| Grey Acumen said: Actually, I've long since known the rating system is flawed. Reviews themselves are still tolerable, but a single number that is trying to evaluate games within a market that has such a diverse and often conflicting set of interests is just not feasible. GTA IV was merely a game that has gotten a perfect score which makes it more clear where reviewers primary interests are. I've already suggested various ways in which a rating system could be handled, depending on what level of interaction you're allowing from the consumer. One of my ideas was the Wii Review Channel. The setup was originally intended to be specifically to handle the diverse consumer group that the Wii has been intended to target. However the basic premise; that the way you rate games yourself will act as a filter to find rating made by people with similar interests to your own, could potentially be set up for general use as well. So simply put, when you are looking at the rating of a game, it will first look at games you've rated already, and look for people who have given similar reviews to yours in order to create an average review for that game. Of course, people that have rated games completely differently will be more likely to be filtered out and not used to create the average. Of course, that becomes difficult to implement without the user first interacting. Another possible method would be to essentially attach a name to every rating such as "battle grit 10" or "fantasy adventure 7" or "artistic puzzle 9" so that the game is first given a rough category, and then scored for its quality within that category. This would hopefully let reviewers rate the quality of the game on the intention of its focus. The problems with this would still be finding people to review games that could actually do that. I'm not about to pass that off as an easy thing to do. It's not as much of an issue with an open community with filters like my wii review channel suggestion, but asking one person to essentially do that same job alone is usually asking far too much. the only other solution that can really be offered, or perhaps used to combine with the previously mentioned idea, is to fall back to a more simplified rating system, such as A, B C, D, F and combine that with a date, like 08.3 = March of 2008. C is an average game for its genre. D is a game that has frustrating problems, but is still playable, F is for games that have problems making it nearly or completely unplayable. B is for games that show quality, and A is for games that raise the bar for the entire genre so for instance, Wii sports would be A-06.11, GTA IV would be A-08.5, as they both raised the bar for their specific genres. |
Well, the problem with this system, is it caters to the stupid. I don't think we need an overly complicated system to score a piece of entreatment that cost $40-$60, to the level where we are pretty much just telling you what to play.
I think most people who play games know what they like, and know how much they will like a game based on a review and what kind of game it is. So if I kind of like baseball games, and one gets a 9.5, yet I love FPS's and one gets a 8.7, I know I am going to most likely like the FPS better. No one needs to make a system to tell me this.
For example, when GTA got a 10, everyone with SMG didn't think "Well, is scored higher then SMG, and I love that game, so I must go get an HD console and buy this game!" No, they realized the audience it's for, the kind of game it was, and made there own individual assessment.
They are just games, and before the internet, you had to find someone who played the game, so you could ask "So, did you like it". Websites are just giving you the ability to find that guy in the same place every time.
If you want my advice, I would say stop over-thinking this, and just go enjoy some games. It is an entertainment industry after all :)
