Jurassic Park: The Game was kept from the press until a few days after the game's release—rarely a good sign. The game did have a number of user reviews on Metacritic, though, and they were universally positive. These reviews gave the game perfect scores and showered praise upon the title. GameSpot grew a little suspicious at this odd turn of events and investigated; turns out that the user names attached to the reviews led to employees working at Telltale Games, which developed Jurassic Park.

Sure, this looks bad, but we wouldn't go so far as to say that the user review section of Metacritic has been uniquely abused. Regular users are doing a pretty stellar job of abusing the reviews section already.

Telltale Games responded to the controversy with a reasonable-sounding explanation. "Telltale Games do not censor or muzzle its employees in what they post on the Internet," the company said in a statement. "However, it is being communicated internally that anyone who posts in an industry forum will acknowledge that they are a Telltale employee. In this instance, two people who were proud of the game they worked on posted positively on Metacritic under recognizable online forum and XBLA account names."

Still, as those employees no doubt knew, the power of Metacritic averages for both professional and user reviews lies in the numbers, not the words. It doesn't matter if an employee stated that he works for Telltale Games in his review; what matters is that the employee was able to influence the final numerical average. The employees weren't really reviewing the product or trying to give unbiased buying advice; they were promoting a product they worked on.

While Telltale games does not "muzzle" employees from planting reviews of its own products around the Internet, many developers have explicit policies that block employees from reviewing their own games online. "What's tempting is fighting back against user reviews that don't feel fair," one industry professional told me on the condition of anonymity. "You can get a bad review for doing anything, or an imagined slight against gamers. We have strict rules against posting any feedback on our games through non-official channels. If you're found out, or even if you're upfront about it, the result is usually more negative user reviews."

Telltale is finding that one out the hard way. The user review average for Jurassic Park on the 360 now sits at 2.9.

User reviews exist to be gamed

The problem isn't that one developer was caught trying to game the user reviews—that's not a new trick—but that everyone games the system. User reviews are used to air grudges, attack franchises, and punish companies. The gulf between the critical score and the user review average for a game like Modern Warfare 3 is huge, and the negative reviews have more to do with the size of Activision and the game's popularity than with its quality. One user review even stated that the game wasn't bad, it was merely more of the same. The game's rating from that review: zero.

Metacritic has had to ban users in the past who "bombed" games with zero ratings in large groups to lower the game's score. Gamers have used user reviews as a way of punishing writers who said inflammatory things about video games. One of the most famous examples of user reviews used as offense happened when Spore was released with restrictive DRM.

I conducted an informal Twitter poll about developers hyping their own games with user reviews. To my surprise, most people didn't seem to care. The main reason cited was that user reviews have always been used to make a point or to attack or defend a game, not to actually review the product.

The whole system has few safeguards in place, so eventually people just assume that every review is dirty, or at the very least suspect. Telltale wasn't gaming the system, merely participating in the systemic game. What can the community do about it? That's a more difficult question.