Regular readers of our daily High Score posts know that GameSetWatch is a blog that we here at Level Up very much enjoy. So it is with something approaching great reluctance that we take issue with its January 2nd post, titled "GameSetChat: How Do Wii Judge Fun For Mainstream Gamers?" In it, site editor and man-of-many-hats Simon Carless (who also serves as the publisher of both Game Developer and Gamasutra, chairman of the Independent Games Festival and organizer of the Independent Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference) shared an IM exchange with Joel Reed Parker of Game Of The Blog discussing the quality of Wii software and the perceived inability of game reviewers to distinguish between good and bad casual games. Here's a snippet of what they said:

Joel Reed Parker: Man, Wii third-party software really is bad...a friend got a Wii and was asking me for advice about party games and good games and such. According to the aggregate scores sites, not much.

Simon Carless: But I will say that conventional reviewers do a poor job of differentiating fun casual games from bad casual games--or just bad games, in my opinion.

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JRP: I agree wholeheartedly. Same goes for kids' games also.

SC: Like Mario Party 8 has a 62 average on Metacritic's Wii chart, and so does...Heatseeker? Blimey. OK, we definitely need write something about this.

JRP: I didn't even seen the Rayman Raving Rabbids games as high as I thought they would be. It's all the predictable stuff--Mario, Metroid, Zelda.

SC: There's definitely a problem here--Elebits, Korinrinpa, and Dewy's Adventure are all worth checking out, and are lost in terms of scoring with markedly inferior games--even/especially from a 'mainstream' gamer perspective.

It's understandable that in an IM chat, Carless and Parker would use Metacritic averages as evidence of a disconnect between reviewers and consumers when it comes to non-core games. But how truly make a case without examining the text of the reviews? By our lights, the text of a review is where a writer should, in part, attempt to weigh his or her own experience against that of the game's intended audience, be it tween girls or military shooter fanatics. The score, on the other hand, should measure the game against both others of its ilk and against games in general.

Carless and Parker, however, appear to have assumed that the consumer guide aspect of a review (what does the writer believe a typical player might think of this game?) is more important--or somehow separable--from the critical assessment aspect of a review (what does the writer himself or herself think of this game?) when it comes to casual games. So from their perspective, it's a problem that Metacritic scores don't better reflect the taste buds of the mass market. But how can they? All reviews are inherently subjective, no more or less so than Carless' opinion that "Elebits, Korinrinpa and Dewy's Adventure are all worth checking out." So when it comes to the subjective, it's just as plausible to say that the thousands of people who've made Mario Party 8 and Wii Play a hit have terrible taste in games as it is to say that "conventional reviewers do a poor job of differentiating fun casual games from bad casual games."

All Metacritic does is provide a quick summary of what the reviewing establishment had to say about a game. To use it as a consumer guide--heck, even using a single review score as such--is as pointless as using Ebert's raised or lowered thumb alone to determine whether or not to see a movie. The body of his review, and of reviews in general, is where people should begin. It's in reading those lines of copy--and in the case of games whose play styles may diverge from those preferred by the majority of reviewers, reading between the lines--that players can best judge whether or not they may enjoy a particular game. (It might also help if Nintendo allowed publishers to offer Wii game demos for download.)

None of this is to say that game reviewers shouldn't at least consider recalibrating their criteria for assessing game, or at the very least question some of their long-held assumptions about gaming quality. A more nuanced version of Carless and Parker's argument was made in passing in a November 15th Level Up post by Bill Harris of the blog Dubious Quality, titled "How the Videogame Industry Shot Itself In the Joystick--and Why the Wii Has Stopped the Bleeding."

Reviewers, meanwhile, are just adrift when it comes to certain Wii games. Gaming has a canon that extends back over three decades. It’s well-defined, and it’s well-known. When I play a game, I can usually tell you where it fits in the canon. Most of my friends who play games can, too.

Wii games that have a single-player experience, or co-operative play, fit inside the canon. The review scores, in aggregate, are generally very reliable.

Some games on the Wii, though, are almost entirely outside the canon. For reviewers who are used to "getting through" a game, playing a Wii party game, for example, must drive them mad. There’s no completion in a game like that, really--it’s just play.

The difference in Harris' take is that he went on to consider the text of these reviews of casual games as well as the score, writing:

No, reviews and reviewers aren't perfect. But it's up to the prospective purchaser to get a sense of a particular reviewer's tastes, their likes and dislikes, and weigh them alongside their words moreso than the resulting score, in order to determine whether we're likely to find a certain game appealing. We can't expect them to do our work for us. And that goes double for Metacritic.