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...Although I'll be willing to take a small amount of blame for the situation.

I had thought we might have discussed the issue of "scoring games like grading school work" in more depth (and maybe we had, but those links are what Google turns up).



I had said before that it's important to have a scoring scale put the most resolution where it's most needed. We can dig into that a little bit.

If you're told not to buy a game, that's pretty much all you need to know. There might be some situations where you'd doubt a recommendation to not buy a game -- say, if it's part of a series you like, or if you're just collecting games for the system that game is on anyway -- and maybe you'd like to know how strong the recommendation to stay away is. Okay, so maybe there's some reason to have degrees of badness represented in scoring scale. And some people might even be interested in playing the absolute very worst games out of a morbid sense of curiosity (though, in my opinion, once you're confronted with the very worst, you realize you never need to confront anything like it again)

So, we could justify points like

0 - Of interest only to those who want to see the very worst
1 - Stay away for any reason
2 - Might be acceptible if your standards are extremely low.

Do we need 7 or 8 points on a 10 or so point scale to precisely delinate just how bad a game is? I think the answer has to be "no".

What about recommendations?

There are all kinds of degrees to which a game can be good.

There are games you don't particularly care for, but you might not mind having them in your collection (if you are a collector), or adding them to your list of completed games. It's more experience with gaming, but nothing else. (I wouldn't call a game like this "good", but it is some kind of degree)

A game might be good for when you have nothing else going on, so you're bored, but it's nothing that'll change your life. There are dozens of other games (or other activities, like watching a comedy movie) that you could have spent the evening with instead, and they would have been just as good, but that particular game was the one you experienced, and it was okay. If someone else expressed an interest in playing that game, you wouldn't try to turn them off of it. If you had money to burn when you bought it, you wouldn't have regretted the purchase. If you had to be more choosey, you would have (or would have wanted to have) held out for something better.

Then there are games you actively like. It might not be great, but if a friend expresses an interest in playing a game of that particular type, you might recommend that game. You might have a few fond memories of the game after you've finished it. When you play other games like it, you'll compare those games to this one, and they generally won't quite measure up.

Then there are games you really get into. You might try to pursuade friends into playing that game EVEN IF they have no interest in that type of game. When you play it, you're completely wrapped up in it. There are moments when playing it is even emotional.

Then beyond that are games that you think are perfect. They might connect with you on a personal level. You judge other games by that game's standards. You think about it when you're done playing it. If you could only buy or play one game a year, and it was that one -- it would leave you satisfied. It might have finally made you realize, beyond any messageboard clatter, or claptrap posted on Ebert's site, that videogames really can rise to the level of art -- and arguments be damned, because you've just experienced it. You think EVERYONE should play this game -- and that's no an unreasonable demand to make, because there aren't many games that you feel that for. Playing that game is essential to understanding you as a gamer, and may even be essential to understanding games as a whole.


Anyway, there are more, and more important, degrees to how GOOD a game is than how BAD a game is.


Unfortunately, even the argument I presented here could be more comprehensive, detailed, sophisticated, careful, and even put forth more articulately.

I suppose one of my problems is, I had always hoped that when I put forth arguments like this, that would be the FIRST step in formulating a deep philosophy on the aesthetics of games. Then, those proposals would be challenged, debated, altered, and further developed, and they'd become stronger and stronger.

However, they're not really getting any serious challenge, so I suppose it's up to myself to challenge them.

I'm sure we've talked various times here about problems with the media's scoring of games and having 7 be average -- in fact, I'm pretty sure I once had a thread in reviews just called "7/10", but I think it was lost in the ezApocalypse.

But one thing we mentioned a few weeks ago is that considering a 7/10 be a negative score is a scoring system for cowards because it allows equivocation. It's a way of saying something is good and bad at the same time, so you don't have to take a stand. Readers won't even KNOW if a 7/10 is meant to mean good or bad, because it's used so often to mean either one.

Hell, that's illustrated in this very topic.

Devil May Cry 2 got a 72. Is that a good score, or a "D" score?

If it's a D score, then that would mean Hulk's 85% is a "C" and Hit and Run is also a "D", meaning that they're not well recieved at all.

Which is it supposed to be? If you think those games suck, you're supposed to think all is well in the world because they didn't get scores of 93+. If you like them, you're supposed to take comfort in knowing they scored well above a 1%. Either way, no one gets offended.