As I said a few weeks ago, this Review Symposium will either be very important for videogame journalism, or a bit of a “self-obsessed literature fart”. So far, and we have only seen one topic discussed, it’s been around 50/50.

The first topic discussed was that of giving a numerical score to a review. I recapped all the interesting points I got from it in part 1 and part 2 earlier this week. In this final part of my report (I really need to think of better ways to break this down, “Part 3 of my Report on Part 1 of the Symposium” just doesn’t fit right) I’ll go into a little more depth on my reactions to what was said.

Reviews have scores, critiques do not.

The first thing I picked up on whilst reading the debate was that several writers don’t seem to understand who they are actually writing for or who their target audience is. Most reviews are not aimed at the wine drinking, game-theory learning, late-20-somethings who actually understand Braid. Reviews are aimed at the people who want to know about a game and the people most likely to buy it. For the most part, these people don’t care about what a game is about, just if it’s any good. They want to know if they will enjoy it.

As N’Gai Croal said “a reviewer answers the question, how well does this game work, but a critic answers the question, how does this game work?” A valid point, and one that I think gets to the essence of the issues here very well. All of the people lamenting the shallow nature of reviews are essentially wanting to push game reviews towards being game critiques, which is something very different.

Reviews are reviews, and critiques are critiques (I would technically class a review as a type of critique, but in this context a critique is a dissection of a game. A dissection similar to that an art critic would create). I would love to see somebody like Croal dissect the true meaning behind Gears of War, I really would, but not in a review. When I chainsaw my way through a giant enemy monster, I’m not thinking about how this ties into our continual erosion of the taboos of violence in society. The content of a review is different to that of a critique, and I think they should stay that way.

This is where most of the complaints at forcing a number onto a review come from. You can’t put a score on a critique of a game, that’s like putting a score on a work of art. But you can add one to a review.

There is also some wiggle-room for game reviews. They don’t have to all be identical. Take Negative Gamer reviews (what few of them there are so far). They are very different to a standard review. You could equally have a review looking at the technical achievement of games, or the story driving them. With such a tight focus of a review, scores can still be applied because the question “how good is x within the realm y” can be answered.

This idea continues to less focused sites. As every site has a set of criteria by which they judge a game, they could be said to be just as focused or clinical with their diagnosis. Although discouraged, several reviews from the same site should be comparable. A game given 5 on IGN should be worse (by IGN’s criteria) than a game given a 6.

Skip to the end.

The fact that you can apply a number however, doesn’t mean you should. Scores are often very much misused. The clearest example is with Metacritic. How can you compare the scores given by a number of different sites, who all use a different method of reviewing a title? Unless a scaling factor is applied, the implication is that a Gamespot 8 is identical to a Destructoid 8, and there is no way around that. (However, that is for comparing actual reviews, using an average of reviews to compare games should allow for a fair comparison.)

The score may have been preceded by 2,000 words, but those are completely ignored by the majority of people. Everybody does it. If you are not interested in a game, but want to know generally how good it is you scroll to the bottom and check the score. Problems come when readers choose to check the scores on multiple sites.

On a site like Destructoid for example, I know the kind of tendencies the writers have. I also know the scale the site uses, so understand that if a game got a 5 or 6 then it’s probably middle of the road. If I didn’t know Destructoid that well however, I would think a game getting a 5 was terrible. This is where a concise accompanying blurb helps. Almost every review has one, but it’s often under used.

A small piece of text explaining in a single sentence what that number means prevents a vast amount of misconception. People will always say dumb things, but having a sentence next to the number helps even those who skip to the end avoid a misconception. As many contributors to the symposium said, not everybody has time to read a large review. But they do have time to read a quick recap.

The importance of being.

A review should be a summary of the game. The score should be a shallow reflection of the review. As Jeff Gerstmann said: “They aren’t rocket science, and were never really meant to be treated as such.” Complaints aimed at people who over emphasize the score are in essence, complaints aimed at the people who read reviews. These people want to know “is this game good?” A review answers that.

Scores don’t “detract” from a review, they are part of the review. A very important part. Like the answer to a maths puzzle. The reviewer has shown their working in the paragraphs of text above the result. Anybody who complains the answer is wrong needs to point out where in the working-out there is a mistake. Anybody who doesn’t can simply be ignored.

Look at the maturity levels of most “gamers” who will be reading, and more importantly, replying to online reviews. Do you really think you can change that? Reacting to it wont help so just ignore it and move on, but remember what they want from a review.

Essentially, a score is important. It is misused, but the number of people who do that can be reduced. If you look over the past few years worth of reviews, rarely have the larger (arguably more standardized) reviewers disagreed much, at least on the score.

So, this symposium eh?

A lot of things were said in the first topic of the symposium, but nearly all of it was simply re-stating what is commonly known (or off-topic waffle). It’s good to have it all there in one place, but nothing was really decided upon. It would have been nice to see some opinions turned into action. Perhaps that isn’t the goal of this symposium and it’s just a gathering of mind to determining what the current situation is.

Some advice on what’s best, fewer essays about commonly understood ideas, some discussion about the future and talk of what needs to change to reach everybody’s ideal would have been nice. But at least there were some solid opinions and good foundations laid out. There is also a lot of scope for all that in later topics. As such, I give this symposium a 6.3/10.

Hopefully the next topic, “Reader Backlash”, will provide a bit more progress.