So I've been starting to play with the idea of doing the occasional game review on this site, mainly to highlight smaller indie games, a section of the industry that could certainly use more commentary. But that always leads me to the question of whether or not to include scores at the end of my reviews. This is an argument I have heard go back and forth for ages, whether or not a number can accurately reflect the relative quality of a game. It's a tricky subject to be sure, and one that I've changed my opinion on several times over the course of the past few years. So my notion was before I launch into reviewing games, I would try and sum up my feelings and thoughts on review scores, just to get everything out in the open.So with out further rambling, lets dive right in!
The best argument I've heard against the use of review scores is that it may be impossible to express a complex and subjective opinion numerically, and there is certainly some credence to that. The idea of trying to come up with a single number to express the quality of a particular game is daunting at best. But I begin to think that if I start to give out review scores, I wont be aiming to nail down the very loose and ever-changing concept of quality. I feel a better way to express this would be to rate the experience I had with the game, and how much I would recommend this experience to others.
Now these may seem like entirely identical concepts, and on the surface level, they are. But I find them to be fundamentally different at their core. Trying to assess a games quality sends of flags of placing an objective opinion on game, and reviews by their very nature are going to be subjective to the reviewer in question. So I feel like its best to embrace that, and allow the reviewer to simply discuss and rate the experience they personally had with the game. A number at the end can simply represent how much they believe other gamers should experience it as well. A game that gets a perfect 10 does not mean it is a game without flaws, but rather it is an experience that anyone should have despite its flaws. A subtle distinction, but an important one.
The problem that I most often have with review scores is when they are used to compare one game to another. If Game A gets an 9/10 and Game B gets a 8/10, people will often turn around and state that Game A is objectively better than Game B. Though this seems logical on the surface level, it discounts too much about the process of reviewing. Every game, every review and every score needs to be taken in context. Everything from its style, genre, narrative to its price, play time and other games that are released around it form the context for that review. To take two games out of their context and compare them just based on the score is discounting the entire process of reviewing.
So, all that being said, will I be providing scores in my reviews? Yes, yes I will. But I'm not here to judge the precise quality of any game in question. My plan, to rate the games I play based on the experience that I had. To discuss the points within the experience that I liked and those I didn't. I want to look at the experience as a whole, and try and sum up how much I think its worth your time. Just remember, a perfect score doesn't mean that the game is perfect. Just that you should play it anyway.
