Edge's numbers
Posted on June 10, 2003 @ 16:35 in Games
I've checked out a whole lot of games and gaming magazines, but Edge is the only one I've found that discusses games and gaming in an intelligent and mature way. They, for example, made the issue that featured the review of DOA: Xtreme Beach Volleyball the "girl" issue, discussing the position of girl gamers vis-a-vis the games industry in several multi-page editorials. Xbox Nation needs an honorable mention here, because it's a pretty cool magazine that targets slightly older gamers and doesn't just dribble testosteron for teenage fanboys.
Edge is an English publication and it may be hard to find, but if you can, grab a copy of the last issue. You can't really miss it: it's a silvery grey with bright orange lettering and the Half-Life 2 lambda is pretty obvious. In this issue Edge tackles the thorny issue of how games are rated, numerically, in gaming publications. In two nicely complementary editorials Edge discusses the workings of public relations in the gaming industry and the process of reviewing and rating games. In this second editorial six reviews of the same game, by six reviewers, are presented side by side. The score runs from 4 to 7 out of 10. A significant variation that can have serious impact on games. The editorial then discusses how there is no such thing as a definitive review, an unbiased review, or a 'correct' score. Reviews, according to Edge, in the end depend in large part on the reviewer's critical opinion of the game and the magazine's readership, whose collective likes and dislikes are partly embodied and partly shaped by the reviewers. To make its point, Edge has moved the scores for all the games to a separate section, leaving a question mark under each review, where you'd normally find the game's rating.
At first I thought this was a great idea, something that might be worth continuing -- you too can play the guess-the-score game! After reading through the reviews though, I'm not so sure anymore. Even though I can look up the actual score for the game on another page, I find the reviews somehow lacking. Maybe I'm not the average reader, but I tend to read every word of a review. After reading I have a fairly decent feel for what the reviewers likes and dislikes about the game and what I myself might like and dislike about the game -- which might be different from what the reviewer is saying. So, then I actually want to know how the reviewer rates the "good things" about the game. I think scores are not so much made up by subtracting the bad from the good, but by evaluating how much you like the good and how much the bad hampers you from enjoying the good. At least, that's how I tend to grade student papers. So if there is no final score for the game, I feel I can't really judge how much the reviewer's liked the things s/he liked about the game. S/he might have liked them enough to give an 8 out of 10, or maybe just enough for a 5 out of 10, and I'd like to know.
Or maybe that's just the way of reading that I've grown accustomed to. The more I re-read the concluding paragraphs, the more I'm starting to think words might be enough to tell me what I need to know about the game, including whether I would want to buy it or not. I think I can read differently, but gathering enough information from the short, half-page, reviews is difficult and I think that if you really want to leave the scores out altogether, those will need to be longer.
So even though I had some initial problems of getting to grips with the slightly unusual controls, the included manual more than makes up for it, and this issue of Edge is a great read (again) and a thoughtprovoking experiment. Rating: 9 out of 10.
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