When I finish playing a game and then give it a rating, I almost always add a one liner comment to complete it. But I know rating a game 2 out of 5 and then going on saying it was average may be raising some eyebrows.
This is the explanation of how I use ratings on TA.
Firstly I am a regular guy and not a reviewer. This is important not in explaining how I give ratings but how I game. Because I don’t have to play everything and certainly don’t want to either. So I choose what I play and only play what I think will enjoy, or occasionally the odd unexpected one out of curiosity. I don’t play all the free to play games either nor all the Games With Gold freebies, not even adding them to my library for later if I know I’m not interested.
And what this means is I am not very likely to play something I don’t like, hence making the most regular worst rating I’d give, ‘Average’, or 2.5 out of 5.
Then in addition to that, I am also one of those people that think ‘nothing is ever perfect’. It doesn’t mean I never give top mark on anything but as a general rule that would be my first reaction.
So this means the likely best rating I’d give out of 5 would be 4.
Because half points are not part of how I think about ratings (if you need more granularity then I say change the base instead), that would leave me with pretty much all my games being either 3 or 4 out of 5. And that isn’t very helpful.
So the way I do it is actually fairly simple.
To start with, the ‘nothing is perfect’ is not stringent so I’m perfectly (…) happy to give excellent games the top mark on the scale.
Then I want to allow myself to have enough range to play with to rank the games, so I apply a non linear scale where the average is 2.This makes my personal ranking scale look something like:
1=Bad ; 2=Average ; 3=Good ; 4=Very good ; 5=Excellent
Now I do use half stars as well but in two different ways.
One is we can’t give ratings of 0, though luckily it shouldn’t happen very often. However if needed (e.g. a game is so terribly shallow it shouldn’t even be called a game) I’d give it half a star.
Then I use them as brownie points when I thought something was particularly nice or special and the game deserves some sweets. Sometimes not sure why but just feel like giving some extra. After all, rating something will always be subjective and irrational won’t it?
Ker
(First posted on 25 June 15)
Kerman's World 