So there’s a petition on Change.org demanding that Metacritic stop including scores from gaming megasite IGN.com in its meta-scores. Why?
Because IGN gave the new Doom reboot a score that was … lower than the scores other critics gave it! Thus proving that IGN.com is irredeemably corrupt!
As petition creator Ivan Kovalev explains this logic.
Doom recently got a 7.1 in IGN, severely altering the score that it deserves, All other reviewers give it sterling reviews and has 90% and above score on steam.
Translation: It’s about ethics in you not liking a game as much as I like it!
Advanced warfare received a 9.1 yet being a mediocre game, IGN is paid off by large devs and shouldn’t be use as a legit source of review.
Translation: Any time anyone disagrees with a consensus I also happen to agree with, someone must be paying them off!
How far does your head have to be up your own posterior that you’re unwilling to accept the possibility that someone has a different opinion on a game than you do?
I’m not sure, but given that there are more than 1200 signatures on the petition so far, we can conclude that there are at least that many gamers whose head-up-their-own-posterior score exceeds this threshold.
The comments from petition signers are of course also quite lovely.
The top comment, from a fellow calling himself “Mike Hunt” — get it, get it? — somehow manages to work Anita Sarkeesian into the mix.
IGN is an uninformed, idiotic source paid off by big companies. I rank them at the same level as Feminist Frequency, the aneurysm causing garbage that kills the braincells of any logical being unfortunate enough to stumble upon it’s lie-speckled articles.
Uh, that should be “its lie-speckled articles.”
“IGN is like marrying crackwhore,” explains commenter Lale Gator from Belgrade, Serbia.
You know she isnt the best but still doesnt matter cause she perform everytime you want it from her,but on the downside she always gives you new STD.
Er, that doesn’t even remotely make sense as an opinion about a game site. It doesn’t even make sense as an opinion about a crack addict.
“Ign in cancer to gaming,”declares memes mcghee from Berlin, Israel.
“The don’t rate games probably,” adds Dexter Dorks of Dohah, Qatar.
At this point you may have noticed that I have given up on correcting the grammar and everything else.
“IGNorance should be punished for consecutively selling out,” Paulo Santos of Hollywood, Florida demands.
“People should not be misleaded!” cries Portugal’s Francisco Novais.
“IGN is polluting the gaming community and should be stoped,” Oscar Gerkman of Vingåker, Sweden angrily mutters between bites of lutefisk.
I guess the people have speakened, huh?
Viscaria
There’s really not. I know Gamespot had an issue. Interestingly enough it barely created a blip of outrage compared to somebody doing a few videos about tropes regarding women. Yes, an actual example of real corruption in game journalism was ignored… Imagine that! But that’s not even the actual issue here. This petition is amazingly stupid. ALSO, it shows the problem with Gamergate.
First of all, let’s look at their premise. Because IGN didn’t give the same range as other reviewers they agree with, then IGN is wrong. So to them, the score that a journalist gives SHOULD be altered by pack mentality. That’s so much more honest and non corrupt than changing the score because of money.
Second, it ignores the actual problem. Reviews are opinions. Everybody gets accused of “selling out.” (Some people can’t handle reviewers disagreeing with them, so lash out.) Even numbers or whatever review scale isn’t the issue, simple representations have been used for all kinds of reviews. The real issue is sites like metacritic. It’s trying to combine all reviews. As if each number and representation are scalable. Sooo you get this. Because this one person’s number doesn’t sufficiently follow everybody else, it blows the curve. Blah blah blah.
Rather than go the actual “ethical” path and suggest that metacritic shouldn’t be used by companies because it’s inherently flawed to try to quantify a series of incompatible quality representations, they put pressure on outliers to conform with metacritic, because pressuring critics to give certain reviews is totally ethics in game criticism.
No, there isn’t and never really has been.
The only hard evidence of underhanded corruption in the gaming press has been the Jeff Gerstmann thing, and while that was evidence of a corrupt business, it was also ironically evidence of an ethical reviewer.
It’s just been such a widely-circulated myth that high (and sometimes but far more rarely low) reviews from big sites like IGN (I know they’re a joke to a lot of people, but they’re still one of the most famous video gaming sites) are “paid off” that it’s kinda sunken into the minds of the general community now.
Also, what Tessa and Paradoxical said; people in the gaming community seem to care disproportionately about review scores, and will demand that reviewers they’ve never read change their opinions to conform with everyone else that they already agree with. It’s not enough to have a few people affirm that they chose correctly in liking/not liking a game, they have to have everyone saying that, because otherwise they could be wrong, and if they’re wrong about something like video games, what else could they be wrong about, and then their entire world view comes into question and they need to actually self-reflect for once in their lives.
(Okay, I may be a bit hyperbolic there, but that’s kind of how it seems when actually reading these people.)
Hey David, while I don’t disagree with the content of the post, isn’t it kind of low to make fun of people’s grammar in a language not their own? Unless you yourself have perfect grammar in your second language, that is.
What I want to know from a game reviewer: does the game crash? What type of game is it? How much can I customize my avatar? Are there game-stopping bugs?
And finally, subjectively, if you usually enjoy these types of games, how much did you enjoy playing this one? Did you finish it? Were the quests/companions/story lines compelling and enjoyable?
I don’t see how numbers are really useful in the first part of those criteria. I do see how a subjective “it’s got a good beat and it’s easy to dance to, I give it a 7/10” might be, with the caveat that it’s an opinion.
Gamergate-style outrage and IGN.
Two of my least favorite things clashing together.
Does anyone still have that Anita Sarkeesian popcorn gif ?
”So there’s a petition on Change.org”
I haven’t even read the whole post but i think you could have ended it right there. Why does that website even exist anymore? Can someone tell me the last time changedotorg actually, you know, CHANGED anything? I was thinking of flooding change.org with ridiculous petitions like ”Send Trump to the Moon and leave him there” or ”ban plaid”. Just because.
Reminds of the stink these asshats raised over Gone Home. Large numbers of people are allowed to have opinions that are different than yours, antisocial justice warriors! You’ll accept this fact when you fully grow up.
I think 7/10 is a pretty good score for a remake, especially one that, as far as I saw, doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Probably has too much water.
Of course, I’m not a fan of FPSs anyway in which all you pretty much do is shoot things. Hell, my latest love Borderlands 2 I’d probably give maybe a 7/10. Doesn’t mean I won’t gently hug each and every character and sleep with every gun.
I love you, Unkempt Harold. You know how to treat me right.
But, like, wasn’t IGN part of the whole Kane and Lynch thing? Weren’t people being payed off for a good score or something? It was a GameStop review and stuff. IDK. IDK.
I absolutely loved Doom, but who gets bent out of shape at these review scores? I really don’t get it. Does one outlet giving Doom a decent score (it’s not like 7.1 is bad or anything) rather than an exceptional score somehow make the game worse for you?
@Handsome Jack
How DARE you give Borderlands 2 a lesser rating than what I would give it !
Pistols at dawn !
Laughs at attempts of changing thing
Does literally most futile form of protest to change a thing
Even then, who cares of ign? The metacritic score is not your report card.
Even then I would highly rate the game through the execution sytem meant to encourage aggressive play, new weapons to the roster and nods to a plot that Doom actively goes out of his way show that he doesn’t care about the plot much either.
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/borderlands/images/5/5d/DP_Unkempt_Harold_48.jpg
Pew pew.
If a Change.org petition couldn’t persuade Death to bring back Terry Pratchett, why should Metacritic care about what GamerGaters want?
@SFHC, AnnaB; Just wanted to say thank you. I enjoy bad english – not to make fun of it, just just to sort of revel in the weirdness and fun you get when you throw out grammar. I don’t make fun of peoples’ grammaring, but when I see something fun I’ll usually join in with many wordings what are wrong, or not really so much right. I try to avoid it when it could be interpreted as making fun of someone, though, because that’s never been fun for me. I don’t do teasing or schadenfreude so well.
So I didn’t interpret him as making fun of the language at first! It’s just after you two pointed it out that I read it again and saw it. Thank you for pointing out that blind spot of mine!
re: Ethics in Video Game Journalism!
Just so I have it clear in my head. A movement about harassing women out of video games-slash-ethics in game journalism is now piling onto an ineffectual petition website in order to motivate a game review site into changing their subjective opinion on a remake of a classic game so as to conform to the movements’ opinion.
What a marvelous world we live in.
“Severely altering the score that [a video game] deserves” is bad. But it’s OK to downvote shows aimed at/featuring women on IMDb. Because reasons.
Ahhh, this reminds me of back when a woman got death threats because she didn’t give GTAV a 10…
Good times…?
Honestly, a part of me wants to make fun of their engrish. Even though mine is pretty bad too. Maybe because of that.
also, re: grammar mistakes/typos online:
I USED TO poke fun at those kinds of things ALL the time. i majored in english, and those are the sorts of things that tend to jump out at me (at least in any writing other than my own…)… but then, yeah, people pointed out to me (indirectly anyway) that the internet is global… there are lots of non-native english speakers using it… there are people with dyslexia and other sorts of issues that might make it difficult to get everything spelled correctly… and, of course, that attacking someone’s grammar completely sidesteps the issue of engaging with any actual points they might be making.
so i try really hard to not make fun of grammar/spelling mistakes i see now… though sometimes i try to point them out in the comments of articles on places like this, where i’m honestly trying to do it to help the author clean up any accidental mistakes.
and on that note… glass houses, David. ;P i mean really, picking on an “it’s/its” mistake? that’s a super easy one to make, and I spot plenty of typos in your posts here.
I want to go out on a limb and say Real Gamers™ like they frequently call themselves don’t give two actual shits about gaming reviews. I have never, ever, in my two decades of gaming, bought or not bought a game based off it’s reviews. I just played the fucking thing and formed my own opinion.
I wish I could find it, but I remember coming across a youtube video that argued that 7 was the new 1 in games’ ratings. Basically the guy argued that games were consistently over rated due to angry, foamed speckled dudes yelling abuse if any games were rated below an eight out of ten.
Anyone following Markus Perrson a.k.a. Notch on Twitter? Dude’s freaking out on people after he literally mansplained the word “mansplaining” to someone. Then he accused a woman of “c*ntfusing the issue by dismissing my words with a derogatory term about my gender.” Here’s a link to the tweet but I screen capped it.
Honestly, people have done this for games that they didn’t think get the score it “deserved” to get for a long time. A British gaming magazine got so much hate mail for giving StarFox Adventures for the N64 an “average” score that they jokingly included a 10.0 score sticker in a later issue that readers could paste into the review. There’s even a TV Tropes page about the phenomenon:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EightPointEight
The trope is named after the 8.8 score on Gamespot given to Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii (by Jeff Gerstmann, ironically.) I was really active on the Gamespot forums when it all went down (this was before the whole Kane & Lynch scandal that made me also leave the site) and I saw the whole thing firsthand. The amount of gnashing and wailing was truly phenomenal.
I don’t think it’s exclusive to video games, either. The movie site Rotten Tomatoes used to allow people to comment on reviews. If there was a popular movie with just a few negative reviews, invariably those bad reviews would be swamped with comments full of bile.
The only difference these days is that misogynist dudebros want to link it to SJWs and feminists.
Generally, I’d agree with not mocking people over their grammar/spelling (politely point out errors, sure, but not attack) because of the aforementioned issues, but when it’s accompanied by massive hubris? Fire away.
EDIT: Also, I grew up on Doom and Doom II, and I like what I’ve seen of the new one so far, but even then I think this petition is stupid.
@PI
Yeah, that’s kinda the worst part. Review scores are meant to streamline consumer reporting. If you’re all up in arms for the game not having the bestest score, you’re probably planning on getting it anyway. In which case, the score isn’t meant for you, so why should you care? Same shit happened with Uncharted. When the BvS reviews were unkind, people were straightfacedly tweeting out #IStandWithZackSnyder/DC/WarnerBros. As if comic book Michael Bay, the marketing subsidiary whose comics you probably don’t buy, or the billion dollar entertainment conglomerate needs your defense. Stahp, guys, it ain’t a good look
Re:grammar/spelling
If they’re being obnoxious about how stupid you are and how totes rational/logical they are, fuck em. I’ll nitpick the shit outta their pompous drivel. Better not end ya sentence with a preposition. If you’re cool, I’m cool, and we’ll let each other’s mistakes go unmentioned. You start being an ass, then gloves are off
Edit:grammar, ironically
Beyond the harassment, misogyny, and racist, this is where Gamergate went even more wrong. There is a problem with ethics in games journalism, but it’s not because IGN gave this game 7.1. It’s because a decent score like that is seen as an aberration and all the other scores are around a 9. It’s so very rare for any other medium to get that kind of consensus. For a book or a movie to get that kind overall score it would have to be pretty much a masterpiece.
Of movies currently in theaters, Zootopia has a 98% fresh rating, but even in the fresh reviews, you get scores like 3.5/5, 7/10, even 6/10 is considered fresh (and somehow so is 2/5).
There is no such thing as an objective review, so if there is a medium where its product is consistently getting uniformly high ratings, something is rotten. And the rot isn’t the one who is giving a game a 7.1 rating.