Cameron "The GHost"
Editorial, Rant Monday, March 9th 2009

5 Comments

Whenever the fanboys come out in force -usually in response to a major console specific release- we see the same old bits of malformed logic lovingly trotted out under various guises and grammatical abuses. But of all the ridiculous shit that gets tossed around, one argument in particular really gets on my man tits every time I see it: the attempt to claim that one game is “objectively” better than another because it has a higher Metacritic score.

Excuse me for a second. I have to go fume for a bit just thinking about the sheer amount of idiocy involved.

For those not in the know, here’s a quick briefing. Metacritic is a site that aggregates reviews for games, music, movies, TV and DVDs from many different websites (the sites must register with Metacritic to have their reviews added). This not only provides a single depository of major reviews for a given product, but also an overall “Metascore”. That score is a weighted average of all the submitted reviews which attempts to give reviews from more popular and “trustworthy” publications a greater say. Clearly this is a godsend for all of fanboykind. Finally there is a way to eliminate all of that dirty, filthy BIAS from reviews. Not to mention that it will also fix all of those reviews from rich corporate sites that are paid off by Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft/NAMBLA to give their games better scores!

Of course that conclusion is totally bogus. The vast majority of fanboys couldn’t properly articulate exactly why they are quoting a metascore, so I’ll run down the logic of the argument for them real quick. The basic idea is that if you get enough measurements of something you can eliminate error in the collected data because, although an individual measurement may not be accurate, the average of many measurements will eventually point us to the “true” value. So what happens is that this basic, and sound, principle is then applied to the metascore; hence why it’s used to argue that Halo 3 is “objectively worse” than Killzone 2, because the “true” score for one is higher than the other.

It doesn’t take a scientist, statistician or even a particularly insightful monkey to realize that the above logic is about as sturdy as a bridge made out of marshmallows and caramel (spanning a hot chocolate river of course). The reason is that the premise behind using multiple measures is that an individual measure is random. Are reviews random? Hell no! They are subjective assessments of a product. The score from one can’t be directly compared to another to come up with some new value between the two of them that is somehow more “true” than either score alone. I mean, how insane does that sound when you actually stop and think about it? Reviews will always be subject to the context in which they are written. Does the reviewer have experience with the genre? Is he/ she reviewing “from the gut” (how the game makes him/her feel) or is he/she trying to review from a more distant standpoint (say giving a game that he/she hated a favorable review because the reviewer could see why fans of the genre might like it)? You could list different contexts all day (usually referred to by morons as “bias”).

Oh, and there’s also the fact that every individual is different. I may be interested in something like Megaman 9, while someone else may be completely disgusted with it. Does that mean that the game should get a 5/10? At the end of the day it’s a matter of personal preference. Guess at what the average gamer likes to try and legitimize ranking games based on scores all you want, but you’ll never be able to distil an experience down to a meaningful number.

The point is that the whole use of metascores in any argument is ridiculous. It can certainly be useful when separating extremely shitty/broken games from the rest of the pack. But it should never be taken seriously as some kind of “absolute measure”. Ultimately different people like different games for different reasons, and a score, regardless of how “meta” it may be, can’t tell you whether one game is actually better than another. That distinction is up to you to make for yourself.

P.S. Fuck fanboys and the horse they rode in on while yelling at the top of their prepubescent lungs.