The latest console wars have overthrown all of our abilities to look at the real reason we play video games...  To have FUN!!!

I think with a little feedback from the VGChartz community, we can create a good baseline to create a Fun Meter for rating games.

Often when I read reviews, they go into technical aspects of the games and try to point out every minor defect of the game.  They often want to tell me how it compares to other games in the genre or previous installments.  I don't really need to know that the eyebrows are too close together and this causes the character to look funny when he talks.

Why can't a review be about how fun a game is?  Tell me about what things make this game unique and how this makes it a fun game.  If you want to tell me about a new feature in the game, give an example of how it makes the game more fun, not just that it is there.

I think we can come up with something that still has everyone's favorite number system.  1-10 or 1-100. 

I haven't come up with how to do this exactly, so I am seeking feedback from you.  Please try to leave some constructive feedback below.

The problem is fun ratings are not only subjective but also conditional. 

Example:  Watching 'Battlefield Earth' drinking with funny friends is Hallerous!  Watching is sober and serious by myself is painfull after the opening credits end.

Something can be fun one day, and bore the next. 

Gamepro magazine used to rate "Fun Factor". Those were the days.

I think I'll start doing that for reviews.

Also off-topic, but does it bother you when games are given decimal points in ratings? Like 8.1 or 9.7? Why not just give it a 8 or a 10?

maybe that is part of the Fun Meter rating?  The replayability factor is very important.

Yes! Sever kinds of humor/funny.  Divide it by different ways that people might fund things funny.  Thus we get Zappy’s WSS Humor Rating System(tm):

Witty Factor:

Silliness Factor:

Stoner Factor:

So intellectual humor, things that require a back ground cultural knowledge, political humor, those sorts of things would fall into the Witty Factor.  While slapstick, situational and things that are rather obvious would fall in the silliness factor – including kids or people behaving like children.  While the rest - general goofiness absurd factors and a more relaxed comedic asthetic would be caught up in the Stoner.

Take Flower - it's a 3 on the Witty Factor, 0on Sillyness, and a 10+ on the Stonner factor.

What are we missing?

I think a part of the fun comes with how good the game is over-all. If their is flaws it usually(not always) makes them less fun.

I think there's 3 ways of looking at it.

First, as someone mentioned, it's really hard to objectively measure or even describe "fun".

Second, because of the insistent cries on "objectivity" and "non-bias" for reviews, reviews have focused on comparing one game's numbers to another's and then outputting their own number for a score.

Third, games these days have become undifferentiated and are just starting to converge into this mushy regenerating health shooter genre. So it's pretty hard to really differentiate one game from another in terms of fun and easier to compare them across each other based on technical specs.

You can't constrict the meaning of fun into a number. I'm playing killzone mercenary right now and having a blast: 8/10 funs.

That just makes no sense! Truthfully my favorite reviews are ones that just talk about the game and never give a score. You learn the good and the bad without it being broken down into a spreadsheet.

Also I disagree that people only play games to have fun. People play games to enjoy them, but I feel that the word fun is too playful.

A good review team use to be noobtoob if youve ever heard of them(They never gave scores).  They stopped though :(

One of their last Episodes