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Gaming media's aversion to perfect scores

This is all silly talk. Mario 64 is the greatest game of all time according to Next Generation.

How could there possibly be perfect scores for any game after Mario 64 was released? The best game ever was already released.
 
Because movies and music reviewers rarely use a 100 point scale. If you use 100 points and you give a game all of them then that means there's not a single bad thing about the game, that the game is literally perfect.

If you have only a 5 point scale (or even less), 5/5 only means "I recommend it, it's really good".
 
It's the critical equivalent of Sharp Knees.

It's some mythical game that only exists half conceived in abstract concepts and screwball ideals these Nancies hold dear to themselves and only themselves.

Don't matter none. I just play games these days. Let the reviewing to the ninnies with an agenda.
 
A game needs to be more than the logical next step to receive a perfect 10. It must change how we think about games.
 
Mr_Zombie said:
Because movies and music reviewers rarely use a 100 point scale. If you use 100 points and you give a game all of them then that means there's not a single bad thing about the game, that the game is literally perfect.

If you have only a 5 point scale (or even less), 5/5 only means "I recommend it, it's really good".
Click to expand...
5/5 = 10/10 = 100%
4/5 = 8/10 = 80%
4.5/5 = 9/10 = 90%

The scales mean exactly the same thing.
 
We as gamers should be a lot more concerned about gaming journalism's score inflation. We need to support publications that dare to give low scores, not ones that throw out 10s.

Also, a game score is not (10.0 - flaws). Thank God. It's simply how that reviewer finds the quality of the game in relationship to all the other games he/she has played.

Otherwise games like Deus Ex, Vampire: The Masquerade and Shadow of the Colossus would have to be blasted; they're loaded with bugs, technical issues, balancing problems and design flaws. They're also magnificent. Angry Birds would probably be a 10.

Thirdly, and now irrelevantly, what games have you guys played that don't have anything you would change about them?
 
If the current status quo is marked as "aversion," I shudder to imagine a gaming press that embraces the practice.

Scores are pointless anyway.
 
Hm, I think part of the problem is that the community who reads these reviews are expecting a score - and god forbid we disagree with them.

Since not everyone finds the same game perfect, reviewers are really scared of cause havoc around their community.

Honestly though, why bother? :P I never make purchases based off on reviews any way.
 
This is a pretty terrible thread.

Have you made a script that pulls data from metacritic for all games and movies released in the 5 years and analyzed what percentage of each gets perfect scores? No? So you're just saying it "feel" like movies get more perfect scores. without anything to back up your claim.
 
The gaming media doesn't have an aversion to perfect scores, 10/10s are doled out frequently to undeserving games like MGS4, Mass Effect 2,etc. It has an aversion to accurate scores.
 
Crunched said:
5/5 = 10/10 = 100%
4/5 = 8/10 = 80%
4.5/5 = 9/10 = 90%

The scales mean exactly the same thing.
Click to expand...
I think a 5 point scale implies that there are 5 possible scores, not that 5 is the highest number a score can get. Scoring out of 5 and then giving half points is silly.
 
sixghost said:
I think a 5 point scale implies that there are 5 possible scores, not that 5 is the highest number a score can get. Scoring out of 5 and then giving half points is silly.
Click to expand...
Are there any 5-point scale reviewers which don't award half points?
 
Scores never mattered to me. I always just read the reviews and try to form my own opinion. It only really meant something to me when gaming was shifting to 3D. That's when you saw all these new ideas coming and new ways to play. A lot of us either weren't playing back then or just don't remember but a lot of 3-D games were horrible to play through for a long while. Things are much different now though obviously.... it's also the reason I still have hope for some kinect+controller games.
 
I don't understand the whole 'there's no such thing as a 10/10 game' thought-process. If the most any game could potentially get is a 9/10, then in reality, the scale is actually 9/9.
 
Sethos said:
Because you'll see communities in an uproar "NO GAME IS PEFECT!!1" except those scores are based off personal opinions and are not some sort of scientific fact. So they just play it safe, rate it just a tad lower on the score chart to keep everybody happy.

Same with below 80%, everybody goes apeshit.
Click to expand...
Yeah, the whole "no game is perfect" thing gets really annoying. A 10/10 doesn't mean the game is perfect, just that in the general scheme of games the reviewer enjoyed that game more than most of the other stuff he or she has played.
 
Nekofrog said:
Movie critics and book critics give their respected media perfect scores all of the time (two thumbs up, 5 stars, etc).

When a website or a magazine reviews a videogame, often they will write up the most glowing review possible, accentuating all of the games positives whilst identifying any possible negatives (let's be honest, some games just have no negatives). Then you come to the SCORE side of the review and lo and behold, 9/10, 4/5.

What the fuck? Why are "scores" treated as if a 10/10 or 4/5 is so holy that only one game every 5 years is worth attaining it?

To understand where I'm coming from, a game like RE4 would have gotten a perfect 10/10. For its time, the graphics were top notch, the story was fun as hell, gameplay was revolutionary, music was fantastic, pacing was SPOT ON, everything was just perfect. If it had a movie equivalent, it would have gotten 5 stars, guaranteed.

What the fuck is wrong with gaming "journalists" when it comes to this issue?
Click to expand...

It's not a problem with gaming journalists. You don't see the chaos over reviews with movies or books that you do with games. There's no such thing as Movie Studio Warz, people just chill and read a couple of reviews to get an idea of whether they'd like it.

As mentioned, gamers have gained (earned) the stereotype of freaking out over scores that don't fit into a preconceived box. Thus, journalists have adapted to their audience. Plus they're gamers too, so there's that as well.
 
Nekofrog said:
I'm not talking about the lesser known sites. I'm talking about the big ones, mainly. IGN, Gamespot, etc.

The 8.8's and the 9.5 sites.
Click to expand...

Well this is why.

"Two thumbs up" and "4 stars" have a much smaller range from "good" to "bad". X-Play gives games 5/5 all the time that get 9.something everywhere else. It's not necessarily the same as a 10/10.
 
Crunched said:
5/5 = 10/10 = 100%
4/5 = 8/10 = 80%
4.5/5 = 9/10 = 90%

The scales mean exactly the same thing.
Click to expand...

Not quite.

100/100 is obviously 100%
20/20 could be anywhere from 96% to 100%
10/10 could be anywhere from 91% to 100%
5/5 could be anywhere from 81% to 100%

What do the percentages indicate? As a consumer, it would be most useful to me if a score of 100% meant that a game was better than 99% of what's on the shelves right now, 99% meant it was better than 98% of same, so on and so forth. Of course, this would mean that for every game that scored, say, 75%, you would have one that scored 100%, and another that scored 1%, and ninety-seven more that scored every other possible percentage - this would clearly be impossible to implement, since reviewers just aren't capable of holding so many numbers in their mind at the same time. The best you could hope for is maybe a five-point scale where three of the points are actually used. The reviewers could think of them as "Good", "Great", and "AWESOME!!", or you could make up a little chart for them with a cartoon man's eyes popping further and further out of his skull at how much like virtual reality Grand Theft Auto IV is.
 
RedStep said:
It's not a problem with gaming journalists. You don't see the chaos over reviews with movies or books that you do with games. There's no such thing as Movie Studio Warz, people just chill and read a couple of reviews to get an idea of whether they'd like it.

As mentioned, gamers have gained (earned) the stereotype of freaking out over scores that don't fit into a preconceived box. Thus, journalists have adapted to their audience. Plus they're gamers too, so there's that as well.
Click to expand...

While I'm not typically one to come to the defense of the almost unanimously petty and childish gaming community, I do think that at least a portion of the score inflation problem is due to a great deal of 'soft' corruption with the gaming journalism industry.
 
Conciliator said:
While I'm not typically one to come to the defense of the almost unanimously petty and childish gaming community, I do think that at least a portion of the score inflation problem is due to a great deal of 'soft' corruption with the gaming journalism industry.
Click to expand...

I don't see that... movie studios hand out swag like it's going out of style, hold massive junkets, parties, etc. The same people they invite are reviewing their products, and I've never heard of any controversies/corruption (except David Manning, who wasn't real).

It's an ecosystem that seems unique to one industry; all the others seem to take the critic's opinion as objective and a guide, not something that fits into a numeric scale and can be quantified absolutely.
 
Because gamers are stupid. They think you can review video games objectively and a perfect score means a perfect game. Of course, this is wrong. They also think anything below a 7 is crap.

They've been better about giving games perfect scores this generation, but the additude still exists with a lot of people. I think the first game to ever get a perfect score from EGM was Ocarina of Time. So up until 1998, they didn't give a single perfect score to a game. The first perfect score from Game Players was Super Mario 64 in 1996. They had been in print for like 8 years or something before that point.

I remember reading Game Players magazine and seeing people writing in and expressing their outrage over a game getting like an 8.5 when it clearly should have gotten an 8.7. (I've also seen people write into EGM saying a game should have gotten 9/9/8 as though all three or four scores are given to a game by the same person.)

(It is now probably obvious that the two gaming magazines I read growing up were EGM and Game Players. :P)
 
Dabanton said:
Tbh i just wished a 5/5 or 100% or whatever meant a must play recommendation rather than it meaning the game was 'perfect'
Click to expand...
People have different tastes. There's no such thing as a 'must play'.

RedStep said:
It's not a problem with gaming journalists. You don't see the chaos over reviews with movies or books that you do with games. There's no such thing as Movie Studio Warz, people just chill and read a couple of reviews to get an idea of whether they'd like it.
Click to expand...
I certainly don't. I check the RT score and nothing else. Before I see a movie the only question I want answered is "How good is it?" I don't want any details on the content.

Reviews and critiques are for after you've already seen it. Better to be reflecting on the movie when reading criticisms than reflecting on criticisms while watching a movie.
 
Mr_Zombie said:
Because movies and music reviewers rarely use a 100 point scale. If you use 100 points and you give a game all of them then that means there's not a single bad thing about the game, that the game is literally perfect.

If you have only a 5 point scale (or even less), 5/5 only means "I recommend it, it's really good".
Click to expand...

This is absurd. You are acting like the number 100 has some magical property that 5 doesn't have. This would only make sense if "quality" were some quantized empirical value and that there were only 100 possible values of quality.
 
Jerry Orbach said:
Not quite.

100/100 is obviously 100%
20/20 could be anywhere from 96% to 100%
10/10 could be anywhere from 91% to 100%
5/5 could be anywhere from 81% to 100%
.
Click to expand...

100/100 could be anywhere from 99.1 to 100.0%
1000/1000 could be anywhere from 99.91 to 100.00%
10000/10000 could be anywhere from 99.991 to 100.000%

ad nauseum
 
tokkun said:
100/100 could be anywhere from 99.1 to 100.0%
1000/1000 could be anywhere from 99.91 to 100.00%
10000/10000 could be anywhere from 99.991 to 100.000%

ad nauseum
Click to expand...

How many outlets do you know that use a 1000-point scale, let alone a 10000-point one?
 
RedStep said:
I don't see that... movie studios hand out swag like it's going out of style, hold massive junkets, parties, etc. The same people they invite are reviewing their products, and I've never heard of any controversies/corruption (except David Manning, who wasn't real).

It's an ecosystem that seems unique to one industry; all the others seem to take the critic's opinion as objective and a guide, not something that fits into a numeric scale and can be quantified absolutely.
Click to expand...

The gaming industry is unique - as far as I know - in that a publication's meal ticket is basically in the hands of publishers. If a publisher is upset with a publication, it won't invite them for previews, it won't advertise with them, it may not even send them review copies. I don't know if this is truly rampant or just occasional, but it does have an effect, I think.
 
I review for G4, occasionally.

I will not give a game a perfect 5/5 unless I feel it is outstanding. If I give it a 5/5 merely because I think it's "really good", how is that fair to the games that come along that I feel are truly transcendent, yet achieve the same numerical result? Games this past generation that I would give 5/5's to include Vanquish, Super Mario Galaxy 1/2, Portal 1/2, Ghost Trick, Super Meat Boy, Mirror's Edge, The World Ends With You, Punch-Out!!, Uncharted 2, and a few others I can't think of off the top of my head.

My favorite review system I saw on a small site was a single number that told you the dollar amount they felt the game was worth. Games might have values of $15, or $50, or in the case of Starcraft II, it was easily in the hundreds. I thought it was cool.
 
I feel that the OP is looking for a problem where there is none.

The problem is exactly the opposite actually, that scores are too high. Oh and movies and games are not similar pass times and reviews for either are not comparable.
 
This has to be the first time I've seen someone accuse game reviewers of collectively underscoring games.
 
Feep said:
My favorite review system I saw on a small site was a single number that told you the dollar amount they felt the game was worth. Games might have values of $15, or $50, or in the case of Starcraft II, it was easily in the hundreds. I thought it was cool.
Click to expand...

15 dollars can mean very different things to two different people.
 
Unfortunately games are usually scored a 100 point system instead of a 5 point system. It is so granular that games are going to be thrown in that 90 range somewhere. Unlike movies game reviews/marketing is focused on buy this game and no other, movie houses won't care if two films get perfects.
 
Jerry Orbach said:
How many outlets do you know that use a 1000-point scale, let alone a 10000-point one?
Click to expand...

None. I was just pointing out that your assertion that 100/100 is 100% but 5/5 is not was completely arbitrary.
 
The 5-point / 5-star system is much better. The fact that there are only 5 possible scores (6 is you include zero) means that there will be plenty of variety among scores, and since, as other posters have mentioned, a 5/5 is basically anywhere from 81-100%, the built-in "error bars" allow for a wide difference in opinion while taking away an outlet from the "this game didn't deserve that score!" peanut gallery.

Amazon once had 10-point scores and moved to the 5-star system about ten years ago. Films have always been on a four-star system (no half-stars, please).

I hope this system eventually becomes the standard just like it is for movies.
 
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