The Critic's Plight

[Runa216]

vlad321 said:

And this is coming from someone who wrote a page or more complaining about this?

Firstly, the law of areages very much applies here, BECAUSE it applies to people's ideals and tastes. In fact, that's the WHOLE point of the normal distribution. There is an average among people's ideals and that average can be normalized to be 50. So either call the 80 a 50, or admit that the reviews here are laughably broken.

Secondly, then you are reviewing wrong. A game that gets a 50 should be better than half the games, and worse than the other half. The scores exist to compare games to one another. The writing part is hwere you explain what works and doesn't.

Thirdly, it's not about matching up with MY tastes, it's about YOUR ability to tell good from bad (even if you aren't a fan of someting) and about having the integrity to give a game that's better than half, worse than the other half a 50. Not an 80 to placate crying idiot fanboys who are too dumb and got hyped by some game's marketing team.

P.S. I'm not trying to be hostile, I'm just pointing out how things stand.

I think you need to learn how to differentiate between objectivity and subjectivity.   I didn't write a page complaining about the numerical values of reviews, I complained about important factors not being factored in, resulting in mediocre games getting high reviews, and I also complained about how an extreme review (be it positive or negative) will almost always get blind praise and needless hate.  You need to learn to not apply your own bias to my arguments.  your counterpoints have almost nothing to do with what I was talking about. 

the rest of this post is filled with statements that sould be followed immediately by "in my opinion."  but instead you're presenting them as undeniable fact.  You need to realize that game review needs to speak to its audience, and the method we have is more or less fine.  It's not perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than your suggested traditional sin-curve with 50% being the perfect average.  That requires entirely too much re-adjustment and universal values that are objectively infallible.  As long as all gamers have different tastes, any universal review scheme is fundamentally flawed.  

What we have now works just fine, where different values (8/10, etc) have different meanings.  There's absolutely no need to alter it.  if you like it better, go  right ahead and use it when you review.  I used to review using the same method but quickly found that it was horribly flawed since people generally know and understand what current scores mean. 

besides, all sites should have an explantion to show what each score means, like we do here and like I do.  The only thing that you're inherently right about is that no review shoud ever be 100 or 0.  There always needs to be room to adjust.  

My method works fine.