Metacritic’s founder made a little bit of a stir earlier in the week when he went on the A Jumps B Shoots podcast to discuss a wide variety of topics, one of them being that game reviewers were obligated to “review all the shit,” not just good games [[link]] or those expected to sell well. GamePro followed up for a clarification of his remarks.(new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c&cid=872d12ce-453b-4870-845f-955919887e1b'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c" }).render("79703296e5134c75a2db6e1b64762017"); }); “”Below-average games are not being reviewed as often as they once were and, partly as a result, critics have not honed their skills at assigning scores from the lower end of their grading scales.” Marc Doyle told GamePro. “The question of exactly how bad a game has to be to merit a 1 score instead of 2 on the 10 point scale, for example, is not being contemplated with as much experience, care and precision as the 8 versus 9 consideration.” “Even though enduring a 10-15 hour game that has been thrown together must be an excruciating experience for the game critic, picking that game apart in a review with the degree of care and precision that he or she would employ when reviewing a brilliant AAA game would absolutely help to better define a publication’s full scoring scale, making every subsequent score more meaningful,” he adds. Leaving aside our institutional disagreement with assigning scores, I think my reaction to this is, “Of course Metacritic wants reviewers to review more crap. Or more anything. It’s more free content [[link]] for their site.” Yes, film critics have a larger group of lower-score reviews in their histories. That’s because, as Doyle understands, it takes much less time and effort to credibly review a bad movie than a bad video game. “They don’t have to be in-depth treatments, but taking on this challenge would benefit our industry,” he says. Lowering review standards just to slide in an amusing [[link]] slam of a game known to be crap before it hits the shelves does more to erode a publication’s credibility than to buttress it. I think publications will continue to keep their own counsel on this. An obvious low-budget title, movie tie-in shovelware, or adolescent lifestyle sims will be judged against how interested the readership really is in buying a game (not just reading a humorous review of a bad one), the amount of time it takes to play and write a review the title, and what else the writer could or should be doing in that time. Metacritic’s desire for free, labor-intensive content to beef up the credibility of a notoriously arbitrary scale will come in somewhere around, oh, last. You can hear the entire A Jumps B Shoots podcast here. Metacritic Founder: Critics Should ‘Review All The Sh*t’ — and Here’s Why [GamePro]