Do you think IGN's 7/10 myth is hyperbole

My job is working with a new company for employee feedback surveys, and their scale is “1-6 unsatisfied, 7-8 fairly satisfied, 9-satisfied, 10-very satisfied” with the expectation that you should be giving everything 10s unless you’re some kind of monster. The first thing I thought of was IGN. The second was fuck this shit.

(Oh, and handy tip for anyone who isn’t already aware - they always say your answers are anonymous, and that’s always 100% bullshit)

@nocall: 10 point scales where the expectation for "basic competence" is a 10 are flat out stupid.

It would be better in that case to have a 3 or 4 point scale like:

3-Stars: Meets expectations.

2-Stars: Needs improvement

1-Star: Poor performance

0-Star: Unacceptable

I prefer to call it: a number that would not burn any bridge even though the reviewer was bored out of their mind.

If you have a scale of 1-10 and you have more or less openly admitted that the lowest score you will give is 5, then half of the scale does not exist and your scale might as well be 1-6. There are some really bad games out there in the indie space, but we may as well just pretend that those don't exist and nobody really cares if a terrible game is a 2 or 3 out of 10. And if you are a developer of a game that gets the lowest score on IGN, you can still take some pride in the fact that your game was at least good enough to be reviewed.

I think the 5-star scale also has some problems though because on that it is too easy to slap 4 stars on any decent game and call it a day, and then your score is basically meaningless because that's the score that every game gets.

@apewins: The 10 point scale is an analog to the 100 point scale you get in school. Most people never go below 60 on that either.

The thing is that IGN does use the 1 or 2 on occasion when a game is really broken. They also don't give many 10s. A scale where the extremes are rarely used is, in fact, pretty useful, and leaving a little more room at the bottom end kind of makes sense if you are focusing more on the bigger and better games and not just rating everything.

I don't necessarily love IGN's reviews or find them super relevant to me but I've never really understood all the complaints about the scores. Most big games are decent but not spectacular. If you had all these granular ratings between games that are now 7s you'd just end up with a less useful scale because it would imply there are big differences between games that are pretty similar in quality.

I think the only game review scale I found useful was GB's version of the 5 star scale from back in the day when they did tons of reviews. Of course, the way the GB system worked often meant that you'd need to read the review to understand the score, and that doesn't fly anymore since people just want to see scores that validate their feelings, not actually read about the game. A 3/5 used to mean either "good but flawed", "good for fans of the genre, probably not for anyone else", or "give it a try if you have time but don't run out to buy it at launch". It was up to you to figure out which one from reading the review.

Review scales with more granularity to how the score is made often end up being less useful anyway. For example, Gerstmann used to talk about how the early 00s Gamespot review system was flawed. Because they had to use a spreadsheet and punch in values for sound, graphics, etc., it meant that a competently made but extremely boring or otherwise unappealing game would be guaranteed at lowest like a 6.8 or more likely some kind of 7 or low 8. A game like Concord would probably have got like a 7.5 on the old Gamespot scale, for example. This is the trap that modern Gamespot and IGN also have fallen into. If you try to look at games and score it as a sum of components, most games are going to get like a 7 now because publishers won't let games completely lacking in the basics be released anymore. It takes something completely rotten being released for them to go below that threshold so if you see a low score from them, it usually means something.

With how tight budgets are in games media, nobody is gonna front the fee to have their own Alex Navarro to review the garbage games anymore. Those games are instead going to remain unreviewed.

@ben_h: Scores are useful if you are spoiler averse. I don't read reviews to validate my opinions but I do read reviews after I play games to see what other people thought. I've been burned too often with reviews that think that it's fine to spoil anything up until the last 20% of the game, often by saying things like "the story is redeemed with the incredible twist that "Mario" was actually Princess Peach the whole time, and that surprise is one of the best parts of the game."

Thanks.

The old GB scale was pretty good though.

I find your statement that we need to create more AI clones of Alex Navarro so every publication can have one to be intriguing but I'm not sure that Alex is fully on board. Oh well. Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. AI-X Navarro creation algorithm unleashed.

All I will say is that most games and media in general are middle of the road. Good enough, but not great. 7/10 is supposed to mean good, while 6/10 is supposed to mean mediocre, meaning more of the same. A 7 is actually a good score for a game, but because you have angry fanboys who go crazy for their favorite franchise, they make a big deal over nothing. Speaking of Gertsmann, I remember the outrage he got when he gave Twilight Princess an 8.8 out of 10. A very good score, but because it wasn't a 10, and Nintendo fanboys went crazy. The same with Mario Sunshine, when he gave it an 8.

The important thing people are missing is that regardless of the scale that is used, reviews are nothing more than an opinion. It doesn't mean the game is as bad as they claim or as good. I've said this before, but if I listened to the Gamepro review of Xenogears, I would've missed one of the greatest JRPGs of all time. Gamepro pretty much gave the whole game a 3.0 out of 5, when it should've been a 5 out of 5. Sometimes you just have to play the game and see for yourself.

@bigsocrates: Sure sometimes there are big budget games that are disasters and in those cases you have to write about them even though you'd rather not. But in those cases I feel that you could just as easily say that "this shit is so bad that we're not even going to bother with giving it a rating". But also there are marketing realities you have to live with, for example if you want to be featured on Metacritic I suppose you have to give a score because you want to get clicks that way.

As a former educator, 2 things about the 7-10 scale situation jump out at me:

1) Scores are hard to assess without a rubric like @bigsocrates mentioned. Best practices in my day were to provide a rubric as well as an exemplar. "Here are the traits of a 3/5 response, and here's one as an example." Given that there are more "right answers" for good games than there are for epsilon-delta proofs, the exemplar thing doesn't really apply here, but rubrics for sure. I don't know, maybe you do a Call of Duty scale -- Is this a Modern Warfare 2, or is it a Vanguard?

2) 6/10 on a test is a failing grade, or at least right on the line. A full 60% of the grade spectrum is failing! Make no mistake, I loathe the 7-10 scale, but if I were running a site posting mostly consumer-productish reviews for a general audience, I'd have to think long an hard about whether its worth fighting the common perception of what a 6/10 score means to my readership. Not that folks haven't tried. Hell, take even the simple one-word descriptors that come with Gamespot reviews and see how little it does to deter folks who can't seem to grasp what the word "good" means next to that 7.0 score.

It's grumpy gamers being grumpy. That's it. First off, if 7 is decent to good, you would expect that to be a very common score. But putting that aside, it's just not really the case. Go to IGN and look at the recent reviews tab. In the first 10 reviews at this moment (10:00PT on 11/18), there are two 7's. More 8's and 6's, even a 3. The whole "controversy" is just grumpy gamers letting confirmation bias get the best of them.

@judaspete: The crazy part about this arrangement is how much a lot of young very online gamers are quick to dismiss legacy review sites like IGN/Gamespot as either irrelevant or paid off, while hitching their wagon to their personal favourite influencer.

Ignoring the fact that reviewers at major gaming sites typically *do* have the financial independence to give a negative review to a game and it rarely affects their livelihood, while a lot of small or medium-sized audience influencers would rather *not* openly badmouth games and risk that a major publisher stops sending them free/early codes. I’m not against influencers in the gaming news/reviews sphere, but I feel like I’ve witnessed a lot of them suspiciously never having a bad word to say about current releases, especially games they got a free key for or were sponsored to play for an hour or two.

I think it is not the scale that is the major problem but its understanding by viewers/readers. People these days believe that 5-6 game is bad. That is not the case! A Game that scored 5 or 6 is still an okay game and not a failure. Not every game has to be a masterpiece. God, it would boring if that was the case. 7 out of 10 is actually a really good game and it is mind-boggling that someone would just dismiss it and consider it trash. I hate that approach.

Most of the reviews I've written have been in the 6-7 pocket. I view a 5 as having very few notable qualities. A game that barely registers but is, at the very least, not broken. 6's especially feel like games that have their moments but they're not particularly long lasting. Worth a paragraph, rather than a full discussion.

7's garner a lot more talk from me. Games that do more good than bad and can genuinely show good ideas.

That's my internal head-cannon, anyway.