"Playing with fire"? In reviewing a piece of entertainment? Really?
Maybe game developers who don't want their bonuses riding on the fickle whims of critics, should find themselves another line of work other than *producing entertainment* the alleged purpose of which is to *entertain* people. If simply telling people that you were, say, only 20% entertained, is to 'play with fire' then somebody has got their heads screwed on all backwards in the entertainment biz. I recommend they go play in the sandbox and remember what fun is like, and recall that people prefer to have it than not have it.
Incredible man, thanks for letting me know.
This is something I've been saying whenever it came up, so now I have that to add to my rant.
It's not about maturity level at all, in fact, it is more mature to let mistakes go for the sake of achieving greater output than it is to obsess over every little detail and let your post count sink. Pointless obsession over detail is actually not a very 'mature' viewpoint at all.
A more useful way to think about it is orality vs. literacy. Typically, people would write quite formally, but speak quite informally, and nobody would ever correct the way people speak; it's considered rude. That's because speech is an ephemeral medium that it's inefficient to try to correct. In a sense, much online writing is closer to ephemeral than 'fixed', and depending on the medium or the frequency of output required to cover the subject matter, it may well be way too inefficient to try to correct a blog the way you would, say, a book.
I'm sure you picketed your principal in high school saying, "You can't work my Chemistry grade into my GPA because Mr. Cameron is a tougher grader than all the rest of my teachers! It's not fair!" My math teacher gives out A's like candy, but my Spanish teacher only gave out 2 of them. How is Stanford going to understand that?
"I care about what they have to say about ames criticism as I do about garrison Keillor commenting on the current state of the US Black Metal scene."
I love you so much for this. And will be everything I hope to hear the next time my wife turns on Prairie Home Companion.
I wondered if anyone thought it would come across that way. But that wasn't my intention. As per the name of the image -- go ahead and hover your mouse over it -- the reason for the Pauline Kael picture is because she should be the model for how we write critically about entertainment.
Like all teachers in school use the full scale. Some do, some don't. But you can't make that argument to colleges.
Mr. Gaffer, yes, it was my decision. I have never asked to NOT be included on an aggregate. On the contrary, I'm grateful that I'm included. After all, I consider this my career. I wrote more about that decision here:
http://www.quartertothree.com/...
But in a nutshell, part of what I want to do with Quarter to Three after years of freelance reviewing -- which involves dealing with many different ratings systems, many of which make little sense to me -- is using this site as a place for my own reviews, written and scored the way I feel is best.
I care about typos and especially errors of grammar. As a writer, I am EXTREMELY grateful when people point them out and Mercanis is the bee's knees for how often he does it. Seriously, I love that. PLEASE continue to do so.
Thanks for the clarification. I imagine there are a lot of benefits and I think there is no reason you should not be included. I don't want to sound like a cheerleader but you have one of the most distinct voices in gaming criticism today and you offer a great counter-point to some of the more paint by numbers work that some other writers are guilty of sometimes.
Doesn't surprise me that asinine drivel like this would come out of Kotaku.
I was a big detractor of Kotaku, too, until pretty recently. Maybe do a brief survey of anything on Kotaku from the past year or so. You might be surprised.
What does it mean to say that you were 20% entertained, Paul? Exactly what information do you think you are presenting to anyone who sees that number?
fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck you
I don't think the word "aberrant" was a problem. Problematic was that that sentence followed this one: "Some guy who wants to make a name for himself can absolutely screw the numbers."
How am I disagreeing? He says numbers mean different things on different sites, and that's why I pay little attention to em. Read the review and you'll know what the reviewer thought of the game.
If scores were properly ranged I'd pay attention. Edge's scores are, but what they say about a game is far more telling than the number they assign it. Likewise Yatzee and Kotaku's reviews. No score.
The point here seems to be that scoring systems aren't used properly, and I'm saying yeah, that's why I don't read em.
Tom, I don't think your position here is very consistent. If you really believe aggregate scores like Metacritic are valuable, then you should realize that what you mean by 3 stars is very different from what most critics mean by 60%, so Metacritic is not actually reflecting your opinion of the game relative to that of other reviewers.
In practice, you seem to be either ignoring Metacritic when you score a game (as I think you should), or you're just registering a protest vote, in the hopes of getting other reviewers to use the whole scale
To me, finding good reviewers and getting to know how they personally respond to games and express themselves in words and scores is more valuable than an aggregate like Metacritic, so I'd prefer reviewers focus on communicating with their readers and ignore Metacritic entirely. Which is what I think you do in practice, contrary to what you seem to be saying here.
Meh, i think i agree with what you're saying. But mathematically doesn't make sense...you bring down the average disproportionately. If you want to be on Metacritic, maybe you should have to pick a number between 0-100 so at least everyone's using the same scale? with a rating system from 0-5, each star represents 20 points. Because you have nothing in between, it screws up the average because you were "iffy" about whether you "liked it" or "really liked it" (like coldstone's " love it" or "gotta have it" haha.)
