In the worlds of school and video game reviewing, a 70% is average, an 80% is passing, and a 50% is failing.
It’s a careful balancing act that journalists have always had to deal with.”Īs many of you wrote in the comments of Part One (capitalized to denote awesomeness), it appears that game reviewers subscribe much more heavily to the educational system of grading than a true 1-10 scale. Maintaining journalistic integrity in such situations is difficult, especially when your community is small or when you personally rely on those contacts for a majority of your journalistic work. By currying favor with PR outlets you’re let in on more exclusive stories, more swag, plugs, and a plethora of perks.
The conflict here comes from the fact that no one wants to alienate their contacts. “There have been times at websites to which I contribute where a game recieved a low score, and we were subsequently contacted by publisher with a statement of their surprise. If you write for a small, up-and-coming website, could you really afford to call the latest Microsoft game a piece of shit if there was the possibility that they might one day share privileged information with you? As Sean Fischer, editor-in-chief of says: This was most likely the story behind Gamespy’s Donkey Konga review, or the fact that Nintendo Power was pressured by corporate to switch from a 1-10 rating system to a 1-5 system simply because it was impossible for any game to get a perfect score.Īnd even when bribes aren’t an issue, the potential problem of a gaming news organization offending a major corporation is. But do keep in mind that bribes are occasionally an issue. The last time I said something like this, it didn’t turn out so well. But we can hypothesize, can’t we? We can hypothesize until our fingers fall off. There’s obviously no way to know for sure - if there was, we would have figured it out by now and the ratings thing would no longer be a problem. So, why do game scores tend to be so overwhelmingly positive? If you have read Part One, then you’re cooler than the douchebags in the first paragraph.
Part Two (aka, this part) tries to get at why reviews are so inflated, and exactly why this is a bad thing. It’s about how all video game scores are ridiculously inflated, and that this is a serious problem.
0 kommentar(er)
