lordchompy
Member
Then why assign a score if not to normalize the review alongside the gamut of other reviews? Why assign a score at all then? When I took exams In college I consistently scored in a certain range with a few exceptions that generally were attributable to the proportion of effort and time I spent studying, and to a lesser to extent if the instructor who graded my exam appreciated what I had to say.
Reviewing games is certainly not the same, but there are parallels to be drawn between academia and art/entertainment criticism.
I've asked several different professors about the quality of a particular piece of work I've done and gotten slightly different responses based on, as you say, what the beholder is looking for in a particular piece of work. The professor never questioned the validity of my work's existence, only the level of creativity, comprehensiveness and entertainment it provides. The professors surely had their own personal, subjective opinions about my work, but the focused more on grading me for how I accomplished what I set out to do, the standards I either attempted to meet, exceed, or even change in some way.
I've read multiple reviews for Killzone that continually question the merit of the game's existence on a portable console because their expectations for portable games run contrary to what Killzone sets out to achieve. All standards for what makes a good game go out the window in favor or focusing on the platform the game is on. And in the end, we see a review with a lot of positive, a little negative, and then a rhetorical conclusion that asks 'why Sony even made the game,' which concludes the review, the game receiving a 6.
There simply must be standards by which critics must judge works of art and entertainment. Otherwise, there is no use for critics at all as we can all just chalk their experiences and thoughts about playing games to subjective musings and tunnel vision.
So if you are going to assign a score to a game, make sure you outline the standards that the game must meet to receive the score. And if you could care less about standards and just want to pen your thoughts about your playing experience, leave it as that and don't smear a perfectly good opinion with a numerical yardstick where the units used to measure constantly change, because that will simply confuse many readers and create pseudo benchmarks that are simply not accurate.
And by you, of course, I mean any and all who review video games. This is my personal opinion, and certainly not gospel.
