Woogmoog

Playing the Numbers Game

Everyone seems to be buzzing about The Last Airbender’s Rotten Tomatoes score of 7%, asking things like “is it really that bad,” “is it actually worse than Marmaduke or Twilight: Eclipse,” or “is it really that bad?” It really is interesting to see how much discussion there is out there about scores and numbers and percentages alone on this movie compared to what discussion there is out there on what exactly made the movie so shitty. The Happening is quite possibly one of the worst acts of cinema ever perpetrated on the world, but knowing its Tomatometer score is 18% does nothing to clarify that.

A lot of this is due to the proliferation of score-based aggregator sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. Aggregation of scores is all well and good as a general guide to how folks are taking the latest stuff shoveled into multiplexes, but that’s all that it should be: a guide. Way too many folks obsess over these scores and the minutiae of these numbers. Is The Last Airbender actually worse than Grown Ups because it’s 3 points lower? Does “3% less good” actually mean anything?

The obsession and uproar over Toy Story 3 and Armond White’s obvious trolling is another example. Toy Story 3 is a delightful movie, and the fact that it’s at 99% on some sort meter does not make it any less great.

The problem is way too many people look at these scores as competition and as points in a game; some movies and video games “win” while others “lose.” The ludicrous arguments in forums over the console wars are doubly ridiculous – people actually take these numbers and chalk them up to some sort of scoreboard. Every E3, arguments rage over which of the big three “won.” This also leads to the weird fanboy championing and movements and idiotic online petitions, such as The Dark Knight or “Avatar should win Best Picture” mayhem over the last couple of years. Instead of arguing over whether these movies were actually good or not or what made them good, it seems like all anyone can do is throw numbers at each other.

Whenever someone starts blabbing about specific scores, I bring up one Jeff Gerstmann. A normal video game reviewer, he dared to give the hotly anticipated “oh look it’s adult Link” Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess an 8.8 out of 10. The fanboy uproar was palpable and hilarious, and it annoys me whenever some new hugely anticipated game comes out to a golden shower of 10/10′s (GTA IV, Modern Warfare 2, MGS 4). The other, darker, grimmer side of this came when Gerstmann was fired from Gamespot for giving Kane & Lynch: Dead Men a 6.0, a death knell to a game which Gamesport had featured in integrated advertising all over their site (on a side note, I just picked up Kane & Lynch from the ongoing Summer Steam Sale and it’s fucking terrible – 6.0 is off by about 5 points). For some companies and developers, funding and bonuses actually depend on Metacritic scores. This is right about the time that this was just getting out of hand.

So what do you do? You can’t claim that scores don’t matter, especially not if you’re Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights (although that’s mostly due to the general consensus that Too Human was utter trash). You also can’t be like Kevin Smith, whining about how critics opinions “just don’t matter, man,” but again that’s because Cop Out was universally reviled by critics and normal people.

Way back in the heyday of PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World, CGW actually tried several things. First, they tried taking away numerical scores all together, the thinking being that way too many people ignore the review completely and simply skip to the end to check on the numbers. They were right, but people balked – people do like to have some sort of idea of what to expect, a general idea – it’s somehow ingrained, like looking at the headlines of an article or photos first.

CGW brought scores back, but completely futzed with the scale. The problem they tried to circumvent here was the proliferation of 80% or 8/10s and the like – take a look at most Gamespot-esque websites and you’ll see that games are essentially reviewed on a 7-9 scale. They tried changing things around so ‘average’ was at the 50 point mark. This, too, completely threw off things like Metacritic scores because no one else used the same scale.

It’s annoying that one of the last great things I can say about CGW was their boldness in trying to do away with something as silly as scores. Heaven forbid people look to criticism for actual, well-thought out ideas and words. It’s definitely become exacerbated with all this Web 2.0 “Like” buttons and such – everything everywhere must be byte-sized.

In my own reviews, I toss a score up there. Generally, games and movies are “something” out of ten, and I think this works pretty well. Something that’s 9 out of 10 is pretty much must see, but 7s and 8s are no pushovers. What do you do when you get to truly shitty movies? It all works in the context of the review. A 3/10 is horrendous, but does that mean if you had a choice between that and a 4/10, you would always go with the higher score? This is where reviewer’s tilts and personal biases come in. This is not some sort of sliding scale – I don’t keep a record going of the best and the greatest and top tens and all that. Basically, just about anything below a 5 shouldn’t even be worth your money. If you asked me what three books to take to a desert island or my “top ten of ALLLLL TIME,” I simply draw a blank. I could never give you anything close to a list.

Please take the numbers in critics’ reviews not as some sort of quantifiable stat. Games and film aren’t baseball players with ERAs and human growth hormones. They are meant to enhance and summarize the ideas presented in the copy above, and are only relevant to that context. Know that a 2.2 isn’t half a point “better” than a 1.7, know that they both fucking suck.