Gamer-at-Arms – To Infinite And Beyond

All this time, I have been reviewing games and other media the wrong way. When we write reviews, we always seem eager to whack some number on the end of it – what we never seem to do is think about what that number actually represents. Recently, I have been doing this a lot; inspired by a comment from a friend of mine in response to our BioShock Infinite review.

He mentioned that he thought that “no game deserved a 10/10 score” because such a score “implied perfection”. I was literally seconds away from launching a tirade of criticism his way before I realised that he might actually be right. The more I thought about it, the more reasons I could think of that made him correct. Firstly, and talking on a purely mathematical basis, 10/10 is one whole. If you take 10 tenths of an object and stick them together you will get exactly one – it needs nothing added, it needs nothing taken away. It is “perfect”.

You might stop me there and say “no, a publication’s review guide will state that 10/10 is not actually a perfect score”. Surely if you have to explicitly excuse 10/10 scores in that manner, it simply reinforces the fact that they imply perfection? Problems also arise when you start to view review scores relative to each other. If you look at Paul’s Dark Souls review for example; he gave it 10/10. Let’s also say for example that Dark Souls II has just been released, and improves on its predecessor in every possible way. The problem now of course is that Paul cannot give Dark Souls II a better score than Dark Souls without either changing the score of the latter, or giving the former a score that’s higher than 10. He has no choice but to give it a paradoxically identical score. Now both games are apparently just as good as each other but, simultaneously, one is also better than the other.

The way you should be looking at review scores, if you aren’t already, is as probabilities – the probability that you will get a particular game.

I’ll be honest and admit at this point that I was going to continue on and explain how I felt we needed to totally overhaul the system with which we score games. It was only in the process of writing this piece that a means of rationalising scores out of ten came to me. While I do still believe that a better system exists – I’ll write about that another time – I still think it’s important that we look at how we consume review scores.

To clarify, it has occurred to me that the way I normally look at a game’s review score is as a direct measure of the quality of the associated game – something that’s probably apparent from my previous points. When you look at scores in that context, my earlier reasoning still holds some weight; scores out of ten really don’t work in any kind of qualitative paradigm.

The way you should be looking at review scores, if you aren’t already, is as probabilities – the probability that you will get a particular game. Ten out of ten becomes the equivalent of a probability of 1 – a certainty; zero out of ten becomes the equivalent of a probability of 0 – an impossibility. When you look at it that way it makes much more sense, because now games can have differing quality and it doesn’t have any contextual bearing on the review score it gets. Even if a game gets a “perfect” score now, it doesn’t imply perfection in the product – it just means you should desperately need to own that game.

In fairness, that is what the scores already say to an extent, but the reality is they’re skewed somewhat because the quality of a game doesn’t always directly correlate to how much you need to own it. Look at Deadly Premonition and Modern Warfare 3 for example – two games that vary wildly in quality, with the latter overshadowing the former from a technical standpoint by quite a substantial margin. And yet many people would still recommend Deadly Premonition in light of Modern Warfare 3 because, despite its technical shortcomings, it’s still a marvellous game in so many other ways. Conversely, Modern Warfare 3 is an extremely polished product, but personally I think it holds about as much worth as a lump of coal in a gold mine; it’s certainly not a 10/10 in my book.