Let us briefly consider the 2011 Academy Awards, the award for Best Picture went to The King's Speech which has a metascore of 88, the other nominees where 127 Hours (82), Black Swan (79), The Fighter (79), Inception (74), The Kids are All Right (86), The Social Network (95), Toy Story 3 (92), True Grit (80), and Winter's Bone (90). So yes while there are movies that do receive metascores of over 90 these are not as common as they are in video games (a quick count shows around 40 90+ games released in 2011 while only 2 movies), additionally when a reviewer gives a game a score which is lower than the average they are often criticised for it. Why is this? Are games simply better polished than movies, with higher quality control or is there something else?
Firstly, the argument of higher quality control is incorrect. Skyrim has had to be patched twice since release with more on the way due to problems such as texture downscaling, dragons flying backwards, game crashes, and severe slow down for the PS3 version of the game when the save file exceeds 6 MB. The PS3 slowdown issue is still ongoing with players reporting that eventually the game becomes unplayable. Skyward Sword which won G4TV's Videogame Deathmatch also has an error where doing a specific action at a certain time makes it impossible to complete the game, Nintendo have since announced a fix for this. So how is it that two of the best games in 2011 are released with severe errors and the GotY eventually becomes unplayable on the PS3 and both still receive 90+ metascores? More often than not games are released on their publicised date with the intention being that any problems can be remedied later, and in general reviewers are quite forgiving of glitches and errors. But consider what would happen if a movie had a serious problem, such as the sound cutting out, none of the reviewers would ignore it by simply saying a version with updated sound will eventually be released. So why do game reviewers?
The thing about video gaming is that it still has the niche hobby mentality. Even with the explosion of the casual gaming market there is a large section of the gaming community who refer to themselves as 'core gamers', even the name core gamers shows the mentality of we are the real gamers and everyone else doesn't count. It is generally understood what this section of gamers like, and with most reviewers also being members of this group certain titles are almost guaranteed a 90+ metascore. Ironically it is this group who demand that games be taken seriously and be accepted by the general public, while at the same time deriding attempts to increase the accessibility of games with comments such as 'the Wii only plays kid's games'. If gaming is to be taken seriously then it needs to be viewed and reviewed by a wider audience, Roger Ebert doesn't just watch movies he knows he will like but rather he tries to see and give his opinion on as many movies as he can.
Now what would have happened if someone who usually plays PopCap or Facebook style casual games played Skyrim and had given a reveiw of 6/10 because although it was nice to look at the game was overly complicated and too dificult to know what you were supposed to be doing. The core gamers would pounce on them, complaining that they 'didn't get the game' or 'clearly this isn't your style of game', even though this is a valid review and one that needs to be out there if more people are going to become gamers. We saw a similar thing happen when Tom McShea gave Skyward Sword a 7.5 complaining about the controls and tired, outdated story line; he was heavily criticised with comments along the lines of 'IGN gave it a 10 and said the controls were perfect so you are lying to get more publicity'. Now either because of a problem with the game, his hardware, or the way he tried to play it Tom McShea experienced control difficulties and he shouldn't overlook them when writing his review just because Richard George at IGN said it was perfect. Making things worse is that most titles from the major publishers are sent to reviewers with guidelines detailing what should be the focus of the review, also in some cases reviewers are not permitted to discus certain aspects of the game until after it is released.
So how do we fix the review system? Firstly, we need to stop obsessing over metascores, the idea that only games with a 90+ rating are worth playing is nonsense, a better way is to find a reviewer with similar tastes to you and find out what they are playing (I liked the way the ScrewAttack used to rate their games Buy it, Rent it, or F' it). We also need to get rid of the reviewer guidelines and let reviewers say what they want, because if gaming is to stop simply being a hobby and become a normal form of entertainment similar to tv, movies, or music then a wider range of people need to have their opinion of the medium heard. One problem with changing the review system is that games reviewed before date X couldn't be directly compared to games reviewed after by simply looking at their metascores. But, since there is no consensus on what a review score actually means and what is required to get a 90+ score changes over time (the original Rainbow Islands had a 90+ score but the more recent releases have metascores ranging from 47 to 62) these comparisons are often pointless anyway.
Due to the upcoming holidays this is probably the last update until after the new year.
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