| bugrimmar said: a ten denotes that there is no room for improvement. get that through your thick head. is there such a score as 10.1? no. Ok, GTA4 already has a 10. so if GTA5 turns out to be absolutely amazing and a revelation in gaming, then it can only EQUAL GTA4, even if it's much better. Again, slapping a 10 on something eliminates room for improvement. understand that simple idea. THERE IS ALWAYS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT. |
Ahhhhhh dear me. Looks like I'm going to have to put aside the whole "hard boiled" thing in favor of actually discussing things.
All right, bugrimmar. Pull up a chair. This might take a minute.
First off, you gotta understand that rating systems in the art - literature, cinema, games, what have you - are not actually grades in the sense that you get graded in school. The video game journalists are behind on this, but it's the truth. Using them as a grade scale implies that there is some Platonic ideal of a perfect game when there isn't. Grades imply there can be an objective scale of quality culminating in perfection. That's just not true.
Nor are ratings tools of hype, at least not in theory. The video game journalism industry, again, has dropped the ball on this one, going so far as to try to affect sales through their scoring, and publishers aren't helping in that respect. Still, hype does not or at least should not come from reviews. Reviews stand on their own, as individual statements of quality. Does this contribute to hype? Sure. But it's not hype in and of itself, and claiming that this is universally the intent of high scores is just naive.
We're going to talk about a 5/5 scale here, then move on to a 10/10 scale (which is what most 5-with-half-point-increment scales are) and lastly the 100/100 scales. This is for perspective. The 5/5 scale is easiest to work with simply because it will have the most variation in quality between the increments of the scale.
One a five-point scale a game can be given one of five scores: 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. There is also the 0-4 star scale, but they amount to the same thing: there are five degrees of quality denoted here.
In a five-point scale, a score is not an absolute statement of quality. What it is is a statement as to the generic range of quality in which a piecee of art exists. Most games will be three-star games simply because most games aren't all that special - this does not equate to a 50% score on your English essay. Bansh that though. 3 stars is average. It's a good popcorn movie, it's a Madden game, it's a new album of popular music. But there is tremendous variation in the quality of titles that exist on the value of 3: you can have some that are better than others. Bizarre, I know, but a reality when the scale you work with is necessarily limited. There are very good three-star games and there are not-so-good 3-star games. Having the same score does not mean that one game is equal in value to the other. To pretend otherwise is absurd. Using this logic, we can plainly see that a score is not an absolute statement of quality.
Let's skip down to the five-star games, which you say should not exist because 5 stars is "perfect". But, here we need to remember: five stars is not perfect. It's a statement of what tier of quality a game exists on. Let's pretend - work with me here - that GTAIV is given a rating of five stars. When GTAV comes out years later, it is also given a rating of five stars, and the reviewer says that it is considerably better than GTAIV was.
Is this a contradiction? Oddly enough, no. It's not. Because scores are not absolute statements of value, they are statements as to the tier of quality on which a game exists. 5 star games are all fantastic, there can be no denying, but some games which have 5 stars are goign to be much better than others.
Remember: scores are not grades. You can have flaws and be a 5/5. You just have to be fantastic.
So on the 5-point scale you have games which are of five star quality. There may, in fact, be quite a lot of them, some of them better (others, like Shadow of the Colossus, much better) than others. Are any of them perfect? No. But that is not what the scale is about.
Now let's look at a 10-point scale, which has ten degrees of quality: 1, 2, 3, etc... all the way up to 10. There is no 9.5 or 9.9 here. There is 9, and then there is 10. So what we have is ten tiers of quality.
Let's skipi to the 9s and the 10s. Are the 10s better than the 9s? Certainly, though the distinction is finer than it was between the 4s and 5s on the 5-point scale. Are the 10s perfect? Or couse not. They're simply the best that the medium has to offer. A game can come out that is better than all the other ten without somehow degrading the other tens. They still belong on the 10 tier. The best game is simply better than the others.
Now we will look at something more troublesome (and sadly common): the 100-point scale, used by IGN, Gamespot, what have you. The two highest degrees are 9.9 and 10.0. This is problematic, because it means that there are one hundred separate tiers of quality on which games may exist. Separating them is a matter of semantics, almost, but let's pretend that this is done reasonably and that 10/10 games are simply always better than 9.9/10 games. Does this mean that a 10/10 is perfect? Oddly, it does not. It simply means that they exist on the uppermost tier, the highest echelon of games. This isn't bad! It is, in fact, very very good.
With an understanding that scores denote tiers of quality rather than grades or a lack of flaws or some closeness to a Platonic ideal, we also come to understand that the entire scale has to be filled up, no matter what. If there were no 10.0 games, then the 9.9 games would have to be 10s because that is the highest that the scale goes, and they are the best games there are.
See?
