Jake

Idle Weekend February 26, 2016 - Hack the Planet

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How is this not an argument that 5/10 is a low score? If a site is only reviewing things that they expect to be good, then the average score should trend upward. So even if a game hit the "platonic" average of 5/10, that would end up being lower that what you would expect if the site were self-selecting for "good" games.

 

Yes, "low" for the site, but not low as an absolute score, which is what they're presented as being. If there was a game site that was extremely selective and only ever posted really good 9 or 10/10 games that then gave a game an 8, there are a couple ways that can be seen. In one sense, it's unprecedented, it's the lowest review score they've ever given, and it's the worst game they've ever played (that they've had an official opinion about). Or, you could see it as an 8/10 which is still really good, because it's an 8 OUT OF 10 AND FUCK EVERYTHING I'M OUT

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I don't really think it's reasonable to interpret a score in any other way than in the context of how that score's scoring system has traditionally been used. Almost nobody has ever used 5/10 to mean "okay," so a mathematically-driven interpretation of a 5/10 score to mean "okay" is entirely meaningless. 5/10 is not actually meant to be read as literal fractions of a whole (in which case we'd say 0.5 or 1/2 or something, instead of 5/10); points awarded out of ten are meant as a very roughly normalized way to sum up a reviewer's overall reaction.

Even in a theoretical mathematical ideal, this would STILL only have meaning if there was some kind of empirical way to represent what "okay" or "half of full potential" or whatever actually means. If we're using 5/10 as a literal median point and saying half of games get below that score and half of games get above that score, I suppose it would have SOME intrinsic meaning, but that's still not really useful to any actual consumer, because they presumably aren't in the business of intentionally and regularly buying games that get abysmal scores, which would mean they wouldn't have any real practical frame of reference for what something that hits right in the middle of this ideal scale would play like. Ultimately, if they ever got used to such a scale, they would get there the exact way they already do now, which is to mentally frame it in the context of other similar scores from similar publications.

I should say that I'm not a big defender of scores as a critical function in the first place. But since they do actually exist and are extremely common, I think it only makes sense to receive any given score in the spirit clearly intended by its publisher, rather than a theoretical ideal which in no way contributed to the process that led to the publication choosing it.

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I think it only makes sense to receive any given score in the spirit clearly intended by its publisher, rather than a theoretical ideal which in no way contributed to the process that led to the publication choosing it.

 

"intended" is imo not so easy to pin down tho. I've definitely seen publications claim that a 5 is indicative of "ok," when what they actually do doesn't seem to really align with that.

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This was a good podcast, though I would have liked to see a little more discussion of how the games of the 1990s engaged (or didn't!) with the technological developments of the era and that imagined cyberpunk future. I also really enjoyed Austin's contributions, even though I'd have to disagree with him about Codename STEAM; sure, it could have used a little more time in the oven, and it's sometimes frustrating, but I'm basically enjoying it.

 

I saw a poster on the tube the other day advertising a new fashion collection 'inspired by the 90s'. It made my heart sink, because the main associations I have with that time aren't especially inspiring. Like Danielle, I was very young back then - 14 at the turn of the millennium - but here in the UK, it always felt like all the interesting tech-inspired stuff was happening somewhere else. Even if you had internet access, there was still no practical way to download or stream music and video, so in terms of multimedia access you were still limited to cinemas, movie rental and terrestrial broadcast TV. 

 

And most of that stuff was pretty bad! Lad culture and 'britpop' were absolutely dominant in a way that I found alienating; it was supposed to be disinhibiting and optimistic, but it was really just a reactionary way of asserting a new normal based on the worst aspects of the 80s. So it was all about cars and money and power and sex, and empowering women to behave just as badly as men, but with a supposedly self-conscious twist. Even if you look at something like PC Zone magazine (which is now regularly cited as a touchstone for games journalism) that thing was also not a million miles away from the awful worlds of Loaded and FHM. 

 

What crumbs you could get of alternative cultures were precious indeed. I remember it being an amazing new thing to hear at school that some other kid had satellite TV at home so he could watch this radical American show called The Simpsons - and that was light years ahead of anything that was happening on British television at the time.

 

All of this is not to suggest that there weren't some great things to come out of the 90s! But there was a lot of dreck, too, and so much of the good stuff I've had to discover long after the fact. I wonder if this is how people who were young in the 80s feel about that decade.

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Anime's a funny medium for cyberpunk because, even though it is the venue for several foundational texts in the West (namely Akira and the first Ghost in the Shell movie) ...

  • Akira (1988)
  • Ghost in the Shell (1995)
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) - Whatever else, the production design for the technology and locations is a consummate expression of cyberpunk.
  • The End of Evangelion (1997)

 

Thanks for the reply! I have of course seen the films listed above but I will definitely check out some of the rest as I am in need of a new film project.

 

As an aside I found a complete set of Evangelion DVDs at a local bookstore for 60 bucks and I snatched them up. What a steal.

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"intended" is imo not so easy to pin down tho. I've definitely seen publications claim that a 5 is indicative of "ok," when what they actually do doesn't seem to really align with that.

That's true; what someone CLAIMS something to be isn't necessarily accurate. But I think it's generally not that hard to look at the actual reality of their published scores and see what it reflects, broadly.

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The anime breakdown was pretty good, to expand a little on the cyberpunk reading front:

Here’s a quick reading list of some stuff that was formative for me, I break down some of the authors and titles below the list, this is mostly early stuff, I’m sure there’s interesting cyberpunk that was made a little more recently (Altered Carbon was pretty decent):

William Gibson, the Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive)
William Gibson, Burning Chrome (short story collection)
William Gibson, the Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties)
Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net

As always Gibson is the starting point, and a good mixture of aesthetic and theme.

Considering Blade Runner is considered THE movie canon, you can't talk about cyberpunk without Philip K Dick.  His stuff is often a little further down the rabbit hole than the depictions of cyberpunk that we're used to.  I remember reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? expecting something more like Blade Runner, and got a world that it took me half the book to wrap my head around.  I think reading Dick was important for me to understand the way 60's drug culture and altered reality played into a lot of the hopes of technology some of these people had.  I think that theme is much more important to early cyberpunk than what we are left with now.

 

Neal Stephenson is another author that was a progenitor of cyberpunk.  Snow Crash is pretty renowned, but I feel like it hews more to the aesthetic than the ideas and cultural descriptions of Gibson, I heard it was supposed to be a comic book originally, and to me it shows.  The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a better cyberpunk story in my perspective.  Cryptonomicon has some ideas about technology that relate to cyberpunk but is basically void of the aesthetic entirely.  (One of my favorite novels for the ‘punk’ of cyberpunk is a novel of his called Zodiac about eco-terrorism, but I wouldn't call it cyberpunk at all)


Bruce Sterling also has some great stuff, if you're only going to read one book, read Islands in the Net.  I also enjoyed Zeitgeist, but it’s more along the lines of Cryptonomicon, a future looking tech thriller, rather than cyberpunk.

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I feel like there's an idea just kind of tapping on the door of the above conversations about 5/10 scores that no one's really acknowledging: Average is bad. I know it sounds like a dickbag elitist thing to say, but come on.

 

I refer back to Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. I personally feel like, if anything, that guess is a bit generous -- but whatever, put whichever number you like in there. The corollary is that 80% of everything that's above average is still crap. If review scores were actually supposed to be normalized rankings of all the games that have ever been released, basically every game you've ever played or heard of in any context except for it being extraordinarily awful would probably be in the top 10%. I think 5/10 is an unequivocally bad review.

 

Also, kids, if you're learning a skill, never aspire to be merely above average. Nearly half the people in the world manage that without even trying!

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I bought the current Humble Bundle because it had Else heart.break() thanks to the conversation about it on this episode.

 

Thanks for making me spend money, Weekenders!

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