I Am Not A Number

It seems to be a standard that games are to be reviewed with a score. How can you assign a number to an experience? This is standard for every kind of experience, though. We have means to review everything. Restaurants, skydiving schools, car dealerships, car washes, convenience stores. We can put in our two cents and slap a number on to whatever it was that we just did. Why is this? Why have a score? I think that it's all well and good to voice your opinion and describe your experience with something, but why do we always have to have a number to go along with it. When I see some kind of customer review, I never read it. I just glance at the rating, and make my decision based around that.

I know that my writing style is different from most other writers in the video game business, if you can call me part of that world, but I was recently looking up some freelance writing gigs and some of them gave a description of how they go about reviews. They required a scoring system. One number out of five, another number out of ten, pick a number between one and one hundred and you've got yourself a review. Sure, this number might spark an interest in reading the article, but the general consumer will only take a look at the number.

Adam Sessler, one of my heroes, would always go on about how he disapproved of the scoring system. The man is a writer, and he wants to talk about what he had experienced. At the same time, the man was also famous for the scoring system because he was on the most watched video game television show in the world. His writing style had evolved from the standard compartmentalized version of reviews to something more engaging and descriptive. I try to match that quality of writing whenever I decide to write a review, but I still fall into those standards of writing.

A basic review consists of breaking down and prioritizing the different parts of a game. Gameplay, then graphics, then story, then sound, then whatever. The fact is, that none of this does the game any justice. You can't judge a game by going of one part of it. The game has all of those elements put together for your experience of playing the game. Movie reviewers don't really seem to criticize movies by taking them apart one bit at a time, they discuss the movie as a whole. What stuck out to them, and what didn't quite grab them. I'm generalizing here, but game reviews have a very basic and sterile approach to how they analyze games. It really isn't fair to the reader, game developer, or the game itself.

I can't separate Halo's gameplay from it's soundtrack, nor can I separate Jet Grind Radio's graphics from its story. These things go in tandem, and they come at the player all at once. There is no need to break down each element. I think that we need to do away with this kind of review. Because a number isn't going to capture my exact experience.