See - this is a bit... wonky. I think I know what you're trying to say but the word "true" makes me somewhat distrustful. "True" as opposed to what ?
Deflationistically, we could drop "true" and conclude that a game's measure of worth is what one subjectively thinks about it... but that would annihilate the grounds for communication - if there's only arbitrary opinion, people can agree only through happenstance. Besides - we could never say things like "I know it's not a very good game but I've still enjoyed it" if enjoying it would be the (only ? most meaningful ?) way to assess its value.

If one can find out what a game is like, one can likely also use this knowledge to judge its aesthetic value.

Let me do some drive-by-quoting:
"[url=http://homepage.newschool.edu/~quigleyt/vcs/kant-kuhlenkampff.pdf]Kant furthermore holds that we are quite right in expressing our aesthetic judgments in an objective mode of speech. It would follow then that our judgments of taste are meant to designate some objective matter of fact. Beauty and deformity would seem to be qualities of the objects which we judge aesthetically. And as we shall see, Kant in fact provides an explanation of the objectivity of beauty and deformity. Hume, on his part , even in the face of the "great variety of taste", declares it "natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another" ( S T 229).[/url]"

Really? All too-often I've seen "professional" reviewers say that a game sucks with little or no factual evidence to back that up beyond simple opinion. I think the people who gave games like DA2 good reviews are good examples of that...

Intentionally subjective language to make an intentionally subjective point. It's not like it's a deep one.


------------------------------


> Ok...so? How does that show my statement "The number is not supposed to
> indicate why or what they like about the game, it's just to indicate how
> highly they thought of the game as a whole " isn't accurate?

It's not that it's wrong, it's just an extremely unusual contextualization.
I've never heard of reviews being considered before as "the reviewer's
personal opinion" and that's all. I mean, if a review is just a personal
opinion, why is it their job? Why have reviewers? I can get an opinion from
anyone.

A review is expected to do a lot more than that, and be at least to some
degree authoritative, researched, considered, and well presented. That's kind
of the point. Reviewers are typically (and there some in this thread who are
making this point) trying to present not a personal view, but an different
position, a sort of generalized impression of finding the good and the bad,
and the context of the work.

And that's the high note.

The low note is what I pointed out and claim is the much more typical case,
that of some kind of expectation of validation or valuation of the score as
some ranking of quality against other games.


> Your statement [...] shows that some people have wrong expectations for the
> number score [...] and that a lot of people are foolish.

Sure, of course it does.

> It doesn't use any kind of sound logical reasoning to show that my statement
> isn't accurate though.

Because that's ridiculous. Observing reality does not require proof.
I even went out and found three entire links discussing the problems arising
from considering games scores as an objective valuation (not just mentioning
it in passing) but you're still going to cling to the idea that it's a
personal fancy?

At best that's dumb, but it's more likely disingenuous.

I agree with jsjrodman's statement and not based on my personal history or a "poor sample size on the internet". Publishers set Metacritic scores as project goals. It's a fair assumption that, unlike you or me, they actually did market research and it turned out that the score is important to large amounts of people. Considering that metacritic is an aggregate score it is obvious that people don't view scores as a "personal take" since it's clearly not. The fact that I consider those people dumb doesn't change the fact that they are in the majority and that makes jsjrodman's statement an accurate generalization.

You guys aren't even reading what I've said. I've never said that scores aren't important to a large portion of people

Ok you agree with jrodmans statement. Well, that doesn;t change my mind at all. "considering that metacritic is an aggregate score" or the fact that "publishers set Metascores as project goals" does not make it obvious at all that another large portion of people don't view the score as a personal take. How exactly do those things you've said prove that the majority of readers expect "objective truth" in their reviews? I've used metacrtic even though I've known it wasn't objective truth.Millions of people on various sites all over the internet use high ratings on items as suggestion while still knowing those ratings aren't all objective truth. They know they're just personal ratings .Are you really going to argue that the vast majority of people think numerical ratings of any kind ( but especially for things like books, movies, games, tv shows) are "objective truths" and not just "personal takes"? If so, how did you come to this conclusion? So far, all I've seen is basically" because I've seen a lot of people do it". How many actual people was this? A few thousand over the years? That's a drop in the ocean of the population of metacritic users. How many people have you actually asked? I have an incredibly hard time believing that the VAST majority of people would actually say " They are based on objective truth" because that would mean that the majority of people are mind-boggingly stupid.(yes I know that you can say the majority of the people ARE stupid, but I'm talking about stupidity of incredible depth here) There is no reason to think that the number ratings are based on objective truths. Reading sites and their explanations for how their ratings work, they don;t show any indication at all that the number is supposed to be some "objective truth". If anything, they admit that a number rating isn't meant to be taken as exact'

For example here's a quote from IGN :
"Unfortunately, there's no science behind a score, no algorithm that can be run to get it right. It evolves as a process from an editor playing through a game, talking with others about the experience, and looking at how it stacks up against other games. "

well here's two admissions by the sites themselves that their reviews are opinions. I found these by clicking some reviews on the main page of Total War: Shogun 2 - Fall of the Samurai at gamerankings


From IGN"s rating guide:

Sometimes one person gives a game a great review, but another editor says they didn't like the game -- who's right?
The IGN review is the official statement on a games quality. It is the opinion of the reviewer, but we entrust each editor to speak for the site as a whole. That said, we would never want to silence the voice and opinion of our other editors. Though there is often a consensus in the IGN office over the quality of a game, there are always going to be dissenting voices. We think one of the things that makes IGN special is that we have an office packed with people who absolutely love playing and discussing games. We want editors to continue that discussion, even if the opinion isn't always in line with our official review.

So, to answer the question : They're both right, because each person is allowed to have their own opinion. But the IGN review is the sites official take on the game. "


from a site called MMM
http://mmgn.com/wiki/mmgn-review-guide


"Remember, our reviews are merely a critical opinion. We provide this opinion because we believe we have a sound and professional knowledge of the gaming industry. Opinion is one of the greatest things we have in this society, and we hope you can appreciate our opinion as we would yours. You may not agree with our review and that's fine. We expect that!"


The rest of your post I don't have the energy to respond to, because IMO that post is just a disaster in more ways than one. I'm convinced that you're not paying full attention to what you or I have written in this thread

Couldn't agree more. After watching some of these crowd response videos to E3 trailers for things like (ungh) Halo 4 and Watch Dogs, I wonder how these people can call themselves professionals. Their advertiser bias is even tougher to swallow when you know the writing is coming from such easily incensed fans. That f-word should never be associated with either journalism nor critique, and yet it's easy to see that's what these people are.

There is no real gaming journalism. Everything is spoon-fed from companies and reviews are just opinions. Even people who claim to be the more journalistic of the bunch like Patrick Kleppek or John Walker are just writing press releases or their own opinions 99% of the time.

That said, what gaming news sites do have are well spoken people with a rich knowledge of gaming history and what makes a game play well. They might not be journalists, but they are worth listening to. I would exhibit Jeff Gerstman, John Walker and Anthony Burch as examples, though Burch quit for a job with Gearbox.

Two words:

Jeff Green

followed by three more:

Computer Gaming World

and another three for good measure:

Tom vs. Bruce

in my humble opinion, gaming journalism died on august 2nd, 2006 ... the day Zif Davis announced that they would be killing off CGW and starting up "Games for Windows: The Official Magazine".

I think the closest thing the industry has got to "Gaming Journalism" is ZeroPunctuation, but that is still just entertainment writing more than anything else.