Poll: Should regular gamers be allowed to rate/be a critic of video games

[Shoggoth2588]

Everyone has to start somewhere. Movie-Bob, Yahtzee, the AVGN, the Irate Gamer, KWING, Silent Rob, Susan Arnt, Justin Clouse, Paul Goodman, Steve Butts...None of these people were genetically engineered in a tube somewhere (unlike the people who report on G4 or Game Informer [/joke])

Everyone has a view and everyone has a voice. They're not all going to be popular or coherent. They may even be severely biased but, that doesn't mean they should be silenced or ignored (even if most of them are ignored)

 

[MisterDyslexo]

"Only if they can not be bias."

.... What?

You know, I was gonna post a big wall of text, but I like how Jim Sterling put it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-oeOqgRi7E&feature=player_detailpage#t=330s

I mean a gamer must form an unbais opinion of the game if they are going to review it. Example being people giving Dragon Age 2 a 0 beacause it was not the same as Dragon Age Origins.

UnbiasED. And again, it sounds like you are holding gamers to a different standard, since cries that gamers are biasED belie the underlying issue that game critics are also inherently biasED.

Why should gamers have a higher standard just to have their opinions heard?

I like this human, he gets it!

Generally, if you're smart enough to look up a review for something before you buy it, you will be able to use your judgment as to whether it was a good review. I mean, would you take a fanboy "its not 'x' series so its a -42/10" as a good review? No, you wouldn't. You would probably take the reviews of a lot of different people though, and judge them based on how they like it. Splinter Cell Conviction has an 85 on metacritic, a 7.7 by the community at large. I'd give it a 9.0, above most reviews. Well guess what, I like stealth games. I can look past all of the bugs. I like the unique style of gameplay it has created. I think that, if the AI works properly, that the game rewards you for using good judgment and using swift execution at some times, careful execution at another. But like I said, I like stealth games. I can look past a LOT of bugginess in games (Far Cry 2 is one of my favs, even though I've yet to complete it because the save files bug out). Not everybody is like me, so take my review of that with a grain of salt. Meanwhile, I suck, suck, suck at driving/racing games. I'd try to give a fair review to the game, but its hard to do so when I suck at it, and just don't enjoy the gameplay much. I'd probably give a game with an average score of 85 something in the 6 or 7 range. It becomes harder to merit something when you cannot enjoy it. Take every gamer's opinion with a grain of salt, taking into account their likes and dislikes, their loyalties, their fanboyism and potential childish/immature attitudes.

 

[LarenzoAOG]

Everyone has the right to an opinion, however only smart people should be alowed to actually voice their opinions, stupid people can think whatever they want but they better keep it to themselves, you can apply my logic to reveiws, debates, etc. etc. etc.

 

[dWintermut3]

The main problem with seperating "real critics" from the laymen is a lot of the time they love totally different things.

Look at movie reviews, Citizen Kane probably wouldn't sell that well today, there's no CGI robots and nothing blows up, there's only one action scene (even if it is the best room-trashing ever, not involving Tommy Wiseau anyway).

Movies that sell half a billion tickets and then go on to clean up on the DVD and rental market are rarely rated highly by "serious cinema critics".


Gamers all look for different things, people that play games for a living usually have top-end computers and see enough different games in one week that they notice minutae of graphics engines, a typical gamer might be wowed by some features (realistic water always amazes me), but generally doesn't care as much. On the other side, they've also seen so many different games that they start to get bored of plots that still seem fresh to your average gamer.

At a certain point of encyclopedic games knowledge you sound like the southpark episode "simpsons did it" poo pooing every idea because some other good game did it (in this instance replace "the simpsons" with HalfLife, Fallout 2 and Dues Ex, and Gears of War if it's a cover-based shooter).

Because they usually get pre-release copies professional games reviewers can rarely give a fair review of the quality of online play, even if they get to test multiplayer it's LAN not wold-wide server supported. Likewise games that involve dozens of hours of gameplay before you get into the middle of the game (Fallout: New Vegas comes to mine) are hard to review given the time-to-print cycle of your average article and the fact game reviewers have real lives too.

Likewise, games that have crippling bugs on some platforms and/or PC configurations rarely get a fair and full review from reviewers (Thinking of FO:NV again). Either it's barely playable by the reviewer and gets slammed or the crippling problems other people will experience don't rate a mention.

 

[Cazza]

Most gamers don't know how to rate games fairly. Sure everyone should be heard but in many cases people are just idiots with unrealistic expectations.

 

[DestinyCall]

Why do we read reviews if not to get an idea if it is a worthwhile game? And who better to tell us if a game is worth our hard-earned money than another "regular" gamer who already put down his money on the product? Taken in context, I don't see how a regular gamer's opinion regarding a game could be any less valid than a professional game reviewer.

Personally, I like to read a professional review or two along with some user reviews/ratings to get the complete picture on how the game was received. When there is a wide margin of difference between the ratings, it usually says something important about the game. Maybe it has a controversial DRM program or major glitches or some other issue that offends some players ... or maybe it has great gameplay or a unique premise and many gamers love it, but the professional reviews focus too much on the game's shortcomings. It's pretty easy to avoid the more biased gamer reviews, since they rarely bother to hide how extreme they feel about the game. A professional reviewer is not without bias either, although they may be different from a random gamer (or better hidden). Just take a large enough sample, keep your mind open, and consider carefully before you buy.

 

[dagens24]

They should be able to, but I'd trust a critics review before a users review. I've seen to many user review scores at 0/10 for games that were masterpieces to be able to take user reviews seriously.

 

[Gennadios]

I wouldn't say heard, most people are illiterate tards and have no useful input.

However, a single like/dislike rating, when averaging 10,000 people is still a *very* good metric for how good a game is.

 

[Nyaliva]

I picked "other" because I don't like using the word bias because it's accepted definition has fallen far from it's true definition. But basically, I think gamers should express their opinions about games, they're the consumer and if they don't like something, publishers should change what they do to accommodate, or else they won't sell.

However, this is the ideal situation for an ideal world. Unfortunately, you get too many people taking the smallest, most insignificant issues, some of which the publisher knows about and likely did all they could to fix, and consider the game crap based entirely on that. Alternatively, some people will ignore any and all design issues and will rate a game phenominal so long as it looks pretty and is easy. So, I don't think EVERYONE should be a game critic, however, those who know what they like and can look at a game critically should certainly voice their opinion if they so wish, and other gamers and publishers can judge if it's a proper critique or a personal attack.

 

[Something Amyss]

The main thing I am trying to get across is I am against "zero bombing". I have nothing against gamers reviewing/rating a game just as long as the can do it in a "good" way, not just "the game is not like the first one 0/10".

Then I would say you have failed miserably, as you keep saying other things, things which do not mean that. Complaining about bias is wholly irrelevant to "zero bombing." Relating it to gamers versus critics, where critics can still be biased and give a poor score solely because it's "not like the first," is wholly irrelevant to "zero bombing." Your initial question, pre-edit, and your poll both ask something also wholly irrelevant to "zero bombing."

Is zero bombing wrong? Yeah, it is. Review spam of any kind is crap.

Next time, just ask that, instead of explaining you meant something completely different.

 

[b3nn3tt]

I presume you're talking in terms of Metacritic user reviews and the like. I would say that yes, everyone has the right to go on and score any given game, based of course on their subjective opinion of it. The only thing that I would change, given the chance, would be to include a minimum character limit for user reviews. It is of no use to anyone if a game is simply given an arbitrary score with no indication of why it has been given that score.

I think that the more important question is, should people base whether or not to play a game on user reviews? And to that I would say, for the most part, no. Due to user reviews being predominantly based solely on a person's opinion of a game, they won't tell you very much about how much you (the reader) would like it.

So overall, yes to them being allowed to rate games, but no to people using these as any real basis for decisions.

 

[EmzOLV]

Everyone should be able to have and express their own opinion - not just for the fact that you know, some of us would burst without being able to express how much we truly hated something, but you know. Because we should.

The reason its amazing is simply because everyone is different. I always read reviews for games, both the negative and the positive and get a greater picture from both. I mean, I read one review which absolutely slated say, a snowboarding game for being boring after 5 minutes. I read a positive/neutral one which specified that it was focused on the speed runs that other games were and more technical aspects, so it wasn't for all. Therefore I can probably place the two together to see that the game was never going to be interested for the negative reviewer because it wasn't his style of game.

Take everything with a pinch of salt - but it definitely helps to give a bigger picture to everything. I also love when people say a game is great but add in the camera controls are terrible (mostly because that's my biggest downfall anyway) or something teeny, because that's helpful.

You'll always get someone who's going to give a game 0 and then say it was terrible in one word in the review text. But then - you're always going to get someone who chews gum with their mouth open, farts incessantly or doesn't look either direction when crossing the road - they're all an irritation (to most). Luckily, you'll still always have people who want to express the good and bad parts, give up their seat to someone, etc etc

 

[Zay-el]

Trolls will always exist, you just can't root them out, no matter how hard you try. Give your honest opinion of games and have enough internet-fu to know what's a troll review like. Leave those rolling in their mud.