I have been debating if I should add a numerical rating on my reviews. If I did try it out I would keep it simple. I would use a scale of 0-100% to rate how much I enjoyed playing the game.
For a long time I’ve been resistant to rating numbers for a couple reasons.
“I have been playing videogames for decades now, reading about them for decades and have been writing about them for several years now and I have something that I have to get off my chest about game reviews. There is absolutely no good reason to rate a videogame on a linear scale between "Good" and "Bad". Summarizing the value of a game based on letters, numbers or stars is really the exact same thing. There is no decent reason to make a simple chart from good to bad and apply it to how people might enjoy a game.”
“There are so many factors about a game that determine how you can enjoy it. Each team that developed a game might have a completely different goal, different budget, time schedule, hardware requirements and target audience. When reviewing a game you need to consider how successful is the game is in what the developers were trying to do and how audiences might play and enjoy it.”
“There is almost no consensus between gamers and so limiting a game review to a numerical scale that does not take in consideration the specifics of the who and what of the game and it's potential audience. Different people will get different things out of each game. Not every movie, book or album is meant for the exact same audience. To me Katamari Daimacy would be a 9.9, other might hate it and give it a 2.2 and both would be completely valid estimations of the game.”
I read the Stephen Totilo's Game Reviewers Bill or Rights and it is a mostly pretty good.
Pros to using a numerical rating:
Helps Marketers state if a game is good
Promotes the Metacritic ratings malarkey
Short infobox are easy to scan for caffeine laced readers that can’t read any text longer than a Twitter tweet. Oh main I did it again. Try blinking sometime people.
Cons to using a numerical rating:
A Linear polar scale between good and bad does not take into account all the nuances surrounding how people would play and enjoy a game.
Limits games to genre
Not rated on creativity
Does it really help publishers? I mean a bad or lackluster review from one bitter idiot on a keyboard can mess up their precious rating.
Adds fuel to the fire of fan-boy arguments.
So what do you think? Should I add a rating rank on my reviews?
yes. quantifying things are what make us humans. from my perspective, the issues inherit in the linearity of numerical ratings has more to do with deep rooted issues of numbers/quantification then with the fact that it's a rating.
no. numerical ratings are a fun diversion but add no substance to a review. they are like eye candy for readers to contrast. you'll get hella dim comments reacting solely to the number rating.
i dunno, i'm 50-50. whatever that means.