Why We’re Using Review Scores

Some of you may have noticed that on Monday, for the first time ever, The Escapist awarded a quantifiable score to a videogame alongside our usual review. This was not a mistake, nor was it a one-off. As of this moment, The Escapist will be awarding scores to every review we publish, just as many of our competitors have been doing for decades, and as many of our readers have been asking us to do (and not do) for years.

This was not an easy decision to make. I’ve been personally against review scores for as long as I’ve been aware of them, both as a journalist and as a gamer, and for the past four years it’s been the policy of The Escapist that review scores are not a necessary part of communicating with our readers about the experience of playing a game. Yet times change, and from time to time we must re-evaluate our previously-held convictions and be willing to change with the times. I believe this is one of those times.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his historic essay Self Reliance, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” That is to say, an unwillingness to change for the sake of not changing is a tendency unworthy of educated, reasonable men. Considering, then, that I like to believe all of us at The Escapist are both educated and reasonable, I remain open to change – to being inconsistent – and I hope you will take that ride with me.

Four years ago the most profound statement a journalist could make was to write an in-depth experiential review describing how it feels to play a given game. That is the style of writing we endorsed by founding The Escapist, and that is the kind of game review we have always published and, frankly, always will publish. Yet we have never been afraid of change. Those of you who have been with us since 2005 have been with us through numerous changes to our layout, numerous additions to our content lineup and a few notable shifts in philosophy. We are not afraid of change, and we approach it with the same careful consideration and commitment to our readers and the integrity of our content with which we approach everything we do.

In the past it has been our policy that raw numerical data is irrelevant to the process of reviewing games, and so we invested our energies instead to delivering the highest-quality experiential reviews that we could, offering, instead of a score, a taste of how it feels to actually play the game. Today, however, we find that raw data is becoming increasingly more relevant to how reviews are consumed. Entire industries have spawned to chew on review data and spin it into meta-data, and readers have clamored for this information. The game industry itself has attempted to reward quality in game development by tying product royalties to review data. While this latest effort is beset with problems, it does point to an overall trend that shows no signs of changing course.

Although it has been our policy in the past to offer reviews as pure editorial without appending a numerical score, we believe it is possible to change with the times without compromising our core values and integrity. We can offer both experiential, meaningful reviews and review scores, and if, by so doing, we are able to continue to grow and evolve and welcome more readers into our world and way of looking at the experience of playing games, then we see no clear reason not to.

I can assure you this was not a decision we made lightly or without years of deliberation. In fact, we’ve been arguing about whether or not to implement review scores at The Escapist since we first published a review almost four years ago. The last time we discussed the issue, I remember voting decisively – and loudly – against it. Times, however, change, and we must change with them lest we fall victim to our inner hobgoblins.

In our internal debates regarding review scores a couple of criticisms against the policy continue to come up, and I would like to address both of them with you.

The first criticism is that review scores can provide game publishers leverage to use against us in order to coerce us into compromising our editorial ideals. A publisher could, for example, threaten us in some way if we offer a review score lower than what they feel they’ve earned.

I know this is true. We’ve seen it happen over and over again. Fortunately for us, The Escapist was founded in the belief that our editorial integrity is sacred, and that no publisher will have the right to dictate what we can and can’t say about a game. I’m pleased to say that, to this date, we have an unblemished record in this regard, and I don’t expect that to ever change.

The second major objection to review scores is that they encourage readers to marginalize the written content of the review. Again, this is true. I’ve seen hard statistics that show many readers of game reviews will scan the page for the review score only and ignore the rest of the content.

I don’t like this. As a reviewer, I work very hard on the review for each game I play, and I put as much – if not more – effort into it as I do my lengthiest articles for The Escapist. I believe that the bond between reviewer and reader is one of the holiest trusts, and I agonize each and every time over my description of the experience of playing a given game.

Therefore it pains me to no end that some readers may open up my review – or any review at The Escapist – only to look for our number of stars, then flit off without reading a single word of what we’ve written about the game. Ultimately, however, if that’s how readers choose to consume our work, I can’t stop them, and those people who would be inclined to do so aren’t reading our reviews right now, so we are losing nothing. Perhaps, even, if we’re lucky, we’re gaining.

If one single drive-by reader stops to take a breath, reads our excellent review prose and learns just a little bit about how meaningful these experiences can be, then I think that will be one for the “win” column. After all, why are we here if not to share?

I know there are many, many more reasons not to offer review scores, but these are the key two we have debated for the past four years at The Escapist, and the ones for which – until we had an answer – we saw no good reason to change. We hope that you, dear readers, will accept this change as gracefully as always, and that you will stand with us as we attempt to prove that scores and integrity are not mutually exclusive.

We’ve written a handy explanation of our scoring system which should explain what we mean when we say a game deserves however many “stars.” You can read this here, and it will be remaining on the site and linked to from every review.

As far as the content of the reviews themselves, we trust that you will find it hasn’t changed a bit with the addition of scores, and we promise that it never will.

Russ Pitts
Editor-in-Chief