Hathur wrote...
I just love the way so many Sheeple put so much stock on review scores... what makes 1 reviewers score about a game more valid than some random fella you ask off the street? There's no degree in video game reviewing... no field of study with a defined parameters how a game is judged & scored....
A review score to me from PC Gamer or Gamespot or IGN or whatever has as much credibility / significance to me as if I had asked a homeless person what he thought about the game... a 9.0 /10 means nothing to me... a 2.0 / 10 means nothing to me... it's meaningless. Scores don't do anything to tell me whether a game is suited to my personal tastes.
You know what DOES help me decide if a game suites my liking? A reviewer with a journalism degree & strong writing skills who can succinctly explain what he liked about the game, what features it has, what problems it has, what he didn't like, provide a technical analysis of game and then his own personal commentary on the game..... THAT is what I base part of my decision on whether I would like a game or not...
But someone saying a game is 9.0/10 out of 10 is utter garbage to me.... Call of Duty games get huge scores... and I hate them, can't stand playing them at all... you'd have to put a gun to my head to ever even try it again for 1 minute. Why? Because it doesn't suit my tastes one bit..... now if I read a well written review about Call of Duty, then I can find out if it's a good game for me or not.... but the score? Useless.
Yer all a bunch of sheeple.... now Imma goin a back to ma cave.
Okay, I have to make a comment on this.
While I think you are right to say that it's the real, substantive content of a thoughtful and intelligent review that really matters, and not the number that's attached to it, I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that aggregate review scores mean nothing.
What, exactly, do those numbers reflect? They are nothing more nor less than an attempt on the reviewer's part to quantify their impression of the game's overall quality, taking numerous different factors into account. Of course, different reviewers have different opinions and standards, and surely some are more professional than others, but, as you said, there is no clear set of defined parameters that govern what makes a "good" or "professional" review.
A decent critic isn't going to just pull a number out of a hat and slap it up at the top of a game review. A decent critic will spend some time reflecting on what he or she personally enjoyed about a game, how the game compares to other (and especially similar) games, what faults the game possesses, how the game fares in terms of relatively objective criteria (most criteria pertaining to a game's quality are not wholly objective, but most of us will tend to broadly agree when a game's controls are too poor, or the acting is too bad, or the bugs are too major, etc.)... only after thoughtfully considering all these things and more will a decent, conscientious game critic assign a numeric score to a game.
Obviously, a high Metacritic average isn't going to tell us much about any game, except that most critics like it or consider it to be good. If you want to know specifics, read some reviews from sources you consider relevant or credible. That's the difference between words and numbers-- the former can explain, and analyze, and qualify, and interpret, both on specifics and in general, in theory or using examples; numbers express quantitative values and relationships. They don't tell us the same things words can, but that doesn't mean they're useless.
As I said, in a professional, thoughtfully composed review, the number score should at least come close to representing the reviewer's opinions on a game as a quantitative value on a clearly defined scale. Of course that number won't tell us specifics about how the game plays, or what particular faults it has-- those things should be covered in the text of the review. But I don't think it's smart to completely discount a huge mass of aggregate data taken from dozens of reviews from different sources just because numbers and averages are for "sheeple." At the very least, it can give us a general impression of how highly critics are judging a game, and in much less time than it would take to read fifty plus reviews.
For my part, I like to use Metacritic as a starting point to get a feel for the reviews of games I'm interested in but not completely sold on yet. I usually start by picking out one of the highest scores, one of the lowest scores, and one somewhere in the middle, and then reading those three reviews. I find this useful. If you don't, that's fine, but there's nothing wrong with looking at scores to get a very general sense of how a game is doing critically.
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