What’s in a Review?
Reviews can be a challenging thing to do. Going into an product totally unbiased and trying to best provide your experience and how it came off to you. It can be downright difficult at times. Sometimes we simply judge an item by looking at it coming up with our own preconception that it’s lame, just has to suck or some other insult but are later pleasantly surprised if we see people enjoying it and finally get a taste of it ourselves. But how does one rate a review?
Well while we normally don’t mention video games here unless they’re RPG-related, Destructoid has an interesting article on having scores in reviews. It’s a very good article on why they take the 1 – 10 scoring method rather then some other numerical system. Here at the Hub we decided to forgo any numerical values to our reviews. We do this for a specific reason that throwing out numbers based on our opinion is rather trivial. How do you evaluate your feelings? Sure, at the hospital they ask you if you feel a 1 – 10 on the pain rating and it’s just plain hard to assign a number to that. When I give that number I feel it cheapens me. Is it really a five? Is it maybe a seven? Can I really express to the doctor across from me by a number for how uncomfortable I feel. The same goes for reviews. I like to shoot straight from the hip. I don’t like to pussyfoot around if something bothers me, even if it’s a trivial thing. Most importantly I want to express it with words.
I find that reviews need to avoid scoring. Often, as the Destructoid article mentions, some people tend to skip to the number. “Oh, it’s a 3 on this numerical system they are using, so it must be bad,” a reader might say. Then they miss out on a really good product without really going in depth. A review is a writer’s singular opinion which you may or may not agree on. It’s where the writer stands on a product and he hopefully adequately described his impressions as best he could so people can look at it, take the information they need and see if it might be a product they should look into. Mind you, the writer’s review is not the definite and final voice on whether a product is really worth it. Getting many opinions and voices from multiple sources is the best route to truly formulating a buy or skip opinion.
A comment by one of the Destructoid staff even mentioned that a numerical score is a must, that if you cannot stamp a number down then you cannot make a proper stand. I think that if you push in that direction then you’re just appeasing people who don’t really want to bother finding out more about a product by reading your review. We have a format much like Kotaku (and other Gawker sites) for our reviews where we talk about the product and then sum up our likes and dislikes. I find this format is much more efficient. You fully express yourself and highlight some of your opinions throughout the review so at least people who want to read the abbreviated version come out with an opinion of at least some substance.
You might be thinking: “Well, video game reviews aren’t the same as RPG book reviews!” Well, let’s look at two big sites. We have EN World and then we have RPG.net. Both have reviews provided by the community and staff, and both have taken a 1 – 5 rating approach. Personally, if I were to do numerical scores I would do the 1 – 10 approach. 1 – 5, or in the case of EN World where they use stars, cannot truly define what a product’s value is. You essentially are shoe horned into a vague value. If it’s average, you give a 2 1/2? If it’s slightly below average you do what? 1 1/2? There is simply too much of a fine line between those numbers that just don’t describe what words can convey easily.
The point of all this is to get multiple sources and that the numbers don’t matter. What matters is the experience. We don’t judge our lives by numbers, we describe them by feelings / emotions / thoughts. I profess to just be an average Joe doing reviews for fun and not a professional journalist or writer with a degree. What are your thoughts on how sites review products? Like the numbers system? Like plain old text? Let us know.
