Reviewing Reviewers

It's not abnormal for publications which depend on advertising revenue from the industry whose products they are rating to "play nice" with their reviews. Beyond the incentive of advertising, a publication is unlikely to get exclusive first coverage of an upcoming game after they trashed the studio's last one. Publishers give sneak peaks and early reviews to generate sales, not to scare customers away. And while many of the more popular reviewers exist in cyberspace today, most of these sites are similarly driven by ads and rely on traffic generated by previews and early reviews.

Consequently, most video games recieve scores between seven and ten on a ten-point scale, or three and five on a five-point scale. To add further articulation to the system within such a small range, it has become common for reviewers to rate to the tenth of a point (implying 100 distinct points of articulation on a 10 point scale). I acknowledge that reviewing is always a subjective process, but for me the idea of a 100 point review scale is absurd. To further confuse issues, most of these points are never used by reviewers; the same reviewer that has issued 60 scores of 8.7 has never issued a 4.9.

Of course, many reviewers reserve their actual criticism for the body of the review, offering insight into a game's crippling flaws across the page from a score which is said to represent an "Excellent" game. Ponder that for a moment: what does "excellent" really mean when 50% of all releases by major publishers receive such a rating? In any case, fear of reprisal often prevents legitimate scoring from occurring. Even on sites and blogs which are not affected by this "review backlash" we see the same inflated scores. I once believed that this was due to a sort of standardization that had been led by major game news sites and magazines, but I've spoken to more than a few fans and amateur critics who have assured me their scores are heartfelt.

It is, of course, nonsense. While it may be legitimate to hand out a few "5/5" scores each year, "10/10" probably comes along once or twice in a decade and "100/100" never has. If the top score obtainable represents perfection, and the bottom score obtainable represents utter failure, these extremes should be virtually unobtainable. There has not been a game yet in which no fault can be found. The vast majority of studio releases are deserving of middling scores; they are truly average, mostly forgetable works that have some merit to fans of the genre or particular style. A significant number of games, at least as many that receive above average scores, deserve lower than average scores. These are games which are seriously flawed, either in concept or execution or both, with little value except to die-hard fans of the genre or style. On top, you have the cream, in the 7-9 point range. These are memorable games with broad appeal, or perhaps exemplars of a particular style or genre. While the number of titles represented here should be few indeed, this section probably accounts for almost as many units sold as the rest of the scale combined, as these are often the four or five "must have" titles each year.