The latest Gamers With Jobs tackles the thorny topic of AI in games.
I sincerely hope you enjoy it. I got a lot out of the conversation, and everyone involved is coming into it from a different place, which is helpful and (hopefully) informative.
While the episode tackles AI, which is definitely controversial, I'd love to take an opportunity to discuss review scores.
This is inspired off of a video which dropped from IGN explaining why they frequently give out 7's. It's not a great video (and solicited enough blowback that it was taken down), and I fundamentally disagree with so many of the assumptions, most notably the direct statement that if something isn't covered that it's not worth your time as a player.
An absence of a review is not a review, and to suggest it is is profoundly cruel and disrespectful to the creatives working in the margins. There are incredible artists out there doing tremendous work in obscurity. Especially on the heels of learning that Waypoint is soon to be no more, it's disheartening to see a major outlet be so dismissive.
I think giving creative work a score is not only unhelpful, but destructive to audiences. For starters, it's a left brain way to organize or think about things, and artistic work is inherently right brain. Scores push us to consider creative work as something that has value in the capitalistic sense instead of the actual sense. The question becomes "is this worth your money" and not "how does this resonate for you?" In shifting that fundamental question to being about games as products instead of art, audiences are subtly encouraged to think about games in extractive/capitalistic lenses. This is why games have bloated run times - people start thinking about how many hours of gaming they get per dollar instead of examining the experience of playing the game on its own terms.
It also leads to things like toxic fandoms, both because it works in tandem with capitalism's focus on brand over substance and because it's an ideal tool for trolling. Review bombing and harrassing creatives comes in many forms and for a myriad of awful reasons.
As Tears of the Kingdom is set to release soon, I can't help but think of the weird Zelda/Horizon fan fight and how review scores played into that.
All of these things make audiences worse at media literacy. I probably have a whole book about how media literacy plays into, well, [gestures broadly at society] all of the problems we are facing.
The other problem with scores is that they make for worse criticism too. Especially the topic of the video - the 7 out of 10. That's a score that's all about hedging. Good critical work takes something artistic and it illuminates and lifts it up. 7 out of 10 is like waving a white flag. It says, "I don't have much to say about this. Maybe you'll like it or maybe you won't." If I was forced to use ratings, I would never deploy a 7, the same way people tend to never deploy the 1,2,3,4, or 5.
If something about a game resonates with you, it should be at least an 8. If nothing resonates, then that's a 6.
There is no "average" artistic work. There's stuff that's not fully executed, there's work that isn't fully baked but has a glimmer of something, there's work that swings big and fails to connect, there are things that are modest in ambition but workman-like in execution, there's stuff that sings at moments but doesn't come together, and there's mediocrity that tries to be something more but the artists aren't yet firing on all cylinders. All of these things are common, but none of them are average. And all of these things have an audience for them that would likely deeply connect and another set of people who might just shrug and move on.
A good critic knows how something hit them or didn't, and can speak specifically to their experience navigating a given work in a way that's helpful for audiences and artists alike and do so very much knowing (and hoping) that audiences with other perspectives are out there.