Interwebs

I was asked recently what I thought about the whole ethics thing that’s currently going on (such as Gertsmann-gate, et al).

This dismays me because I thought I had my point clear: the rating system is broken because of the internet. And only a bonafide internet solution can fix it.

Here are some facts that are lost in the hyperbole surrounding this issue.
1. The "money" is already firmly entrenched at every level.
2. You cannot, and will not change this.
3. No reviewer can safely do their job under the current environment.
4. Integrity pays the bills... to a point. Yes, Penny Arcade may make a killing and still being honest, but their annual budget is less than Grand Theft Auto 4's upcoming ad campaign. In a game of numbers, integrity loses to marketing's sheer number strengths. You use game reviews as either a sales percentage booster, or as a necessary write-down. And minimizing that write down is worth millions and millions of dollars.

Any viable solution is going to have to account for the money, and THEN it must address how fraught doing business on the internet is.

Let me explain. On the internet, you can find people who agree with you 100%. I cannot point to one thing on the internet (and that includes 2 girls 1 cup) wherein you couldn’t find somebody who shares the same viewpoints and interest.

Think about that. No matter how reprehensible, illogical, or batshit perverted the idea, you can find legion on the internet.

What does this mean? Well, from a psychological point of view, it means even bad ideas can find a place to grow. It means that you are UNDERSTOOD. There is something very final about writing down something. That more and more of people’s lives are being posted and portrayed on the internet, we find a simple breakdown.

When someone did something dumb in the past, the near universal peer pressure meant that, if sanity didn’t take hold, then usually the thought of being egged at the grocery store did. One is never as powerful as many.

Now video games are a small part of this, and it is to the genius credit of some of these shady companies that they have discovered it. A reviewer’s score doesn’t mean a hill of beans in any town. Marketing is all about numbers; and you can only hope to subtract numbers with people like Gertsmann.

Now to Wikipedia for further examples- Wikipedia is an awesome source of news and information, but you have to remember that ANYONE can post. And when anyone can post, anything can be valid. So my big deal with the internet is that everything can and will be valid.

So the dilemma of trying to appoint an integrity-based or revised hard score (such as stores for movies) seems to be applying a 20^th century solution to a 21^st century problem. Integrity can be profitable (see Penny Arcade), but to truly help inform and create, there has to be a lot of outside the box thinking.

Considering the services that a good reviewer can mete out to the reader, I find this issue important. But there is something about current scoring that offends people. It’s not so much that they disagree. They are OFFENDED.

And that’s the larger issue, I think, than advertising. Because disagreements are fine, but offense is what every last consequence regarding game reviews started out with. So you need to find a way to placate the advertisers, the journalism, and the public. You can’t do it with integrity alone.

So as I see it.there are two options. Fix the internet so people can learn to spot, vouch, and respect integrity and learn discretion, or fix the way people perceive reviews. The first is a foolish venture. The second way is to take the arbitrary scoring ball and go home.

Reflexive scoring matrices solve this problem the same way Netflix or Amazon helps guide decision making without ever losing the ability to change one’s mind. By eliminating the arbitrary number, you effectively take the main sting out of the reviewer bee.

But the stinger you gain is even more impressive. Suddenly, game companies cannot focus their ire on one or two dissenting reviewers; they have to be concerned with the public. A reviewer is free of the entirely reactionary scorn that has plagued them for a few years. Reviewers can still work because their opinions matter. If, using the reflexive matrices showed that they were not “in tune” with the average gamer, then business and nature would take its course. Jeff Gertsmann may be fired because no one on this planet may agree with him, but it wouldn’t be about advertising. In effect, you deal with the real issues and concerns that people have, all the while eliminating corruption. Not a bad affect.

My problem with the reviewing system is that it’s already fundamentally broken. The problem with the matrices is that it would rely solely on user input. And of that, there are thousands of ways to count,. What does your Xbox Achievement points say about your interests? What does your Virtual Console say? Your PS2 memory card? Your Gamefly queue? The amount of data that is available to create a broad, multi-faceted picture of an individual as a gamer is already out there in one form or another. Harnessing that effectively is tricky, but I believe it can be done.

Integrity is very important, but we are naïve to think we can simply eliminate the overwhelming pressure of money. Even Kane and Lynch sold a million copies, despite all the bad press. The only way you can change the dance is if you change the song. There is no quick fix to this, but the gaming industry needs to keep itself in check via sales and reviews. ET the Atari game bombed, and with good reason. It sucked. Unless you can redirect how money is spent (and it’s clear bad press isn’t enough), there will forever be influence. People might actually buy ET. There are too many jobs on the line to take this other than seriously. A review may not take into account the reader, and a reader may not take the reviewers point of view into account. If you change the way people look at both parts, you may have a fighting chance. Anything else is doomed to a constant battle.