’ve been thinking about creating my own game-reviewing system. Here’s how it works: for everything the game does right, give it a point. For everything the game does wrong, take away a point. The final score of the game is the points the game earned out of the overall possible total. Seems simple enough, right? But I’m no expert, I’m not a professional reviewer, what do I know? I haven’t even tested out this radical new method. Maybe this weekend I’ll give a write-up on a game. Which game? Well, that’s the surprise and you’ll have to come back later, you nosy, nosy, person, you.

Something I need to say here, though. I AM NOT COMPLAINING ABOUT THE SUBJECTIVITY OF GAME REVIEWS. That’s a given. Game A might be the second coming of Christ to one person and the dump another person took the night before.

One more thing: honestly, what is the difference between a 6.9 and a 7.0? Is there really that huge of a gap between 8.3 and 8.5, for instance, that you need to distinguish between them? Those 0.2 points are not important reviewers; stop doing this. Until you figure this out, just don’t give games scores. Joystiq does that and it works out fine.

This is a completely accurate depiction.

So yeah, tune in this weekend when I give a game its own hand-crafted, individually tailored review. That’s right. I treat my games like the unique spirits they are. Not like just another number in the system.