Image source @ Visual China
The text | game Pizza, author | Dante's Ark, edited | Zhang Youfa
On the eve of the Internet age, three USC alumni founded Metacritic in 1999, a comprehensive rating site that covers as much entertainment as possible. Founder Doyle summed up its purpose: "Let consumers know how to best use their time and money." ”
Bringing together multiple media to get an average score, more convincing than a single media score, for a long time, M station ratings played the role of game word of mouth vane, and even some publishers to the game bonus will also be linked to M station ratings. Obsidian Studios producer Chris Avilon has revealed that his team missed out on $1 million in prize money due to one point below the expected target.
One of the features of Station M is to take the "weighted average score", which Doyle said: "The weights in our system are opaque factors, which is our exclusive secret recipe. "Its criteria for selecting media are also opaque, and larger media such as IGN and Eurogamer may be included in the rating list of a game at the same time.
M's long-term competitor GameRankings is more strict on media inclusion and calculates absolute averages, but the site has announced its closure at the end of 2019, and the original domain name redirects directly to M station, and the original team said that it will only "bring more classic game reviews" and no longer provide rating services.
As early as 2015, the well-known media Eurogamer gave up the scoring mechanism of 1-10 points (the sub-station is still retained) and adopted interval ratings such as "recommendation" and "boutique".
It is not difficult to understand why established websites or media seek changes, and the arrival of the mobile Internet and the rise of live broadcasting and video platforms have changed the original media ecology. After the threshold of "self-media" is lowered, the player's voice channels become more and the cost of sound is reduced, and they can express their opinions on a game, and the media reviewers are essentially only "more professional players", and the ratings given cannot avoid subjective colors. Second, by watching live broadcasts and videos, players can also decide whether to buy after a preliminary understanding of the game, and no longer rely on "ratings" and "word of mouth".
Changes in the environment are an inevitable dilemma faced by the old evaluation system, but it seems that it is not feasible to completely hand over the "scoring rights" of a game to the player at this stage.
There are many cases of "bad review bombing", some time ago, the racing game "GT7" was brushed to 1.5/10 on the M station because of microtransactions, long maintenance time and other issues, becoming the lowest score PlayStation game in the history of the station.
The large-scale bad reviews on Steam include "Football Manager" with Chinese and "Neil: Mechanical Age" with a sudden price increase. Some developers recalled to Pizza Jun that because their own games added a hidden plot in which characters may die, the praise rate of several platforms such as Steam and WeGame fell from 90% to 50% in just a few days.
In addition to "deliberate bad reviews", there are also "deliberate praise", that is, in the form of saying the opposite, playing terrier to increase the game score, in 2018, tapTap's "Greedy Blue Moon" was "recruited", the official had to send a "situation handling on malicious evaluation of 5 stars" statement, after removing the redundant rating, the game score dropped from 8.3 points to 1.8 points.
In many cases, "player ratings" are just a way to express emotions and do not represent the quality of game content.
Why is it difficult to unify game ratings
Ideally, there should be some kind of stable evaluation system behind the specific "score", and to discuss how to evaluate a game, it is impossible to avoid the dual attributes of "business" and "art" with the game.
According to Newzoo statistics, the global game market size has reached 180.3 billion US dollars in 2021, and an objective and huge market supports the statement that "games are first and foremost commodities". "In the final analysis, a game is a commodity, and a commodity that meets the needs of consumer groups is qualified and successful." A senior executive of a company whose buyout works have sold 2 million copies told Pizza Jun, "As long as players are willing to continue to invest time and are really willing to pay, it can be said that this is a good game." After all, games are not a necessity like food, clothing, shelter and transportation, but a pastime. Game makers also have to find enough player groups to survive, otherwise it is easy to be high and low. ”
In the logic of consumption, emotional scoring also has a certain rationality. The optimization problems of the game, the network problems and even the incomplete language provided can be explained as consumers exercising their right to evaluate because of the poor user experience.
More extremely, some games offer features other than "content entertainment" compared to other content products. An employee of a large factory confessed to Pizza Jun: "Most people still want to see good content when they watch movies, but the purpose of everyone playing games is different, some people may want to play good games, some people play games not to play games, may want to spend money to enjoy the pleasure of 'abuse', may want to find a place to vent negative emotions ..."
If you don't have to distinguish between "good" and "bad" game content quality, the rating has no meaning. In addition, when it comes to recharge, there will be a gap in the consumption strength of different players, "the game's ARPU (average active user income) is very high, some online game private servers may rely on a few players to raise the entire server, others are robots, then the rating is meaningless." The above-mentioned employees of the big factory said.
However, product attributes are not the whole game. The "Detailed Rules for Game Review scoring" piloted in China last year proposed to score the games submitted for review from five dimensions: concept orientation, original design, production quality, cultural connotation and development degree. From the perspective of industry and player perception, the name of "Ninth Art" has also accompanied the game for many years.
Once in the realm of art, scoring based on appreciation or appreciation requires a certain basis for judging.
"First of all, it is clear that not all games are called art, just as painting is art, and I am not painting." Producer Ya Heng shared with Pizza Jun the 6 judging dimensions he divided into games: commercial achievements; player influence; production level; game artistic value (referring to design related to interaction, system, and gameplay); general artistic value (universal aesthetic experience such as humanities, society, and aesthetics); and authorship.
"In fact, ordinary players are not obliged to do appreciation." He said that the award is the other extreme, which means that the selection must be made according to the purpose of appreciation, "the focus of different awards is different, for example, TGA will pay more attention to the level of production, general artistic value and commercial achievements, and IGF will value the artistic value and authorship of the game." ”
Courtesy of respondents
Although the selection criteria of the awards have little to do with ordinary players, the game does not have a set of judging criteria that are generally recognized by veteran enthusiasts. Media evaluation generally has a picture, system, narrative and other general dimensions, and then according to the performance of each dimension to play a comprehensive score, whether it is accurate or not, the popularity of this discourse system among ordinary players is not high.
Third-party film and television communities such as Douban and IMDB, gathering a group of enthusiasts (the film field is "fan-style audience") is a prerequisite for them to influence the industry. The cognition of "good games" is too scattered and personalized, resulting in the current "crowd review" section of the domestic game community is difficult to have influence.
TapTap, which focuses on mobile games, is an exception, in the early days of its establishment, TapTap used to convey community culture to users in the form of "answering questions before speaking", and the concept of building a website is closer to creating a hardcore player community. However, due to the lightweight nature of the mobile game itself, it is still difficult to see a complete evaluation based on certain criteria, and it is more common to score perceptually.
Digging deeper, this is because of the aphasia of games in the two important areas of academic research and basic education.
Liu Mengfei, a scholar engaged in game research, once said in an interview: "Referring to the brother industry film and television, the relationship between academia and the industry is very healthy, and it is a consensus that there is a threshold for research and evaluation of film and television, and at least there must be a reading volume to output reliable opinions." ”
However, in the current social consensus, players who want to comment on a game do not require "playing a lot of games", and very few colleges and universities will carry out research involving game theory and game reviews.
On the other hand, appreciation needs to be cultivated, and everyone will be recommended in school or at home when they are young, and receive some "excellent works". Even if you don't enter the professional field for a lifetime, people with interests will form a general judgment framework over the years, and have their own vague cognition of the quality of the work, but the game does not have this treatment.
Most players have never intentionally trained their "game literacy", and the entertainment carrier of games cannot form a stable audience rating on any third-party platform.
If you count from "Space War" in 1962, the history of video games to the present is only a full 60 years, and the speed of technical iteration is very fast, and it is normal for it to exist more as a consumer product and not be given more cultural significance. "Rating" is only a tip of the iceberg that exposes the surface of the sea, and if it is to form a solid and widely recognized appreciation and appreciation system below, I am afraid that it will take years to give the game years.