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IGN, kotaku, mom dad, parents, polygon, review, scores

As any self-respecting video game review reader knows, reviewing video games is really hard work and nothing hurts more than when someone loads up the article for a new review, scrolls all the way to the bottom, and reads just the score out of ten. Even now, despite this not being a review for a video game, I can sense most readers will see the word “review” in the headline, scroll to the bottom, and find themselves confused to discover there’s no score at the bottom. 

To say the least, it’s demoralizing and belittles the work we do to analyze a game for its artistic merit, which is why many websites have been removing scores entirely from their websites and replacing them with a “recommend” or “don’t recommend.”

Here at Hard Drive, we like to take things a little bit further and more seriously than other video game websites. As such, we are also removing scores from our video game reviews, but instead of a simple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” we are going to be rating all video games with either an Approving Parent or a Disapproving Parent.

Here are some reasons why we think this will be a superior system over review scores:

• They encourage you to make your own assumptions about the game we reviewed, instead of simply taking our score and assuming that’s how good or bad the game is. 

 

• Gamers are less likely to write death threats to our writers who gave a GOTY a 7/10, having seen a photo of the mother or father of the person who wrote the review.

 

• People on Reddit can’t say we ripped off Polygon.

 

• It motivates our writers to think more about the work they put into their reviews, like placing a mirror in front of a candy bowl on Halloween so that would-be thefts have to contemplate their own reflections before taking a number of tootsie rolls, because (even if their own parents won’t read their reviews), now a photo of their mother will.

 

• It reminds readers of their youth, like video games themselves, which are tools to bring us back to the days of our species past, when our job was simply to learn how to solve puzzles (which, in turn, makes readers stay on our website for a crucial 15-20 seconds longer, which absolutely rules for our ad numbers). 

 

• It’s funny to force our parents — who said we would never get a job one day if we spent our youth playing video games — to now become a part of the job we got from playing video games our whole lives.

 

• We don’t have to pay some freelance artist to make us a “thumbs up” and a “thumbs down” graphic.

So there you have it. We hope you now read to the bottom of our articles, instead of just scrolling there immediately. You know, that is the 5% of you who actually click the link from Twitter in the first place. We give this website 3 more months.

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