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Some exciting review news to start 2020.
Review score news > next gen news
Announcement: IGN's Review Scale Just Got Simpler
We're adopting a simplified new scale for a new decade of games, movies, TV, and comics reviews.
In the spirit of a new decade of games, movies, TV shows, and comics, we at IGN have a special announcement: we’re making a change to our scoring system and dropping the decimal from our traditional 100-point scale. That means there’ll be no more 7.1s or 8.9s – not even 6.5s. Just nice round numbers from 1 to 10 that clearly and decisively convey what we’re trying to say. After literally years of internal debate, we’ve come to a strong consensus that this system will improve the quality of our reviews and allow us to communicate with you better. It’s a big change, so let’s walk through some of the reasoning behind it.
IGN has used a 100-point scale for the vast majority of our 23-year history, and in most cases it’s served us well. A lot of people love the pinpoint accuracy of that system for the way it allows you to declare one thing slightly better or worse than another. Under the right circumstances, this allows you to create an ordered list of reviews that accurately reflects the very specific sequence in which they’re recommended, which is useful for at-a-glance comparisons. As a reviewer, it’s nice to be able to recognize improvement or decline in a series, however minor, with a slightly higher or lower score.
Please read the full IGN game review scale description here, but here's the short version:
10 - Masterpiece
9 - Amazing
8 - Great
7 - Good
6 - Okay
5 - Mediocre
4 - Bad
3 - Awful
2 - Painful
1 - Unbearable
So, why the change? In the experience of the current IGN reviews team over the past several years, the reality is that these direct comparisons between extremely diverse reviews often end up inadvertently miscommunicating our intent in practice. That’s especially true in the context of a large outlet like IGN, where many different critics with different specialties work together to cover a broad spectrum of the entertainment world.
Art criticism, whether you’re talking about games or movies or TV shows or comic books, isn’t a science. To use games as an example, while you can count the pixels on screen, the number of frames per second displayed, or even the number of hours of content available, none of these things mean a game is good; even if it’s technically bulletproof and runs at 4K and 144Hz it could still be terribly boring. Conversely, a game can run in 900p at 30 frames per second (with occasional dips into the 20s) and still be worthy of our highest rating: Masterpiece.
The fact is, while many have tried, you cannot objectively measure how good or fun a game or movie or TV show or comic book is in the same way you can quantify things like temperature or mass or speed. All of these mediums are art forms, and the goal of art is to inspire an emotional reaction in its audience. Therefore, what we’re doing in reviews is talking about how a given work affects us emotionally when we watch or read or play it – and the review is the inherently subjective perspective of an individual critic. When we then summarize that review into a score, we’re not doing any kind of calculation; there’s no “default” score that’s added to or subtracted from to arrive at the final number, and no qualities or features (or lack thereof) are worth a prescribed number of points. That’s because scores aren’t math – they’re code, with each number corresponding to a description on our scale. But especially because that description only exists on IGN.com and our scores are frequently shared around the internet without that context, the 100-point scale can sometimes give people the wrong idea about what we’re doing.
Additionally, we’ve found that those double-digit numbers aren’t all that meaningful. We’ve always had an answer to the question of the meaning of the number after the decimal: it’s a 10-point scale within a 10-point scale that allows a reviewer to indicate whether something is on the high or low end of a score category, loosely translating into informal categories such as “almost great” or “just barely okay.” However, when we’re asked to explain the meaning of the difference between a 6.5 and a 6.6, things get a lot fuzzier. Obviously a 6.6 is a better score, but what does incremental differentiation actually mean when comparing one game to another? The answer is... not much. And if a difference isn’t meaningful, it doesn’t serve a purpose.
On the 10-point scale, by contrast, each possible score says something very different and concrete. Rather than creating unnecessary debate and argument over the distinction between small increments and prompting readers to attempt to reverse-engineer the meaning of a single point difference, the round-number scores relate to a firm statement that’s clearly defined. While some games, movies, shows, and comics could certainly end up with an identical score even though an author might consider one marginally better than the other, that distinction between them is always made clear in the text rather than the number.
This doesn’t mean that going forward we’ll “round up” to the nearest whole number if we’re internally debating whether something is closer to a “Good” or a “Great.” If something would’ve gotten a 6.9 or 6.8 on the old scale, that meant we were calling it “Okay,” but short of “Good.” Rounding those scores would mean changing the author’s intent from “Okay” to “Good,” which is another illustration of why scores should not be treated as math.
As for why we settled on the 10-point scale as opposed to the multitude of other options, it has a lot to do with combining our current review philosophies with our long tradition and audience expectations. Our decades-long history means that scores like “10/10 - IGN” have become an iconic and instantly recognizable part of our brand for millions of people around the world. Plus, pretty much everybody understands the 10-point system intuitively, so there’s no issue with the clarity of what we’re trying to communicate. So even though you can argue logically that when you boil it down the bottom half of the 10-point scale is just different ways of calling something not worth your time, if we were to drop to a five-point scale we’d lose something important in the process.
The sense of IGN’s identity and our readers’ familiarity is also one of the main reasons why, in our internal debates, we’ve always opted to continue using a scoring system at all instead of dropping it entirely. While we know and accept that the concept of scoring art on a scale isn’t perfect, it’s something our community has vocally enjoyed and rallied around for decades. And just as many of you value our stamp of approval, we’re incredibly grateful to have that enthusiasm and support, and prefer to respect it in kind.
As for our enormous back-catalog of thousands of reviews, nothing will change. Reviews are snapshots in time, and it wouldn’t make sense to alter the authors’ original intent by retroactively changing their scores.
All that said, there is no perfect review score system. Every possible scale, including no scale at all, has its advantages and disadvantages. Everybody has a system they prefer over the rest for perfectly valid reasons. Like reviews themselves, they’re mostly subjective. It’s also not the first time we’ve changed our review scale in IGN’s 23-year existence. Notably, we went from 100 points down to 20 in 2010 and then reverted back to 100 in 2012. It’s likely that at some point we’ll want to revisit the topic in the future. But right now, for our staff, this change feels right.
Source: IGN
Review score news > next gen news
Announcement: IGN's Review Scale Just Got Simpler
We're adopting a simplified new scale for a new decade of games, movies, TV, and comics reviews.
In the spirit of a new decade of games, movies, TV shows, and comics, we at IGN have a special announcement: we’re making a change to our scoring system and dropping the decimal from our traditional 100-point scale. That means there’ll be no more 7.1s or 8.9s – not even 6.5s. Just nice round numbers from 1 to 10 that clearly and decisively convey what we’re trying to say. After literally years of internal debate, we’ve come to a strong consensus that this system will improve the quality of our reviews and allow us to communicate with you better. It’s a big change, so let’s walk through some of the reasoning behind it.
IGN has used a 100-point scale for the vast majority of our 23-year history, and in most cases it’s served us well. A lot of people love the pinpoint accuracy of that system for the way it allows you to declare one thing slightly better or worse than another. Under the right circumstances, this allows you to create an ordered list of reviews that accurately reflects the very specific sequence in which they’re recommended, which is useful for at-a-glance comparisons. As a reviewer, it’s nice to be able to recognize improvement or decline in a series, however minor, with a slightly higher or lower score.
Please read the full IGN game review scale description here, but here's the short version:
10 - Masterpiece
9 - Amazing
8 - Great
7 - Good
6 - Okay
5 - Mediocre
4 - Bad
3 - Awful
2 - Painful
1 - Unbearable
So, why the change? In the experience of the current IGN reviews team over the past several years, the reality is that these direct comparisons between extremely diverse reviews often end up inadvertently miscommunicating our intent in practice. That’s especially true in the context of a large outlet like IGN, where many different critics with different specialties work together to cover a broad spectrum of the entertainment world.
Art criticism, whether you’re talking about games or movies or TV shows or comic books, isn’t a science. To use games as an example, while you can count the pixels on screen, the number of frames per second displayed, or even the number of hours of content available, none of these things mean a game is good; even if it’s technically bulletproof and runs at 4K and 144Hz it could still be terribly boring. Conversely, a game can run in 900p at 30 frames per second (with occasional dips into the 20s) and still be worthy of our highest rating: Masterpiece.
The fact is, while many have tried, you cannot objectively measure how good or fun a game or movie or TV show or comic book is in the same way you can quantify things like temperature or mass or speed. All of these mediums are art forms, and the goal of art is to inspire an emotional reaction in its audience. Therefore, what we’re doing in reviews is talking about how a given work affects us emotionally when we watch or read or play it – and the review is the inherently subjective perspective of an individual critic. When we then summarize that review into a score, we’re not doing any kind of calculation; there’s no “default” score that’s added to or subtracted from to arrive at the final number, and no qualities or features (or lack thereof) are worth a prescribed number of points. That’s because scores aren’t math – they’re code, with each number corresponding to a description on our scale. But especially because that description only exists on IGN.com and our scores are frequently shared around the internet without that context, the 100-point scale can sometimes give people the wrong idea about what we’re doing.
Additionally, we’ve found that those double-digit numbers aren’t all that meaningful. We’ve always had an answer to the question of the meaning of the number after the decimal: it’s a 10-point scale within a 10-point scale that allows a reviewer to indicate whether something is on the high or low end of a score category, loosely translating into informal categories such as “almost great” or “just barely okay.” However, when we’re asked to explain the meaning of the difference between a 6.5 and a 6.6, things get a lot fuzzier. Obviously a 6.6 is a better score, but what does incremental differentiation actually mean when comparing one game to another? The answer is... not much. And if a difference isn’t meaningful, it doesn’t serve a purpose.
On the 10-point scale, by contrast, each possible score says something very different and concrete. Rather than creating unnecessary debate and argument over the distinction between small increments and prompting readers to attempt to reverse-engineer the meaning of a single point difference, the round-number scores relate to a firm statement that’s clearly defined. While some games, movies, shows, and comics could certainly end up with an identical score even though an author might consider one marginally better than the other, that distinction between them is always made clear in the text rather than the number.
This doesn’t mean that going forward we’ll “round up” to the nearest whole number if we’re internally debating whether something is closer to a “Good” or a “Great.” If something would’ve gotten a 6.9 or 6.8 on the old scale, that meant we were calling it “Okay,” but short of “Good.” Rounding those scores would mean changing the author’s intent from “Okay” to “Good,” which is another illustration of why scores should not be treated as math.
As for why we settled on the 10-point scale as opposed to the multitude of other options, it has a lot to do with combining our current review philosophies with our long tradition and audience expectations. Our decades-long history means that scores like “10/10 - IGN” have become an iconic and instantly recognizable part of our brand for millions of people around the world. Plus, pretty much everybody understands the 10-point system intuitively, so there’s no issue with the clarity of what we’re trying to communicate. So even though you can argue logically that when you boil it down the bottom half of the 10-point scale is just different ways of calling something not worth your time, if we were to drop to a five-point scale we’d lose something important in the process.
The sense of IGN’s identity and our readers’ familiarity is also one of the main reasons why, in our internal debates, we’ve always opted to continue using a scoring system at all instead of dropping it entirely. While we know and accept that the concept of scoring art on a scale isn’t perfect, it’s something our community has vocally enjoyed and rallied around for decades. And just as many of you value our stamp of approval, we’re incredibly grateful to have that enthusiasm and support, and prefer to respect it in kind.
As for our enormous back-catalog of thousands of reviews, nothing will change. Reviews are snapshots in time, and it wouldn’t make sense to alter the authors’ original intent by retroactively changing their scores.
All that said, there is no perfect review score system. Every possible scale, including no scale at all, has its advantages and disadvantages. Everybody has a system they prefer over the rest for perfectly valid reasons. Like reviews themselves, they’re mostly subjective. It’s also not the first time we’ve changed our review scale in IGN’s 23-year existence. Notably, we went from 100 points down to 20 in 2010 and then reverted back to 100 in 2012. It’s likely that at some point we’ll want to revisit the topic in the future. But right now, for our staff, this change feels right.
Source: IGN
