They are framed in terms of the emotional experience of playing the game, be it in awe of the action and spectacle or feeling ripped off for buying the game despite it seeming similar to past games." "The emotionally framed reviews are also generally dichotomous in their scoring, a zero or ten, because it's hard to put numbers to our feelings. Many reviews are typically, 'I love this game' or, 'I hate this game and I hate the corporate greed of Activision'. "Many user reviews lack obvious criteria and systematic reviewing. Really, guy? Is everything either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever? "I think it's pretty fair to say a lot of the user reviews are rants," says King. Does a zero really help your fellow consumers? If Modern Warfare 3 is a zero, what is Superman 64? Worse? How? It's not objective criticism it's a protest. There's no perspective to these sorts of knee-jerk scores and there's very little analysis. Fairness, balance and credibility are shot out of the sky when those upset with one flaw in a title rate it zero out of ten. ![]() You expect value for your gaming dollar, especially in Australia – these reviews suggest that there is at least a significant minority of players who feel that the Call of Duty franchise is no longer delivering along those long-held gaming values of originality, innovation, what-have-you." Many Metacritic users have turned a ten-point scale into a two-point scale "Loved it! 10!" and "Hated it! Zero!" There's no pressure on users to think about assigning numerical scores in context. I'm a gamer, I know where they're coming from. "People aren't necessarily saying the game itself is a 'zero' as an overall package, but are expressing a very strong dislike of the series' overall direction as a yearly series that makes relatively small incremental improvements and changes. "My skim read of the content of these reviews suggests to me that the number one complaint is the perceived lack of innovation and new content from the previous iteration of the series," he continues. He took a few moments to read some of the community reviews of Modern Warfare 3 on Metacritic. King is happy to help us examine exactly what's going on here. Daniel King is a research associate at the University of Adelaide's School of Psychology, in South Australia. What's noteworthy is just how many gamers are so turned-off by it that they are compelled to give it zero out of ten. Gamers are permitted to dislike any game you put in front of them, Modern Warfare 3 included. What's of note here isn't that Modern Warfare 3 has attracted negativity. The critical averages (out of 100) for the game are 89, 88 and 81 respectively. The user score, out of a possible ten points, for Modern Warfare 3 at the time of writing is 3.2 on Xbox 360, 2.8 on PS3 and 2.0 on PC. ![]() The user score system, however, is flawed. User scores are not factored into the critic Metascore, but they sit alongside it. Metacritic differs from sites like GameRankings, however, by featuring a user score. Some companies have even been reported using Metacritic scores as indicators for additional rewards for developers, working a desired 'Metascore' into publishing deals. Earlier this year investors were spooked by Homefront's 72 out of 100 average on Metacritic THQ's stock sank by 21 per cent on the first day of the game's release, well before any sales data was available. The stocks of video game publishers can rise and fall significantly based on Metacritic scores. Over the years the site has become a hugely influential component of the video game industry. Metacritic, if you're not aware, is a website that collates and averages review scores for a variety of entertainment products, including games. There's a vast difference, however, between constructive criticism and what's going on over at Metacritic right now.
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