Yesterday I posted my recent article about Metacritic, the entertainment scoring Web site. It’s just so interesting how it very quickly evolved into such an important metric for the video game industry, far more so than it has for movies and music.
A major reason for that has to be that the game review business has no equivalent to a Roger Ebert. There’s no single authoritative name — or handful of names — that people turn to when they want to see how a game rates.
This is due to the nature of the medium. It’s possible for one guy, be he Roger Ebert or Gene Shalit or whoever, to watch several movies a week and then tape a half hour show or write a couple thousand words on them. A movie is watched in two hours yet many games can take 20 hours or more to complete. That makes it tough to comprehensively review even just one game a week, whereas you could (theoretically) review 10 movies in that time.
Also, a movie reviewer isn’t as beholden to the subject matter of the movie to render a competent opinion. Ebert can review “The Natural”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “300″ and “The Fast and the Furious” and the same critical techniques generally apply. It would be weird if Ebert was known as the “war movie reviewer” while Leonard Maltin was the “sports movie guy” and Gene Shalit was the “comedy movie guy”.
But you kind of have to have that specialization that with games. Yes, there’s always the standard of “Is this fun?” but you can’t take what makes a good first-person shooter and use that to judge a role-playing game, or judge a driving title based on mechanics found in a football simulation. The experiences are just too different. In that way, video games seem more like real-world sports where commentators focus narrowly on baseball or football but rarely are able to have encyclopedic knowledge of every sport. Game reviewers definitely gravitate towards their couple of favorite genres in a way movie reviewers don’t.
The sheer number of gamesreleased, and the variety of platforms, also comes into play. An Xbox 360 experience is going to be different from a Wii experience, which is in turn different from a PSP experience. It’s as if Ebert not only had to review movies but also TV shows and comic books.
I think that naturally led to gaming sites and magazinestaking the role that individual reviewers have played in the movie industry. Readers end up feeling that GameSpy, or GameSpot, or EGM, or whatever, generally has reviews that match most closely with their experiences. Yes, some of the more devoted readers may latch on to individual reviewers. For instance, GameSpy’s Sal “Sluggo” Accardo is one of the top “Guitar Hero” players in the world and he used to be a professional musician. Therefore, I always seek out his reviews on music-themed games. But in general you say, “Oh, this game got 4 stars from GameSpy“.
A final thought is simply that it somehow became an established part of game reviewing to use a fine-grained scale such as 10 points, 20 points or even 100 points. That compares to the 4- or 5-star scales, or letter grades assigned by most movie reviewers. I’m not sure how that evolved, but I’m guessing it might be an outgrowth of gamers’ tendency to break down criticism of titles into categories such as “graphics”, “sound”, “story”, “multiplayer”, etc and then adding up the various sub-scores to reach a final number.
In the end, the urge for the quick take from an authoritative source is still present and powerful. Sometimes you just want a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” take on a movie without delving into details of the cinematography or whatever. It can be the same for games, and Metacritic steps into that role with a nutshell number that delivers that instant gratification.
