Scores Kill Jobs: Why Game Criticism Needs a Change

In their 68th Podcast, the Gamecritics.com crew talked a lot about writing about games without receiving monetary compensation. This is a somewhat controversial topic, but it’s not the controversy I want to engage with here. One of the statements in that segment on the show was that the quality of game writing doesn’t matter, since most of the readers are only interested in one thing, and that is the score at the bottom of the article.

And that right there is a huge problem with games writing, a huge problem with game criticism. I have my problems with the way games usually are reviewed to begin with, and personally are not a big fan of game scores. This however adds a whole different layer to the whole problem. Game scores kill jobs. They make the job of game writers less lucrative, since quality writing essentially doesn’t matter.

Game scores kill jobs. They make the job of game writers less lucrative, since quality writing essentially doesn’t matter.

Why is that? Because the articles in question, the reviews themselves, matter less to the majority of readers than the score at the end. Are there even other forms of media where criticism can be boiled down to essentially the length of a tweet? What is it about or favorite medium that makes it so susceptible to a kind of criticism that is... basically what, exactly? Bragging rights that my favorite franchise got a percentage point more than yours? What is wrong with this picture?

Sure, movies do have similar shorthands for “is this piece of entertainment worth my while”. Be it stars, thumbs up or what have you. But movie ratings rarely produce the kind of controversy game ratings get. Movie reviews or critiques do something else though—a lot of the actual articles prove “controversial” for the fans sometimes. Does that mean we as gamers just don’t like to read in favor of the instant gratification an end-of-article score provides?

Also, games are usually more complex entities than movies. They take longer to finish. They tend to have more layers—be they narrative, mechanical, technical—than movies do. So how is it, that a game review is not important and only the shorthand? Are gamers the “tl;dr” generation?

This is something—at the risk of sounding like a broken record—that has to change. This has to change across all of gaming’s culture. Sure, reviews have to be enjoyable to read to begin with, so maybe there’s a certain mechanism of a vicious cycle going on here. And I’m not saying that any and all review of critique of a game is worth reading since for one, there are tons of them out there and then a lot of those are poorly written and argued. So is this a chicken-egg problem? Do we gamers have to change in paying more attention to the actual text of an article, or do articles and writers have to improve in quality so that we have something worthwhile to read?

On the writers—and also on the publishers’—side there should be a higher standard sought. Better quality writing, less product review more critique and less trying to be objective scoring emphasized as what game writing is all about. Of course this is a naive view in how I wish the industry of writing about games should be. On the gamers’ end, good writing should be sought after, not confirmation for personal bias. Gamers should care more about what writers say in their articles than about the scores that are slapped onto them.

There are some publications who de-emphasize the final score, giving the actual article a lot more space to breathe. But those are few and far between. Worst offenders are those magazines—in print or online—that deliver a fully fledged scorecard, breaking the final score down further into individual grades for graphics and sound, thereby further de-emphasizing the actual review.

This is something the gaming press needs to get away from, for everybody’s benefit. If the prevalence of scoring games means that game writers will be paid less since the quality of their writing isn’t appreciated by the unwashed masses, then screw gaming scores. Pay them as little attention as possible, and read the actual articles instead. I know, gaming is a time consuming hobby, but seriously. Being the tl;dr generation isn’t a cool thing to be, and if anything it gives gamers in general a bad name when we care so little for the written word that we don’t even have enough attention left to care for those words written in and about our hobby.