
Game reviews on Metacritic: why we avoid inclusion - barredo
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/05/game-reviews-on-metacritic-why-we-avoid-inclusion.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
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electromagnetic
Having worked as a game reviewer, they're correct. There's a ton of hidden
pressure behind the scenes to positively review some games, for threat of
losing the publishers review materials.

Some publishers were great, and some were complete asses putting up embargoes
on review release dates to hand them off to the bigger magazines first.
Overall it just made the experience of reviewing them rather negative, which
has tainted my view of games as a whole.

I used to be an avid gamer, now I'd barely classify myself as a casual gamer.
There are some great and truly innovative games in all sorts of terms from
gameplay to story, however mostly I just see Arbitrary Action Element 12
followed by Unsurprising Plot Development 8, even in some reputedly great
games.

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jacquesm
The golden days of game development imo were the late 80's, just enough
computer power to make things interesting and not enough big money in it to
make it hard to get in to for creative small companies.

It's been very much downhill since then, with the exception of a few
interesting developments in the console market.

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barrkel
Almost all video games from the late 80s were crap by today's standard. I
think you're guilty of some pretty severe bias in your estimation. You need to
justify the criteria by which you are measuring, IMO, in order to explain why
such brilliant games are not currently out-competing today's games.

By crap, I meant that they had so little resources to work with that most
could only work on the level of playability, puzzles and reaction times; to
get deeper, they had to rely on text, where they didn't enter into a visceral
feedback loop with the player. They worked only on very slim slices of the
mind's abstraction stack. If they were reaction-based, they would be at most
tactical, not strategic, and certainly not epic in a story-telling sense; and
if they got into story-telling, they ended up in interactive fiction land,
where they lose the immediacy of high-bandwidth visual and aural
representations. They need to say, rather than show, so the user gets a
narration, rather than an experience.

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jacquesm
> most could only work on the level of playability, puzzles and reaction times

That's _exactly_ why I liked them. I used to play games a lot because it was
great fun, the games out today concentrate on 'the experience' rather than any
of the above, and I already have a great world around me to experience.

The pacman game on the google page really brought that home to me, I really
had to very strongly resist playing it or I would have been hooked for at
least an hour.

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smackfu
Not surprised. This is the same Ars where they used to rate other things (like
iPods) with a numeric scale and ditched it because people were fixating on the
rating and ignoring the article.

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ghshephard
"Our practice of giving games either a "Buy, Rent or Skip" verdict is too
vague for Metacritic to arbitrarily take our score and tell its readers what
it thinks we meant."

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nopassrecover
Instinct suggests 85/65/30. If you felt inclined you could probably have some
fun with parsing the reviews for influential words too.

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mortenjorck
They actually have a policy for scoreless reviews:

 _However, this does pose a problem for our METASCORE computations, which are
based on numbers, not qualitative concepts like art and emotions. (If only all
of life were like that!) Thus, our staff must assign a numeric score, from
0-100, to each review that is not already scored by the critic. Naturally,
there is some discretion involved here, and there will be times when you
disagree with the score we assigned. However, our staffers have read a lot of
reviews--and we mean a lot--and thus through experience are able to maintain
consistency both from film to film and from reviewer to reviewer. When you
read over 200 reviews from Manohla Dargis, you begin to develop a decent idea
about when she's indicating a 90 and when she's indicating an 80.

_

<http://www.metacritic.com/about/scoring.shtml>

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sliverstorm
They kind of paint Metacritic in a poor light. It's not Metacritic's fault THQ
has the policies they do.

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shadowsun7
I think what surprised me the most is how much Metacritic matters to the
gaming industry. You don't get the same issues with music, say, or movie
releases.

It's true - Metacritic isn't at fault for THQ's policies, but then that's what
you get for coming in and changing the mechanics of the game review world.

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henrikschroder
I think it's because a lot of gamers treat game reviews as some kind of
absolute truth, instead of just the opinion of one guy. People seem to have no
problem treating movie reviews like someone's personal opinion, and find a
reviewer they like and trust, and ignore the rest.

But when a game gets 8/10, it somehow either _is_ an 8/10 game or the game
reviewer is _wrong_.

Somewhere along the line people forgot that reviews are subjective, not
objective.

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arohner
Yes, but the stakes are higher. A movie takes $10 and 2 hours of your time.

(New) Games cost $60, and occupy a variable amount of time. Since I'm
bootstrapping my startup i.e. poor, I only buy games with a high expected
value. I typically look for $1 / hour of entertainment, or better. This means
I buy games that I can expect to play for 50+ hours before getting bored.
Modern Warfare 1, for example, I played for hundreds of hours, making it a
great bargain.

The game review scale is also highly compressed. The difference between 8/10
and 9/10 is often the difference between "good game" and "unplayable".

