Guffawing Graphics

          I am tired of seeing graphics being used as a benchmark for how great games are. It's really irksome and often a completely pointless exercise of finding the minute difference between two near-exactly identical games. The question needs to be asked, " what role does graphics serve in this game?" Then from there we can properly evaluate how well the graphics of the game are filling that role. Graphics can play several roles at once in a game. They can be critical in suspending your belief or necessary for being able to distinguish between wall and player. Graphics serve an end of some sort and when its reached, anything extra could very well be considered a point of diminishing returns. Sure, it's nice that you're able to read the identification number on that building, but the amount of immersion that's lost from not having it is probably minimal. That's not to give a free pass to developers to start making games that are graphically horrendous. I'm merely suggesting that graphics aren't a good thing to distinguish games by. Did the graphics of Wind Waker make it inferior to Twilight princess? No, and anyone who uses that as a main reason to reject one in favor for the other would be viewed as clueless. Graphics with today's technology is a given. Great graphics should make little noise, while horrible graphics should be ostracized. It would be fair to compare graphics to an offensive line.
        There are some games where the graphics comparison is reasonable. Simulation games such as Madden or 2k rely heavily on trying to bring as much reality as possible. The grittier the game gets, the better it is. So when comparing Madden 2012 to 2013 and hearing that it's "more crisp", I understand why that kind of commentary might be valued by the player. However, a comparison between Halo 4 and Black ops 2, in regards to graphics, tells us little about the overall playing experience (unless one of them have serious graphics issues). The point is that graphics need to give us insight on whether the game is better, not merely be a bragging right that a game (and in part idiot fans of the game) gets to flaunt. I'm not asking that graphics stop being analyzed, just stop using them as arguments when their effects are minimal at best.
      One final distinction I want to make is the difference between graphics and art design. Graphics can play a role in art design, but rarely is it the main star. Instead what is often sorely forgotten is the way games construct environments that are unique, yet familiar. Art designers need to decide how entire civilizations and landscapes look. The decision to make a level on an uphill incline, that has protruding thorns in a way to imply a scorched earth feel, is only partially fulfilled by graphics. This level design can be created in all range of graphics, but these decisions have a transferable in game experience.
     So my suggestion to most websites and gamers out there is to stop putting so much stock in graphics. Call out aesthetically poor games, but don't adopt this pixel driven mindset. Instead analyze art design and incorporate graphics there. Or only discuss graphics when it's pertinent. This will give reviewers and gamers more time to talk about the things that matter, like the fact that the zombies mode in Black Ops was seriously altered.

Dear Jim, Be Quiet: Why review scores are plagued in Video games

      I was watching a "Jimquistion" video on escapist.com. In fact, here is the video http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/6582-Review-Scores-Are-Not-Evil# you can go watch it yourself, but I warn you it's a huge waste of time. The video was essentially a defense of the use of review scores in video game reviewing and why everyone who's upset with it can go fuck themselves. Jim claims that he shouldn't have to sacrifice accessibility for most users due to the incessant whining of a select few. What Jim refuses to acknowledge is how perverted the video game review system has become. Well, he does do a small 15 second acknowledgment of a "few issues" with the system, but decides not to talk about any of them because then it would make him look like a complete idiot. Instead I'm going to explain why video game review scores currently don't work. I'm not saying get rid of every review scores system. I'm just calling out big offenders like IGN and basically every other mainstream video game review sites that uses the same inflated bullshit rating system.

          The first issue with the rating system is how easy it is to create kickbacks with it. Reviewers can easily give a game an 8/10 (what ever that means) and then proceed to rail on the glaring issues of the game, without ever having to worry about seriously being called a hypocrite. That's because a good majority of people don't even read the reviews. Or for sectioned reviews they'll skip to the graphics section (because they can clearly tell the difference) and arm themselves with the review score and graphics score so they can brag to their friends. One might argue that if you get rid of the score system, kick backs will still happen. Yes, they will but then it's much easier to detect bullshit when you're reading someone trying to actively convince you a bad game is good. A score on the other hand gives you no way of knowing whether a game is good or not. 

     A good example of a game that received amazing reviews, while among most gamers being the worst game of the series is the infamous Fable 2. Fable 2 was rated one of the best games of the holiday season and panned out to be the most boring and dull game of the year. It was also a huge waste of money. But what did our friend IGN give it? An 8.8. This game deserved a nice 4.5 and that's generous. Yahtzee (someone who probably owes his initial big break to the creator of Fable) even refused to give the game kickback praises, referring to it as the same game with a dog. 

         The second issue with the rating system is how inflated the system is. For most websites the average game get's about a 7. God forbid a game gets below a 5. Games that are average should be given 5s. If you don't feel comfortable with that switch to the 5 star system or another point system that doesn't make you seem like a complete meanie. But there is no excuse for game review websites to continually churn out 7s and 8s for subpar games. Some argue that they're using number systems as one would grade exams. A 7 is the equivalent of a C- and so on. I'll get into why that doesn't seem to be the case later ( or more specifically why that doesn't matter). But the point is that there are way too many highly rated games. This is usually because the standards games are rated on are out of wack as well (another post some time). 

      The third and final issue with review scores is that there is no tangible way of analyzing them. Nobody really understands what reviewers are trying to say with their review systems. The argument that games are being rated like one rates a test is idiotic. A test is often easy to measure on a 1-10 scale because you do it based on how much of the test was completed correctly. The reason 7 isn't that great is because we expect a high level of mastery on most of the material. This isn't the case for video games. People don't go into reviewing a video game saying they want a certain amount of content covered and if it isn't all mostly covered it's horrible. Reviews use some basic parameters (and fancy one's if you have a good reviewer) and use them as a metric to describe the game. The final score should make it so that a 5 is average and 10 is the best. It's that simple. Other sites switch to different ratings systems, like the 5 star system. This is a good start, but again it's important that we fully understand what ratings mean and what weight they hold as a good comparative measure. 

      Now I know I can get called out for being a hypocrite because I use a rating system in my own site. However,I urge you to read my first post on this site to get a clear explanation on how I rate games. An expedited explanation of my reviewing system is that I can care less about review scores. I come up with game specific measures because I think what's more important is finding what shines ( and what's horrible) than to just look at the same 5 stock things every single time. 

   This isn't a call to get rid of the review system. All this is doing is calling out review sites for their nonsense reviews and telling Jim Sterling to respectfully shut the fuck up. Stop whining about how people are too stupid to understand rating systems and acknowledge that the relationship between the rating system and the video game community hasn't been a particularly smooth one. It's definitely a relationship that can be salvaged, but with videos like Jim's, we have a long way to go.