Great editorial over at Gamasutra on the topic of the Jeff Gerstmann firing and the supremacy of numerical scores:
But many outlets have failed to stir up any reader interest in the text behind the review, or the overall atmosphere of the mag or website they’re exploring — instead, readers increasingly care exclusively about the score, so they can praise and/or whine about it online. Entire game-media outlets have been, and are defined by, the numerals they publish…instead of, you know, how fun they are to read.
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1 Responses to "It's All About the Numbers"
Nadine says:
Dec 6, 11:34 AMI think that if I’m a less than literate young person who goes to these sites to comment I’m not going to spend 5-10 minutes reading a thoughtful article when I can simply look at the 1-10 score and feel a surge of pride or anger and reflect that with a simple:
“This game is teh shit!”
“This game is awesome, it’s way better than a 6 it’s a 9!”
Such a relative concept as the liking of a certain game is boiled down to such a powerful icon: Numbers (sometimes with decimals!) And then to have those icons absorb all the attention instead of the game…it’s a bit odd. This collective we have going, this “oh this guy gives it an 8 so I’ll play it but I won’t play below 6” is almost scary. Individual thought and feeling is stripped away by the worship of a numerical concept.
Weird.