Reviews Are The Gospel - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Do you really need someone in authority giving you a simple yea or nay before you buy anything? Why don’t you roll over so they stamp on the other side of your face?"
-Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw (Game Critic), Zero Punctuation, on video game reviews

For whatever reason, video gamers tend to, on the whole, place more stock in professional reviews of works than fans of any other medium. Only arguably second to news, reviews of the newest games are the main attraction of most gaming sites and magazines. In fact, review scores are just as likely to be used as personal opinions in Console Wars debates or to argue which of the newest Killer Apps is the best.

This is why Eight Point Eight situations occur with such startling regularity. Of course, while there's nothing wrong in placing some stock in the opinions of others, review scores shouldn't be regarded as authoritative, simply because reviewers are, like everyone else, human beings with their own personal tastes and preferences. Not to mention that reviewers are not exactly always trustworthy...

One could say there's some logic behind all this — after all, purchasing a fifty dollar game is a much riskier endeavor than buying a book or movie ticket, so it makes sense that many people might regard professional reviews higher than they should. However, over-reliance on reviews is just as common in areas where software piracy is ubiquitous. Another reason perhaps is that video games as a medium demand more time and attention from us than most other entertainment forms, so most of us need to be discriminatory in the games we play.

Culturally speaking, this deference has existed for awhile, as aftershocks from The Great Video Game Crash Of 1983. One of the big problems of first and second generation video games was the general absence of any review infrastructure. This leads to many, many upset consumers who had to guess whether a game was any good and quickly became frustrated to discover they just put a lot of cash down for a very poor port or imitation of an arcade game they thought they liked. This is the reason for the "Nintendo Seal of Quality"- which wasn't supposed to mean "awesome game" so much as "playable game". The seal's importance greatly diminished with the advent of modern video game journalism, since third-party reviews ultimately serve the same function, only with more detail.

Also said to be a phenomenon among fans of live theater. Indeed, reviews can influence the act itself over time, replacing actors or modifying scenes slightly.

Examples

Professional Wrestling

Smart Marks following Dave Meltzer's (of the Wrestling Observer) reviews of matches. There are only a few instances (in the US, at least) where he gives a match a five-star rating.

New Media

In the IGN.com comments (and probably every other gaming web site) on reviews of games that have either not been publicly released yet or have JUST been released on that very day, you'll often see about a hundred comments' worth of arguments between people who "know" the game deserves more than the review score and people who "know" the game deserves either the score it got or lower. All this bickering from people who haven't even played (or come close to finishing) the game yet is an example of Eight Point Eight and Complaining About Shows You Dont Watch, but it seems to be rooted in a near-religious belief in this trope. People try to refute or defend the review as if it's a scientific experiment. One that they haven't done yet, to boot.
- This often causes many games that aren't given perfect or really high scores to be abandoned. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yet if you only play what others tell you to (Aka Sheep mentality) then it's not really the eye of the beholder but the eye of the OTHER beholder isn't it?
This troper uses Yahtzee's reviews as a misplaced standard, given his pessimistic tendencies this troper usually rates games one bar above what he does. For example: If Yahtzee thinks it's bad, its really mediocre; if Yahtzee thinks it's mediocre, it's probably good etc.
- And if it's Portal?
  - Then it's ~~one step below~~ Jesus.
- And if it's Psychonauts it's one step above Jesus.
  - And Branston Pickle?
- It can cause the world to explode if you add no more heroes to it
  - And it would be awesome.

Music

Pitchfork. Period. It lacks an editorial policy, and has been known to take part in some very unethical practices (of which This Troper has been a witness to one). It does not state for the record how its ratings systems work, though the best guess of many is that 7.0 is the de facto standard of what is considering a "good" record or album, let alone one that qualifies for the prestigious "Best New Music" badge. Further, many of their reviews are questionably written. Any hipster will use their logic to deny reading it, let alone influence their record-buying/pirating decisions, especially after it began its partnership with ABC. But ever since the Arcade Fire's Funeral LP, any time Pitchfork gives a "Best New Music" badge to an album from a new and upcoming band, that album's sales/downloads will significantly increase, and the band's rep will increase exponentially. It's very difficult to deny that their reviews are considered influential over the hipsters to some degree.

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