If you’ve been reading gaming media long enough, you’ve memorized some review scores. The large statement makers were much lower than expected, or very high to the rare higher values that had the feeling that history had just been made. Once upon a time, a single score from a well-known outlet could define public opinion about a game.
Half-life: 96% in PC gamers. Deus Ex years later: 95% struggling. This single digit number of his was very important to all of us. And don’t get me started on Edge Magazine 10s. This was the pre-internet equivalent of being nominated for an Oscar in the gaming industry.
I’ve been reviewing games for 15 years. And the more time passes, the more unscientific, wholly subjective, and at the whim of a myriad of external factors, the whole process becomes visible.
Here’s what I didn’t consider when I sat down to write that review in 2011.
The 94% I’ve given Dragon Age 2 shows very well the points before it, but I’m not just saying that because I’ve got some famous scores that are objectively wrong If BioWare itself were to explain to anyone why it deserved that score, it would be put to rest. I can see it now But what I didn’t consider when I sat down to write that review in 2011 was the following. I was in a very good mood at the time.
Just weeks before my review copy arrived from BioWare HQ, I was offered a full-time staff gig at a gaming magazine after three years of trying to establish myself as a freelancer. With all of Denerim’s low-res brown textures installed on my hard drive, I’m a traveling writer and freelancer waking up at carefree 11 a.m. before entering a thrilling new phase of his Enjoying the last few weeks of life. I was sitting in my office watching my editor order an exploding sheep for a photo shoot. It was another time.
As an aside, recent events have heightened my temper so much that if Dragon Age 2 were nothing more than aggressive malware locking my PC and physically crashing through my monitor, I would would have enjoyed it. This urban area has lingered a bitmust have thought. But now it’s my job to hang around and say sarcasm to the people in the bar. how good is that?
Thanks to PC Gamer 95%, that’s all I can say.
numbers game
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a reviewer publicly admit that something that happened in their personal lives influenced one of their reviews, but of course it happens. . We are not white coats. Curve Digital’s latest test samples are tested in a sterile lab to perform quantifiable tests. We are people who, at some point in our formative years, thought it would be fun to play games for a living.
The entire culture around reviews has changed to focus on scores
The whole culture around reviews has changed a lot since Dragon Age 2 Gates, and it’s all about scores. On the one hand, I’m used to influencers “reviewing” games and hardware as part of paid promotions, and I’ve learned to decipher opinions from “opinions”. Several reviewers have developed a format for completely forensic detail, and I remember feeling very humbled back in 2015. Kirk Hamilton’s Witcher 3 Review on Kotakunot just because of its length and the incredible breadth of topics he covers in his copy. I was.
It’s a format that the site has rolled out across the board, and several other major outlets have become maximalists around the same time. Realizing the fact that the list of pros and cons of is eating up traffic, it has adapted and evolved.
These Reddit posts and Steam reviews were probably more popular than traditional gaming media in the first place because the creators put so little of themselves into the ratings. The average Steam review reads as if someone took this game into a lab and ran some tests. Game reviewers, on the other hand, see the magazine’s predecessor era where asserting a distinct identity as an editorial staff was as important as telling how far Team Fortress 2 had fallen by this time. was pointing at
I wanted to make you feel like you’re part of a club that’s only on the pages of magazines.
This approach makes a lot of sense in a pre-smartphone world where people enjoyed sitting down and reading magazines instead of flicking to review scores to see the moment before buying a game. To enjoy yourself as if you were, you wanted to be entertained. Clubs only existed on the pages of those magazines.
In the age of digital distribution, short attention spans, and the much broader gaming media landscape, that doesn’t make much sense. Assuming that readers want to know you, the writer, and want to hear your wilting remarks as much as they want to know if the game is worth buying, that’s arrogantly. I can see it. Also, sorry for the protracted anecdote about my previous Dragon Age 2 review. I grew up reading his PC Gamer in his 90’s.
If there was a danger of a culture war between old-fashioned thinking writers whose worst offense in review was to bore their readers and nu-schools whose worst feature was to omit important features.The machinist, the internet We quickly resolved the issue via our aggregator.
Over time, a single review score became less and less important, even for reviews from big outlets and well-known reviewers. Metascore was really important for studios looking for bonuses and consumers looking to make quick decisions about whether to spend their money.
Aggregators collect hundreds of opinions, process them, and combine them into one neat figure. they are greati use them
Metascore and its cousin the Steam review aggregator have problems. For example, review bombing. Large outliers skewing metascores either way. The gaming industry’s tendency to review on a scale of 70-90 instead of 0-100 and the subsequent homogenization of metascores. But if you want an instant judgment on whether a game is good or not, an aggregator collects hundreds or even thousands of opinions from the press and players, processes them, and boils them down to one neat number. provide. they are great i use them
Where does that leave the great, maximalist written reviews of yesteryear? Reading a 2000-word copy of is like playing a podcast. You are absorbing material about things that interest you in an immersive way. people still want it. YouTube has moved away from listicles to long-form video essays about gaming.
It’s a little more asking for people to read the words on the page instead of watching the accompanying gameplay or piping everything to Airpods via podcast. But game reviews are completely subjective. If we recognize that our impressions are subjective and that our impressions can be colored by various things from the outside world, then this is the starting point for more valuable accompaniments.
