Overly Positive Thoughts: The Brand New Review Score

Over at Destructoid, there’s a particularly great and meaningful article up by Jim Sterling about how to respond properly to a video game review. If you haven’t read it yet, feel free to go do so prior to coming back around to hear about today’s dose of sunshine. A couple of the tips involved: claim bias, make random comparisons, and attack the reviewer. I was definitely enlightened, and you will be too.

One of the things that Jim touches upon, and what I plan on talking about, is the idea that the review scoring system is broken – in the way that anything above a 9.0 is perfectly fine and anything below it means the entire system is borked out. Completely legitimate folks – as someone who likes to give a perpetual 10 to everything I touch, I have to say – positivity is always consistent (10) while negativity is just so darned subjective (what IS a 5.0 vs. a 6.0 anyway?). It’s certainly not because numbers provide a decent context and a fair scale of bad vs. good on an even keel, now is it?

So I say to ye, review scoring system, it’s time for you to go. But what shall we replace it with? Here are some amazing and insightful ideas I just had. Clearly one of these must be implemented as quickly as possible to ensure the future integrity of games reviews.

Made-up Numbers – Let’s face it, folks, math is hard. All these crazy numbers adding and subtracting and dividing into each other. Who needs that inconvenience when you’re reviewing games? Better to go with numbers you can actually trust, like “eleventy-one”, “fourbajillionzillion”, and “42″. With the randomness of the system assured, one cannot criticize the numbers for being vague because no matter what you score a game, it’s all vague. Equality, people – it’s the stuff of legends.

Fruit – If we’re going to review something and subject ourselves to writing walls of text that will need to deal with the ADD that some people have about the Internet, we might as well make it tasty, right? Fruit’s been around for seemingly forever, and it’s already prominent in cultural colloquialism (apples and oranges are famous by now). Also, can you imagine rating something a “Succulent Strawberry” or a “Passionate Peach”? I’m drooling already. For the negative reviews, you could always go with fruit gone terribly wrong, too. I mean, it’s worked for one site that is totally not subjectively selective at all, right?

…but by personal favorite by far has to be:

Cats - In the great cat vs. dog debate, cats are clearly on top right now. Why? Because dogs haven’t become an internet meme phenomenon that is an endless sausage factory of amateur-Photoshopped and outlined-text images, that’s why. Cats, being the self-thought rulers of the world that they are, are the perfect arbiters for the determination of whether or not a game is good. Nothing says “good” like cat holding sniper rifle or conversely, “bad” like pissed cat in moose costume. The range of cat emotions runs long and wide, so if you can’t understand that a cat has given a meaningful and intelligent review score, it is, perhaps, time to go back to school.

So there you have it – my totally infallible bunch of suggestions to fix gaming review scores. Better take note, because if you don’t, I might just implement the ideas myself and create great, totally non-biased, non-subjective, non-opinionated reviews of my own. Watch out!