Just a bit ago, I saw a couple tweets about one of Jim Sterling’s articles at Desctructoid, which takes Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski (CliffyB) to task for calling folks who gave Gears of War 3 an 8/10 “haters.” Bleszinski started off an interview with VG247 by saying he’s “doing great, apart from a couple of haters.” He’s referring to Eurogamer’s review of the game, but a quick glance at Metacritic shows they’re not the only ones with an equivalent 8/10 score on their reviews. Adds Bleszinski, “I didn’t quite gather it. I don’t want to come across as defensive. How do I phrase this properly? When people rated Gears 2 higher than Gears 3, it kind of upset me because I know Gears 3 is a better game on every level.” 

At first, I thought about retweeting what I caught on Twitter with a comment like, “Diva,” “Ugh,” or “Egomaniac.” Because as someone who writes reviews as a large chunk of my living (the rest made up by non-review writing), I not only deal with the frequent struggle of scoring new video games, but also comments on reviews where readers explain how wrong I am for stating my opinion and then trying to affix a numerical score to it. And comments where people say an 8/10 is ludicrously low, because, “How on earth could anyone give [GAME TITLE] anything less than a perfect score?” So my first feeling was, “Huh, what a tool.” Because an eight out of 10 is a great score — one that I award to sharp, memorable, and worthwhile games. But I didn’t end up tweeting anything about the story, and just let it be.

Aside from a small bit of the multiplayer beta, I haven’t played Gears of War 3 yet. In fact, I’m just now going back and resuming my saved Gears of War 2 game from December 2008, though I’m undecided as to whether I’ll finish. But I do intend to play Gears of War 3 in the very near future. Regardless, I started playing a bit more GoW2 after reading that tweet, and within a few minutes I was thinking again about what Bleszinski said.

I’ve certainly struggled with the notion of comparing one series iteration to the next, whether a new version is “better” than the last or comes up short in some meaningful way, but I think it’s well worth stating that game series don’t exist in a vacuum when it comes to reviews. Just because your last game earned a 9/10 in 2008 doesn’t mean that the new one — which you claim to be significantly better — deserves the same score in 2011, let alone a better one. How much has happened in the gaming world over the last three years? I’m playing Gears of War 2 right now, and I recently played a bit of Resistance 2, both of which shipped in late 2008. Both feel like three-year-old games at this point, whether visually or mechanically, because developers are always iterating and improving upon theirs and other creators’ works. Hell, I just reviewed a shooter that made me rethink my position on a competing shooter from six months ago; “standards” change quickly and from all sorts of sources.

And while it’s easy to say, “Oh, [OUTLET] reviewed the last game and gave it a [SCORE], but this one’s better and they gave it a [LESSER SCORE],” we’re talking about the opinions of individual reviewers. Sure, we’re likely to take into consideration the past scores and opinions of the outlet, and sometimes an editor will chime in on such an issue and discuss your score with you. But the majority of reviews are just that — the perspective of one person, albeit viewed from the lens of the outlet’s voice or review approach.

Though your average reader won’t have any insight into this matter, folks who are in this industry and who pay close attention to it know just how different things are in games journalism now versus three years ago. Major outlets have folded, reopened, changed their editorial tone/focus, dropped or drastically changed their print editions, and been purchased by other publications. More notably, how many editors have shifted jobs in the last three years? It’s amazing how much bouncing around has occurred in this industry, even just of late; and any notion that people who work for one publication hate their rivals is silly because, let’s face it, everyone has worked pretty much everywhere at this point. Plus, a lot of folks have left games journalism/criticism to pursue jobs in PR or game design, or other things entirely. And that’s not even considering longtime freelancers like me — my writing has appeared in more than 30 professional outlets, and I’ve reviewed games for most of them, including games as big as Gears of War. I’m just one person!

Circling back to my main point, Bleszinski’s reaction is one of someone who views that series within a vacuum, where the changes in game design and video game experiences — in the shooter genre and elsewhere — have no impact on how the latest, reportedly better iteration in his series scores with reviewers. It’s easy for me to hear something like that and be irritated or upset, because it’s the same thing we see all the time in comments; or when GamesRadar gives anything a score higher than an 8/10 and someone mockingly replies, “So it’s better than Halo: Reach?”

But why wouldn’t he feel that way? Aside from simply wanting his creations to be well-received and lauded, he’s likely been pretty much laser-focused on this game for the last three years — and this franchise has dominated Epic’s attention for much longer than that. That’s not to say he doesn’t play other games and know what’s happening in the world of video games, but of course he thinks Gears of War 3 deserves equal-or-better reviews than its predecessor. Because to him, all that matters is that it’s a better game.

I understand where he’s coming from. But it’s not nearly that simple. Between everything else that’s happened in video games over the last three years, writer/outlet shake-ups, and the absolute core fact that we’re talking about people’s opinions — not objective lists of features, but experiences and ever-swaying personal feelings — it’s not reasonable to think that every game is going to score better than the last because it looks better, has fewer bugs, or includes more competitive or innovative features. Criticism isn’t science. Don’t call someone a “hater” because they thought your game was great, just a bit less so than you’d expected. It’s an unreasonable and childish response, and one that shows no respect for people who clearly enjoyed and recommended your creation. Even if some notably lower reviews pop up in the coming days, these people aren’t your enemies, nor are they wrong. They just see the game differently. Just as average players will next week.

And we’re still talking about one of the best-reviewed games of the year, with several “perfect” scores out there, including from outlets I write for. Sadly, this is the latest example of people within (and outside) the video game industry expecting only the highest scores, while outliers — in this case, people who gave a popular game “only” an 8/10 — are discredited, called “biased” (or frequently, just “BIAS”), or assumed to be holding some sort of grudge against that game/developer/system/etc. The Official Xbox Magazine review of Dead Space — written by ex-intern/freelancer and still-swell person Meghan Watt — is the absolute classic example of this, as it reportedly knocked the Metacritic score below 90 and caused a massive shitstorm at EA, which led to a developer editorial about it down the line in Game Informer. The online version of the review has 389 comments on it; she took a beating from readers who posted sexist and hateful things about her simply because she didn’t like a video game as much as most other reviewers. It’s one of the ugliest situations I can recall in my time either writing about or closely following games journalism, the latter part of which dates back about 15 years now.

Luckily, this example is much less extreme than the Dead Space debacle, and Bleszinski’s flippant comments aren’t likely to cause anyone emotional duress, though it’ll no doubt inspire waves of competing tweets and extravagantly long blog posts such as these. But it stems back to a series of misguided expectations that many video game fans carry about the size and stature of certain games, how AAA games deserve subsequently glowing scores, and that reviews for franchise games better fall in line with what was said before, otherwise the reviewer is ignorant, biased, or spiteful. Luckily, that’s almost always not the truth — though that perception isn’t a fun one to deal with, whether you’re the one on the other side of the supposedly “hateful” review or just another reviewer caught in that miserable web of reader expectations.