Review numbers are ridiculous. I now pledge I will not use them at all.

[The_vagabond7]

famousringo said:

Words Of Wisdom said:

famousringo said:

Words Of Wisdom said:

famousringo said:

IGN recently gave a 0.8 to one piece of shovelware. I'm sure few other reviewers bothered to look at it, and there are many other shovelware games which even IGN didn't want to waste paid labour and bandwidth on.

Why was it a 0.8?  Why not a 0.9 or a 0.7?  Why not a 1.3?  What's the difference between all those scores?

 

Would it be too obvious if I answered that it was because the reviewer thought it was better than a 0.7 and worse than a 0.9?

And the reason why VGC is using a "meaningless" numerical system is because they did a poll of VGC users, and a plurality of voters asked for a 100-point scale, more than doubling the votes cast for any other grading method. People want the clarity of numbers over letters, and they want enough granularity in the scale that they can distinguish between a game which barely made it to the 80s and a game which almost made it to the 90s.

Letters are no more inherently meaningful than numbers.  Choosing between them is essentially choosing between the useless mainstream scale or the useless nonmainstream scale.  Yay.

You get no clarity from either system because the actual numbers have no meaning.  There is no truly objective difference between an A and B nor a 9.1 and a 9.4.  It doesn't exist.  People argue about scores all the time because scores mean different things to different people. 

Those scales work in the educational system because I can objectively give you a 90% on a test because you got 2 out of 20 questions wrong.  Video games lack that quality (or it's just that no one has ever come up with a solid enough rating system).

 

What does objectivity have to do with it? It's a matter of ranking, not objectivity. You can deliver a list of pros and cons for two games along with an explanation of why you list those attributes as good or bad, but you won't answer the the most important question people want to know between these two games: Which one is better?

That's what the number is for, and why the number is more clear when you have more granularity in the scale. That's why people want to see 8.0 and 8.9 instead of just two 8s. Just because there's no objectivity in any of these numbers doesn't mean that knowing which game ranks better in the subjective opinion of a group or individual is worthless information. The only real problem is that people think an aggregation of subjective numbers alchemically makes those numbers objective.

The immature sense that ranking is objective is absurdist though. Why is Tales of Symphonia DOTNW objectively one point out of a hundred better than Infinite Undiscovery? Why is Killzone 2 Objectively a 92 out of a hundred? According to metacritic. There is no objecitve way to rank one game as being better than another, and no point to doing so other than to fuel fanboy wars. I like No More Heroes about a bajillion times more then Uncharted Drakes Fortune. I love Disgaea 3 waaay more than I like Fallout 3. According to Metacritic, I'm an idiot and it should be the reverse. So either I am playing the games wrong, or there is no point in ranking one better than the other because it is inherently subjective. There numbers, the rankings, the whatever you want to call them don't do anything that the body of the text can't do except incite flame wars over arbitrary numbers.