Now you're done with that, I will add my two cents to this too-long-going clusterfuck. And, please, let me disregard the whole public relationships point of view and focus on the players. They are the target, the interested party, the beginning and end of games review. The review's sole purpose is to indicate whether a game is worth being played or not. Even the quality/price threshold must be left out of the review, as it changes from one person to another.
What are game reviews for?
In the previous draft of this post I went into a rant about how much I loved the old Insert Credit reviews and how no site comes close to them. But, in the end, I can answer the question without getting into that sad story: a review is only a way to tell a gamer if a game rocks or not.
And how do we know if we are going to like something? As with everything else, by comparing it to what we know already. This is the role the final score in a review plays. It charts a game against an perfect ideal, which would achieve succesfully everything it tried, while trying to do something interesting in similar terms than the reviewed game. The problem is that, really, nobody knows what this perfect game looks like, as it changes depending on the reviewer, the reader and the game. The decission of whether a game is actually any good or not is based on, first of all, trying to guess what the ideal it is being compared to is. Second, if the reviewer would like that ideal, or has even thought of the same image of perfection. And, then, determining what the score means in all that mess.
What is wrong with this system?
The obvious weak point in all this is the ghostly ideal of a perfect game. What is the point of introducing something like that? The finite punctuation system has been inherited from films, which took it, I guess, from the classic studies evaluation system. So, in its origin, a 10/10 was not an ideal, perfect exam; it was the result of correctly answering all questions. Either you did or you didn't.
Films critics, on the other hand, found themselves in the same situation video-games are right now. But they had an advantadge: when movies started being rated, the medium was already mature, and although the ideal movie was still nowhere to be seen, they had enough samples of widely accepted great films to establish a canon. This is the reason why great divergences are not so common, and usually only seen on flicks which try to tread new grounds: they fall out of charted territory, and cannot be properly judged until the standard includes them.
Of course, there are personal differences, but the variation is slight enough to be acceptable and desirable.
Enter video-games, a relatively young medium in which the games accepted as ground setting have so very little in common with the current state of affairs that they are useless as canon setters. Super Mario, Gabriel Knight, Monkey Island, Tetris, Alone in the Dark or Space Invaders can only be seen as primitive incarnations of modern games: the language they speak lacks half of the modern alphabet. Only by limiting the scope of a new game can you face a classic in equal terms. That's what Nintendo keeps doing with Mario, and that's why it is so successful: there are few pieces to play with, and most can be placed in their right position without error, because a good solution is already known.
So, with no beacons to look at for guidance, what is our 10/10 for a modern gender bender? Can Heavy Rain be compared to games from 15 years ago? Apart from Riven and Blade Runner (1997), I cannot think of a game which even attempted to do what Heavy Rain does. Most just didn't even think of games in the same sense. And every new game finds itself in the same situation: nothing compares to it, safe for the most current games.
So how can we create a common reference ground?
As I see it, the solution is so easy that I don't understand why it is not more widespread: if there is no common ground, don't compare yourself against something you don't know, but against what you know is similar. Basically, compare current games against current games.
How good is Dragon Age? Almost as good as Knights of the Old Republic, a little better than Neverwinter Nights, way above Icewind Dale and plays in a bigger league than Gothic and Oblivion. At the same time, it is considerably inferior to Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect, and shades in comparison to Fallout and Planescape: Torment.
After reading that, if you know two words about role playing games, you know exactly how much you can trust my judgement (I have not played a couple of thos games; guess which!) and whether you'll like the game or not. And the result is probably more accurate than 7/10, unless you checked the score I'd given to each similar game I mentioned.
Still, reading the review is key to understanding the reviewer's point: what does KotoR do that Dragon Age does not? Why was Dragon Age unable to surpass much older games like Fallout or Baldur's Gate? That's important information, of course, but the graphic sets a much more expressive environment than a 7/10 will ever do.
This is, then, my proposal: replace the score system with a simple chart explaining how the game compares to related ones, be it those developed by the same studio, recent hits in the genre, some classics and games not exactly similar, but somehow familiar.
GameRankings will not be happy with it, needless to say, nor the big companies, because they prefer the ease of just looking at a number to make decissions. But the number means nothing. It is void of any relevance, apart from which it is given by others. And that relevance is, in the end, so relative that its face value approaches 0 as it is indiscriminately thrown around.
Therefore, when I start publishing reviews around here (soon), I'll work with this system, based on the relationships database I am creating. And once the system is automated, it will even be possible to look for a specific game ranking, if I have included them, by selecting it from a list.
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