Ambiguous Name: Eight Point Eight

If you're unfamiliar with this page, please Guess The Trope for yourself. Recently, there was an Image Picking thread on Eight Point Eight, and it turned out many of the thread participants had the wrong impression of what the trope is about.

Ready? ... the trope is actually "fans of a game are upset with its good reviews, because they want even better reviews". Of course, the name is completely non-indicative of that fact. The trope namer is a seven-year-old meme, and the page points out that in some communities the meme is 7.9 rather than 8.8. To most people, 8.8 is either a good score, or just some number.

The page itself has a big disclaimer "THIS IS NOT about complaining about reviews". That's indicative that it's being misused for precisely that. Just a casual glance over the page itself shows it's being vastly misused for simply "games getting a bad grade", or "one critic gives a lower grade than everybody else". And there's quite a bit of complaining.

So basically, this is a big mess. The wick check below (77% misuse) shows that most tropes have absolutely no idea what this is supposed to be for, and just use it for anything involving ratings, but mostly "bad rating" and "rating that I don't like". This page clearly doesn't rate 8.8 out of 10; what are we going to do about it?

edited 9th Aug '13 8:55:58 AM by Spark9

Wick check ahoy! Doing every fourth wick from the list.

Correct (14%): Chrono Trigger Jimquisition Old Man Murray Retsupurae The Frollo Show The Needle Drop

Kind of correct ("middling to average rating plus complaining", 9%): Animal Collective Game Players Magazine Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Borderlands2

Misuse for "bad rating" (35%): Alien Breed Backyard Sports El Shaddai Ascension Of The Metatron Game Cola God Hand Kid Icarus Uprising New Media Useful Notes/Psychology Scott Pilgrim Sonic Storybook Series Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Sugarland The Usual Suspects X-Play Zombi U

Misuse for He Panned It, Now He Sucks!, Critical Dissonance, and/or Complaining About People Not Liking the Show (28%): Blur Broken Streak Disney Adventures Fire Emblem Tellius Gundam Vs Series Klaus Von Hohenloe Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns Of The Patriots Most Writers Are Adults Siskel And Ebert Test Drive The Angry Video Game Nerd Uncharted

Miscellaneous misuse for basically anything involving numerical scales (14%): Death Grips Edge ("aversion of Four-Point Scale") Mogworld Nintendo Power ("hardcore fans will love this, everybody else won't") Speed 2 Cruise Control ("only one reviewer gave this a good rating") Video Games ("bad games paying for good reviews")

Meta / direct trope link / no context: Critical Dissonance Final Fantasy XIV Trope Namers/Internet PC Power Play The Legend of Zelda

Verdict: 77% misuse.

Just a nitpick:

"The trope namer is a seven-year-old meme that most people have forgotten" looks really questionable in light of 7000+ inbounds.

That depends. They may remember 8.8 as shorthand for "any bad grade" or "any grade I don't like", making it a case of Memetic Mutation. Anyway I'll take that out, it's not important anyway.

Actually, the definition is "people take umbrage that a review score doesn't match up with the average". That can go both too high and too low, and isn't always numeric (for example, the Borderlands 2 example from the Wall Street Journal, for comparing it unfavorably to Call of Duty when they're two completely different types of FPS).

edited 9th Aug '13 9:05:41 AM by StarSword

To me, the description is more like "an unexpectedly high or low rating causes outrage"

Yeah, that's a better way to sum up, but it's generally just one review out of many is too high or too low.

Regardless, an important point is outrage, not just "I personally disagree with this review". Simply listing "a game that got bad ratings" is not an example, and neither is "a game that about half the people like and the other half don't" and neither is "a game that fans like but critics don't".

I suspect that that sort of usage exists on any YMMV item.

Hmmm. Just looking at this thread, I'd say the big problem isn't the name, although that's certainly contributing. It's the definition.

In 7 posts, by 3 people, we have three very different ideas of what the definition is:

1. 'fans of a game are upset with a good review, because they think it deserves an even better review.'
2. 'people take umbrage that a review score doesn't match up with the average'
3. 'an unexpectedly high or low rating causes outrage'

The only part that's consistent across all three is that "the fans are upset by a review"

My memory is that, originally, it was closer to #1: "The fans are outraged with what ordinarily be considered a good review or rating, because they think it should be higher."

However, I also have to wonder if this is even a trope, or whether we should just mark it as an Audience Reaction, prune the examples and wicks rather aggressively, and lock it.

edited 9th Aug '13 9:20:35 AM by Madrugada

This is already an Audience Reaction, just for the record.

Incidentally, "Odd Man Out Review" strikes me as a viable and objective trope (as in, one critic gives a markedly different rating for some game/movie than everybody else does). Outrage doesn't strike me as necessary for that one.

I'm really dubious about having yet another page on ways in which fans can be outraged.

The problem is that it's used outside the wiki. Jim Sterling from the Escapist actually titled his video about it Hate.Hate as a pun on the trope name. The most common use seems to be when a decent score is treated as low/an attack on the game because it's below the average the game was given.

edited 9th Aug '13 10:11:00 AM by shoboni

What Spark 9 said.

I don't think that Odd Review Out is tropable. Trivia, maybe, but I don't really think that "this review got mostly 9s, but one person gave it a 7!" (or vice versa) is the sort of thing that this wiki is for.

OK, going to comment on a few items at once, so forgive the occasional jumpy train of thought.

Raising a point of order re: @10: The "unexpected review rating" part is also strongly implied in all given definitions.

@12, I question the tropability of that. Also, Eight Point Eight has already a different definition in the wild; we are not going to use it for that.

As for the example section of Eight Point Eight, I kind of expect more bile and complaining from sections before I approve of cutting them.

Finally, about the rename: Pages with high inbounds/low wicks tend to be Fan Speak definitions or used as such ^Explanation People searching for a definition of the term or just linking to it will lots of inbounds, but few wicks as a) definitions are not very often used and b) they tend to have bad names.. This seems to be the case here, so I would not support a rename, just a wick cleaning, and if the problem returns a conversion in a proper fanspeak term.

I think the common usage of 8.8 could keep its name as a cleaned up trope and some of the misuse taken to new tropes if necessary.

What is the common usage off-wiki, exactly?

I am checking that.

Ok, little luck with Google or the inbounds referral tool. Seems like most of the things refer to the Trope Namer, but some did refer to the term as we use it.

edited 10th Aug '13 10:36:58 AM by SeptimusHeap

That sounds like it's suffering from Trope Namer Syndrome.

I think common usage that I've seen is when a score that decent in and of itself cause backlash and it called a bad score because it's below what everyone else gave it(or just not a perfect 10).

"I think common usage is..." is an oyxmoron though

Using google, the only common usage I can find for 8.8 is, "something got a rating of 8.8". Which by itself is not a trope, of course.

How about Imperfect Rating Backlash? It doesn't get any more descriptive than that.

Probably better: Subpar Rating Backlash, since this trope is about a rating that's worse than the general consensus.

edited 10th Aug '13 7:57:30 PM by Rethkir

I like the Subpar one better.