Oli Welsh wrote:
From now on, we will no longer be scoring games out of ten... in Google, however, you will still see star ratings attached to Eurogamer reviews: five stars for Essential, four for Recommended, one for Avoid, three for everything else.
Ben Croshaw wrote:
All it takes is for a 'Recommended' or an 'Essential' to be given to one game that's isn't all that, and the title is meaningless. Eurogamer's new award system sets a speed record by becoming meaningless before the end of the article announcing it, when a list of recent games is displayed with their new shiny prizes attached. Every single one of them was Recommended, bar the first, which was Essential (Sunless Sea for the record), the Recommended list including Grim Fandango Remastered, Captain Toad Treasure Tracker, and Assetto Corsa. Now, surely they can't all be equally recommended without caveats. I like Grim Fandango but I don't like car games much. BOOSH SYSTEM DESTROYED.
Do you think game reviews with percentages and stars somehow cheapened game journalism?
No, I think the desire to get the “first” coverage cheapened game journalism. In the pen and paper world, we used to talk about “shrink-wrap” reviews. I know that some of the early pioneers in the hobby game magazines would talk about popping the shrink-wrap, looking at the components, reading the rules, and writing the review without even pushing pieces around. My feeling was that European publications, because they had a more competitive environment (and efficient distribution system), rushed reviews to press. That doesn’t really serve the reader at all.
My argument with, for example, PC Gamer’s percentage system wasn’t that they used percentages, it was that an astute reader would notice that the magazine (at least, during the Gary Witta era) always had some sacrificial lamb of a product that they rated in low percentage ratings. But, if you looked at those games, a lot of them were never released in the U.S. and certainly weren’t advertisers in that publication. At CGW, we didn’t have enough editorial space to deal with games that weren’t going to be released in the U.S. So, we wouldn’t even have touched those games. On the other hand, there were times that lousy games we might have been tempted to ignore were actually advertised in our publication. If they were advertised, I felt an obligation to review them. And I had more than one advertiser yell at me that I shouldn’t treat them that way after what they had spent. I shrugged my shoulders on one occasion and said, “Ironically, I probably wouldn’t even have assigned the review if you weren’t trying to get my readers’ attention.”
But, did our star ratings cheapen our review work? No. If anything, the stars sharpened our efforts. The reviewers suggested a number of stars and the editor covering that genre was expected to defend that star rating in the general editorial [OK, “Star Chamber”] meeting where we debated the ratings. The meeting often required a half-day or more of heated discussions before we approved those reviews to go to press. We didn’t discuss the reviews among ourselves as much before the star ratings were implemented. To be honest, I resisted the star ratings for as long as possible. I wanted the readers to READ the reviews. But, the bottom line is that I just kept getting hammered by readers that we NEVER gave bad reviews when I thought it was clear that we gave bad reviews. I eventually realized that our readership was becoming younger and more casual and, as a result, we had to spell out what we really thought.
The world wide web was the death of game journalism. There simply isn’t any reliable metric to determine which site is really reliable and which journalists are legitimately trying to do their work and which are merely “fan boys” getting their dopamine fix by slamming people and using “tabloid” style headlines. It always makes me nervous when I read reviews on the web because I don’t feel like I can trust anyone to have played the game all the way through.
Kirk Hamilton wrote:
We at Kotaku often joke about review scores and the futility of attempting to encapsulate a game with a 1-10 rating. We’re proud that we’ve never had our reviews weighed and sorted by the pitiless eye of Metacritic, and similarly proud of our history of running scoreless reviews. Except, well, lately, we have been scoring our reviews. In fact, by requiring a binary Yes/No, our reviews were arguably even more reductive—if less ambiguous—than a ten-point rating would’ve been.
Kirk Hamilton wrote:
In 2016 and beyond, Kotaku reviews will no longer include a Yes/No/Not Yet recommendation. Our reviews will remain otherwise unchanged; they’ll still reflect the individual point of view of their author, and they’ll still be open to whatever creative approach that writer may want to take. They’ll still include a review box that summarizes what we liked and didn’t like. The only difference will be that the box won’t contain a Yes or a No.
And they're going to continue scoring reviews in 2016 and beyond. Only this time, they'll be hiding them better.
Alex Kierkegaard wrote:
Professing to be against ratings is idiotic, because ratings, like it or not, are automatically embedded in reviews by the very process of their composition, and there is no way to unembed them.
Alex Kierkegaard wrote:
So, essentially, the question is not whether or not to ADD ratings to reviews, but whether or not to HIDE them. Because that is what has happened whenever a review does not feature a rating -- the rating has been hidden, and the only way for the reader to discover it is to read the actual text.
