there's another point that I feel needs to be made.
the expectations of the players tremendously colour their perception of the quality of the game.
just now I read someone asking if in a certain game there was going to be a specific scene/scenario with detailed caveats.. the presence of that scene being what his potential patronage would hinge upon, as he explicitly stated.
I don't get that at all..
Correction, I get it in porn, where maybe you want to see a specific kink so you google that one thing and land on a clip that contains just that, either because that's all she wrote or because the rest of the scene or movie is excluded...and you're looking for your 5 minutes of gratification and visual titilation.
In games I don't understand it.
If you really only want one specific uber-detailed thing, why bother playing anything?
That question aside, the lense through which that particular player plays a game will make it so that if it corresponds to the exact specifications he asks for in one minute detail, the game will be good in his eyes, and if it doesn't no matter the quality, the content, the overal scope of the project, he might just leave a negative review.
Now I am not saying that he'd do that, or bother to review at all, or indeed play it should he not be reassured in his request... but it does make me think that if many people look at the games they play through a similar narrow focus, really no value at all can be given to any single review, and only an average star rating can be sort of embraced in the hopes of it reflecting a commonly held view on the quality of the game.
But then you go on amazon and it's hard to ever find a book that doesn't have at least 4 stars..so what the hell?
