Review Scores and Politics

Background

In the following I’d like to expand a little about why I believe that mixing politics/moral convictions in with review scores is not only wrong but also bad for gaming in general.

The rationale for putting my thoughts into print were mainly sparked by two events that occurred within the last month. Namely following part of the conversation Liana Kerzner and Erik Kain had regarding review scores starting roughly around 7:28

They talk about the problems of review scores in general as well as staying objective/free of bias when reviewing video games.

The second and in this case more important reason I’m writing this is due to an exchange I had with Danielle Riendeau earlier today. While doing research for a different story I stumbled over Polygon’s review of Moebius: Empire Rising (written by Danielle). In it she mentioned that the game was written, produced and designed by Jane Jensen (I later found out that Jane had also Kickstarted this game) and gave the game a score of 4 pointing out that the game was deeply misogynistic and ugly to its core (mostly based on the main character of the game).

I did a little more research into this matter and stumbled over an article Jane had written on Gamasutra 10 days prior to this review. In it she explains some of her motivations for writing characters the way she does and while those motives are selfish in nature that doesn’t make them less valid or worthy of shame.

She writes the characters/stories she finds interesting because it’s her passion and she’s simply living out her fantasies. Why not? Right? Here is the tweet I’ve composed about this

As mentioned earlier she replied after having been tagged in by @Chriss_m

and we had a bit of a back and forth

which led me to writing this article.

The problem

I’ll be the first to admit that having review scores from 1 to 10 is a very simplistic approach with lots of room for interpretation. I’ve been working on a much better approach that I’ll hopefully eventually be able to actualize but for the time being I think they’re good enough. Why? Because they give a rough numeric value to the quality of a game. This does obviously mean that a lot of nuance is lost, but when faced with the amount of video games on the market they help alleviate some of the troubles of finding good games.

The way they are usually implemented is by grading things such as gameplay, graphics, sound, controls, story etc. Most people have (or think they have) a rough idea about what is meant by these labels which I would argue is a good thing. Again, definitely not perfect and sometimes even very arbitrary but also pragmatic.

I also want to clarify that I don’t think anybody minds people analyzing and dissecting video games (or art in general). Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I believe there is a reason YouTube channels such as The Game Theorists have such a huge following. People enjoy talking about these things.

Neither do I think that it’s bad to talk about these topics within a review of a video game. Christ Centered Gamer does a formidable job separating their “Game Score” from their “Morality Score” as can be seen by their review of Hatred

And this is really where the whole problem lies. Once you mix your score with your morals/politics in such a way that the reader can’t tell what you added or subtracted points from, things become murky.

What the system employed by CCG allows the reader to do is actually form their own opinions based on their own moral compass about a game. Because no piece art has ever only had one way to be interpreted as.

Take for example the movie Irréversible it has a 7.4 rating on IMDB but the moral interpretations people have of the movie are about as far apart as it gets.

While people may have a general idea of what is meant by “good graphics”, a rape scene (for example) is much more polarizing. And while some people would like to make an argument that violent media has negative effects on society the data is at best inconclusive and at worst points to the opposite effect.

Why does it matter though?

The reason I care about this whole topic however has to do with Metacritic. Their simply takes the numbers that were given by an outlet and generates a score based on that. And while we could have a long talk about why Metacritic is also bad in many ways, fact is that the video game industry does care about Metacritic quotas.

I had initially linked to a talk by Liana K she gave during the “IGDA Toronto Rant and Rave Night 2014”. She told me that this was all said in jest. I’ll happily correct that mistake

For posterity here’s the original video I had linked

The takeaway is that independent of what you may think about Polygon, their reviews do matter to the video game industry. By grading video games based on their moral compass reviewers are effectively politicizing video games, while creators such as Jane Jensen just want to create the art and live out their fantasies.

Ironically people accuse #GamerGate of bullying women out of the industry, but I can tell you one thing for sure. If you want to make a woman uncomfortable one way of doing so is to tell her that she makes deeply misogynistic video games.