Introducing GeekWeek's Game Review Scale

As I mentioned last week, GeekWeek will be doing game reviews soon, which meant we had to sit down and figure out how we'd "score" games (if at all). Well we've settled on a system, and I wanted to lay it out for you.

Games can get four possible scores. Here they are, from best to worst:

 

  

Now let me explain how we came to this. 

Obviously, there are a million ways to go with a review scale, basically boiling down to how many little demarkations you want to make. From my vantage point, I see three distinct camps in the review philosophy debate: 

Lumpers, who argue for fewer tiers (thumbs up or down would be an extreme lumper position);

Splitters, who argue for more tiers (for example, percentage systems allowing a full 100 possible scores);

And then there are Ascetics who reject scores of any kind, arguing we should only observe and worship the Words, not letting ourselves be distracted or perverted by false idols like "9 out of 10" or "A-".

I'll be honest: in our internal debate over what sort of system to adopt, there was talk of Asceticism. Indeed, all of us were at least sympathetic to the the Ascetics' cause, but that's not so unusual; most critics I've talked to find scoreless reviews appealing (I myself have publicly argued for them a few times), though not always for the same reasons the geekerati does. Reducing a carefully-worded critique to some arbitrary number/letter/percentage often feels clumsy and misleading; trying then to ensure your latest arbitrary score is somehow consistent with the arbitrary scores you've given in the past starts to feel like a mild form of schizophrenia. And of course there are narcissistic objections to scoring: not many critics want to give readers an easy way to not actually read their review.

But there are realities to consider. First is the audience: while there are gamers who'd rather read 800 words of text than see it summed up in a score, they aren't the majority: most readers want to get a quick impression before reading a review, and in the absence of a score they'll just skim the closing paragraph for the same effect. So to me, it's silly to try and force review-reading. Besides, everyone gets what they want from a review with a score, since Ascetics don't have to look at the score. 

Second is aggregate review sites. Obviously, it's hard to convert a scoreless review into a percentage for a Gamerankings or Metacritic, and the sad fact of farming is that aggregate sites, for all their evils and shortcomings, include your voice in the critical consensus/debate on a game. Our system allows that sort of dialogue.*

So we knew we wanted some sort of review scale. From there it was easy: we wanted to lump. Our argument for lumping is this: when you're in a bar with a friend and he asks how Dragon Age: Origins is, you don't say "I'd give it a 78.5... no wait, a 79." Unless you're an asshole, or being ironic. That's not how people talk. That's not how people should talk. Generally, when describing games to friends there are games that suck, games that are so-so, games that are great, and games that are awesome. We wanted our categories to reflect that.

Lastly, we wanted symbols that seemed retro-gamer-geeky-cool, thus the classic RPG loot.

And that's the most time we're going to spend talking about this, ever again - because really, the scores themselves are just shorthand. The meat of our reviews will be the words, and those way-cool graphics at the end should just be a snazzy little punctuation mark.

Look for my review of Darksiders sometime this weekend.

*: Roughly, our system would convert to percentiles as follows: Awesome = 90 or above; Great = 80 or above; Meh=70 or above; Shit=below 70.