Gamertell

In reading through the February 2008 issue of Wine Spectator magazine (what, you think gamers only drink Bawls and cheap brews?), I noticed that basic rating scale for wines looks pretty damn similar to videogames. That basic scale is essentially the same as the gradeschool system, where anything below a failing grade is pretty much not even worth putting to paper. A failure is a failure and it’s really not worth even looking at the actual score.

Now I’m not saying this is how all game ranking work but, really, how most people treat game reviews.

As the editor of a major game site told me once, “A 1 or a 2 doesn’t tell me much about a game except that maybe it was released by accident” (name and pub withheld to protect my freelance career). Much like the SATs, a game company seems to get a couple gratis points for just getting the thing in a box, on a shelf and in someone’s game system. There is some credibility to that since any game that you can actually play is, well, playable.

The idea of an average-quality game is not very well reflected by game ratings, nor would it be well tolerated by the game publishing industry. A 70 out of 100, for example, is by definition above average (with a natural mean score being 50 out of 100) and no game company is going to print that on its box art. One game company even told me that the 5 out of 10 GamesRadar gave its game was “bad,” even though GamesRadar is one of the publications that uses 5 to reflect average - middle, typical, not bad and not great - instead of a drop-dead failure.

The wine industry has already embraced what I call the grade school system where there are grades of success (essentially A+ through D- even if not using letters) with an end-all failure score. Even though wines are theoretically rated on a 100-point scale, no wine ever receives a rating below 50. Of course there are plenty of critics of the no-wine-below-50-on-the-so-called-100-point scale who have called for a revision due to the innate silliness of never scoring below 50/100.

Maybe the solution is a psychological shift, a long-term revision of how readers, writers and PR reps view current game ratings. Sure, the higher the rating the better the game, but that certainly doesn’t mean games with low ratings don’t have any fans. When was the last time you or your friends knowingly bought a game with a rating of 5/10 or lower? Much like wine, where any good sommelier will ultimately tell you to screw the reviews and drink what you like, most game critics know that even the lowest rated games will be loved by some gamers. There’s a reason people still buy boxed wine and Naruto games.

As for the adage that all wines get better with age, well, that’s pretty much a fallacy. While all wines require some time to mature and become more complex and, you hope, more tasty, the vast majority do not require more than a couple of months. They have a peak maturation point and can, in fact, begin to lose flavor or even turn into undrinkable swill if left in the bottle too long. Consider that initial aging time the equivalent to a game’s year+ of development.

Similarly, most games don’t have the luxury of improving with time beyond the development stage unless someone goes in and hacks the crap out of the code (I’m looking at you, Xbox Live game developers). OK, so expansion packs may add some complexity to this missive, but those do not usually change the core game as much as add to it. Also, correcting programming glitches is not really the same as improving with age and you certainly cannot correct a bottle of wine after it is bottled.

Many older games we remember as being incredibly fun would now prove to be nostalgically entertaining for only a few minutes. Go back and play the original Space Invaders and you’ll realize that it’s a pretty dull game by today’s standards. Instead of hours of enjoyment, you might get 10 minutes of happy memories, quickly followed by frustrated tedium. There are, of course, games that stand up well to aging like Tetris, a few football games and some fighters, but they certainly didn’t get any better than when you first played them. Your perception of them did.

Just keep in mind that wine and game ratings are meant to help save the most people money by predicting the collective gamer mind. There’s no way to properly account or every wine or game connoisseur’s taste when coming up with a final score.

Read [Dayton Daily News] Site [Wine Spectator]