Good Is The New Bad

So there have been some minor uproars over game review scores lately that have gotten enough attention to rise above the usual internet static. First was Hydrophobia's developer pitching a fit over it receiving some less than glowing evaluations. Then the developer of the new Castlevania: Lords of Shadow title took issue with IGN delivering it a score of 7.5, which equates to "good" on their rating scale.

Since I personally reviewed one of these games, and I'm tentatively slated to review the other, it got me thinking about review scores in general as a sliding scale. It seems as of late, things have gone a bit awry.

Remember when you were in elementary school and the class was divided up by groups according to their reading skill? Each group had a specific color to go along with their workbooks. Children in the "Advanced" group set the gold-standard, readers in the "Average" group were told that they were "good", but were secretly spurned and tracked for being sub-par readers which translated to "good enough". Kids in the "Remedial" group had parents that were related to one another.

The video game industry appears to have reached a point where it is so cut-throat and competitive, that less than stellar review scores for games now equate to a title being forgettable or outright bad. This is only reinforced by the above incidents where developers speak out against a score that is considered in the upper echelon of the sites review scale, but not the very top.

It would be easy to just blame developers and PR people for "not delivering on promises", but the gaming journalism industry is largely at fault too. We (yes I'm lumping myself in there) sit and hype games based on pure speculation, creating a buzz months before there is even a tangible product to evaluate. This in turn creates a readership with very high expectations. I'm not telling anyone they should have to settle. Don't ever settle. Stay hungry, like Twisted Sister told you to. However, I think this behavior from us actually creates an almost self-destructive environment.

In a world where only the top scores mean something is worthwhile, a few docked points garner a title being widely ignored, and a low score yielding a possible phone call or email from an angry company, a new precedent is set. Reviewers most likely give much higher scores simply because their frame of reference is skewed, or because they don't want to deal with the backlash from the occasional low score. So then what's even the point of having numbers below 4 or 8 on the scale at all?

I think as the holiday game season comes upon us we will only see more of this as the top titles compete among cash strapped consumers. There are always winners and losers in a competitive industry, but a combination of the journalist hype machine, and impertinent developers reacting to imperfect scores for their works are creating a culture where we can't separate "median" from "mediocre".