Not Tropeworthy: Four Point Scale

Two problems I have with the article Four-Point Scale - first of all, it's not really a trope. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, and we've even seen a handful of jokes made about it by some shows, but far from enough to make it a trope. It's more like we're saying, "Hey, magazines! You've got a ten-point scale - USE IT!"

That doesn't make Four-Point Scale a trope. It's more of a bash at reviewers.

Secondly, look at the 'examples'. The list of examples is positively PACKED with... aversions. There are more aversions there than examples, and it's especially chronic in the Video Games section.

I would suggest keeping it in some form, even as a mere (in)correct perception labelled as YMMV without examples. This line of thinking about reviews is actually quite common, whether it's right or not.

This might be the description not matching up to the laconic (reviewers unwilling to rate below a certain #, even though they're plenty of room). Deserves a rename, as scales other than 0-4 are used, and maybe some editing.

edited 31st May '12 8:46:56 PM by spacemarine50

With over 5,000 inbounds, there's really no way we can cut the trope.

However, there may be some overlap with Eight Point Eight.

Criticism Tropes are tropes.

Criticism Tropes are tropes.

edited 1st Jun '12 1:13:34 AM by troacctid

This is Useful Notes.

"Deserves a rename, as scales other than 0-4 are used"

Huh? This is about treating 1-10 as though only 7-10 mattered.

This is worth keeping.

@7: Ratings work like this: rate the work form 0-10, but don;t use anything from 0-7. Simply, the rating scale is 7-10.

edited 31st May '12 11:25:28 PM by spacemarine50

Why are you informing me with what I clearly already wrote? Why not explain the "0-4" part you wrote, which doesn't have to do with this at all?

I do think this is pretty close to the 8.8 trope; both are about an ostensible 10-point scale, where nevertheless a mark of 7 or 8 is considered below average and/or insulting.

Eight Point Eight is a completely different trope. It's an Audience Reaction about when fans are outraged by a review they think rated it wrong.

edited 1st Jun '12 1:17:25 AM by troacctid

Agreed. They have nothing to do with one another.

@13 Well, it's not true that they have nothing to do with one another. The Four-Point Scale is actually part of what makes Eight Point Eight. I know from experience.

Once upon a time, I helped run an independent review site. Part of our deal is that we actually used a legit 1-10 scale (with .1 gradations, and with a 0 available for Big Rigs Over The Road Racing). And since we used the whole scale, 5.0 was our "perfectly average" game. Heck, if we gave something over a 7.5, we really liked it.

You would not believe how much negative feedback and hate mail we'd get for our reviews. People would flip out over a 7.2, and we'd have a form response to send them, with some customization. The first line of our response was always "Please note: due to our scale, this is a positive review."

In a realistic world where people expected a full 1-10 scale, an 8.8 would get minor grumbling instead of massive flame wars. Instead, because people act like 7.0 is the worst thing possible, it's treated by both gamers and some developers as a significant insult.

I could do an entire analysis on the two tropes, based on my experience. But suffice to say, while the tropes end up playing out differently, 8.8 doesn't exist without the Four-Point Scale's existence.

I agree.

Four-Point Scale could probably do with some cleanup and denattering, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it.

8.8 is not entirely unrelated, but it's not the same trope. Four-Point Scale is a behavior on the part of the reviewer; 8.8 is a reaction on the part of the consumer. The reason it's 8.8 is due to the Four-Point Scale effect, but if all the world used the full ten point scale, you'd still have a trope for "Five Point Oh" or something, when a highly anticipated title gets only average reviews and the fans flip out (usually having not yet actually seen the product).

edited 1st Jun '12 10:13:46 AM by Escher

I beg to differ that the trope would be in existence if video game reviews were more typically on a 1-10 scale.

Quite simply, look at book and movie reviews. Yes, there are certainly gripes and complaints about various movies getting certain reviews. But I don't see nearly the amount of flip-outs over, for example, The Avengers getting less-than-perfect reviews - for a really apt example, Rolling Stone magazine actually gave said movie an 8.8 on a ten-point scale (or 88 on a hundred-point scale). It's not necessarily the audience, because there's much the same audience (even if the overall audience skews older for the films and books in question, there are enough fanbrats of the appropriate age/mindset where such whining would have happened somewhere). It's something particular to the medium discussed and the effect the Four-Point Scale has on the mindset of its audience.

EDIT: I of course acknowledge that they are distinct tropes. But like in many cases, one trope comes into existence as a reaction to another. There are so many examples of such action/reaction that I don't think I need to list any examples.

edited 1st Jun '12 10:49:58 AM by 32_Footsteps

"Why are you informing me with what I clearly already wrote? Why not explain the "0-4" part you wrote, which doesn't have to do with this at all?" I said that because that is a 4-point scale, and if you're unwilling to go below 7, might as well reset the scale so 7=0 and 10=4. Also, this trope is due to Always High Expectations (is that a trope here?), where the ratings are either excellent or horrible.

edited 1st Jun '12 1:57:34 PM by spacemarine50

Well thank you for clarifying that.

And this trope is largely due to the fanboy culture that the video game industry and press unwisely cultivated (as that tends to treat the Vocal Minority as the more important audience). Thus review scores are no longer about game quality, but just another weapon in fanboy dick measuring contests.

edited 1st Jun '12 12:41:15 PM by DragonQuestZ

To be fair, it's also about misapplication of education systems' grading standards onto non-academic topics.

It's worth noting that the most common defense for the practice that could hold any legitimacy (I'm not even going to dignify the most common, namely "everyone else is doing it,") is that it mirrors the academic scale that most are familiar with, where you have to get at least 70% of things right to get a passing grade.

Mind you, I find this completely fallacious - first off, grading scales do vary from place to place (Is the dividing line between D and F at 60% or 70%? Is the minimum for an A 90%, 93%, or something else? I could go on, based on my experience with grading systems in four different states). Second, there's the assumption that you need at least 70% of that material to function in the world. A game (or any other piece of the medium)? Not so much.

There's also a huge Fridge Logic issue that I've found many gamers don't quite appreciate. Let's say you divide the scale such that 0-7.0 cover bad games, and 7.1-10.0 cover good games. Why do bad games get eight points of differentiation, while good games only get four points of differentiation? Doesn't it actually just serve to make it harder to judge just how good two different good games are to each other? On the other hand, if 5.0 is your Perfectly Average Game, you have much more space to dissect just how good a given game can be. Why take away space to fully explore what you want to express?

"To be fair, it's also about misapplication of education systems' grading standards onto non-academic topics."

How was my comment unfair?

It's really discussion, and chatter, not anything involved all that much in your average movie. Like I said, it should either be removed, or majorly cleaned up.

Not to mention that even if it isn't related to 8.8, one of them needs a name that better differentiates them.

@21 I take it you're not familiar with "To be fair..." as a general transitional phrase to indicate that the previous statement was incomplete in some fashion.

I am, and it's a stupid meaning, as it is not the proper context of "fair".

Complaints about the evolution of the language aren't the topic - whether this is a trope is.

Is there anything else that needs to happen here?