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"Boiling down pages of analysis to a single grade or score or number of pumpkins doesn't help readers, it hurts them, reducing the process of critiquing what is often a living document into black and white terms, when there is often a world of gray left untouched." – Kotaku's justification for eschewing numerical review scores.
This sentiment has become incredibly widespread. Numerical reviews are derided everywhere as sweeping generalizations, simplistic and unfit to convey the impenetrable complexity of the real world. Number-based reviews, video game critics say, are just gamers' way of trying to control, to categorize, to make sense of a complex reality that does not automatically impress itself in their minds as neatly organized.
They are right.
Making sense of reality through cognitive effort is the essence of thought, and is exactly what one does when he abstracts the components of a game into one of the scores it may receive on any given scale. To imply, as these critics do, that this somehow distorts reality is to undercut man's mind at its root and to condemn him to eternal ignorance of all but what is directly in front of his eyes.
The attacks on numerical review scores result directly from an anti-conceptual mentality. This kind of mental framework regards disintegration as the proper method of human "thought," and scorns integration and abstraction in any form. It supposes that since only concretes exist, only individual concretes can be discussed, an obvious non-sequitur.
"Why give a broad statement like 'five out of five,'" they say, "when you can explain that what makes the game great is that it takes 56.3 hours on average to complete on any of its six unlockable difficulties while letting you explore five islands with a combined area of 10.3 square miles as one of 7 different characters wielding any one of 128 possible weapon combinations? Sure, the latter description isn't particularly useful, but at least reality has remained chaste and none have committed the sin of simplification," they chide.
Simplification, however, is the locus of human mental activity, and, further, does not imply a breach of fidelity to reality. When someone says "all men are mortal" or "this game is good," he simplifies, but does not obliterate any content. It is crucial to understand that concepts are defined by an entity's essential attributes, but denote all of its attributes. This distinction is from where all confusion on the subject springs.
Here is a concrete application of this idea to the two sentences already given as examples: "all men are mortal" becomes "rationality-animality can die," and "this game is good" becomes "playable-as-Nik0 Bellic is a value." Such statements are what one gets if he tries to substitute the definition for the entire concept, which is an oversimplification of reality.
However, if one recognizes that those sentences are just abstract condensations of a multitude of data, useful for holding all of that data together in one's mind, then one understands that "all men are mortal" really means that men, including all of their trivial characteristics like fingernails and hair, can die. Likewise, one apprehends that "this game is good" means Grand Theft Auto IV, taken as a whole including every line of code on the game disc, is a value.
Now, apply this to review scores. The argument is that if a reviewer says Portal 2 deserves five stars out of five, then he has simplified and told the player nothing important, because he has left out the concretes that the abstraction "five" subsumes. Of course, this is nonsense, since the score represents the essential value of the game, but implies all of the content from which that value is derived, an examination of which is the sole function of the review itself.
Reviews exists for any who desire to take advantage of them, but my argument here is not predicated on the notion that numbers are okay only so long as they are accompanied by companion texts; I hold that it is valid merely to look at a number and on that basis alone to make one's decision regarding a purchase.
To provide this kind of value, a reviewer has to lay the necessary groundwork. He must explicitly define, consistently apply, and harshly delimit his ratings. A five-star scale, is, I think, best. It is spacious enough to provide the requisite differentiation, but small enough so that those essential differentiators can be retained in a person's mind when comparing review scores.
Many people object that comparing some games to others is like comparing apples to oranges. This is true, but irrelevant. First, if the genres of two games are completely different, then the reader will know which genre, and hence which game, he prefers.
Second, if the reader has no preference between first-person shooters and role-playing games, then it will make no difference to him that they are incomparable in terms of concretes. If he looks and sees that BioShock 2 has received a five while Dragon Age II has been awarded a four, that is sufficient ground on which to make a decision about which to buy.
The whole issue of incommensurable characteristics (i.e., incomparable or mutually exclusive attributes, or values in this context) in video games is an intentional evasion meant to slow one's understanding by throwing another bewildering wrench into the mind's gears. It has no fundamental importance whatever. It is merely an attack that must be dealt with as it arises, unless one knows the attacker is dishonest, as many are, in which case it can be ignored completely.
It does not matter that different genres of video game cannot be compared; numbers tell one the absolute value of individual games, and as long as one knows which type of game he prefers, he is solid. If someone has in his budget the funds to buy only one of two games, one meriting four stars, the other five, and he sees that a score of five indicates "absolutely worth playing," while a score of four suggests "great fun with minor to moderate flaws," then his decision has been expedited based on a wealth of information delivered with minimal communication at lighting-like speed.
Numerical scores provide an incalculable value by presenting in an instant an encapsulation of all the essential factors that go into the decision-making process of whether to buy a game. Without the integration provided by numbered scoring, gamers regress to the animal level, observing and judging only disparate concretes in total isolation, unable to weigh, to compare, to decide among alternatives, to think, to live.
The battle is between those who want to live as animals and those who refuse to live as anything but humans, between those who merely see and those who think about what they see.* A person whose ambition it is to become an animal presses buttons that result in actions on a screen, but a human plays a game.
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*Properly, this should say "between those who see and those who think," and end there, however, I used authorial license to avoid appearing to sanction the analytic-synthetic dichotomy.
It is unnecessary in this context to state that someone is thinking about what he has seen, because there exists no other basis for thought. The word "thought" itself presupposes sight (or one of the other senses), but this has not stopped an army of philosophers from pretending that one can think without having seen.
(Republished from The GameSaver)