Anbpinions regarding... Steam Reviews
I'm not sure how to start this one properly, but I'll probably link this from my Steam profile in the future. Well, I missed the opportunity to have my first review on the blog to be about reviews: I hate Steam reviews and this is a "review system review" of some sort.
Disclaimer number one: I have no illusions regarding Steam and/or Valve. They're a store, they're a company, they're in it for the money. They are going to make reviews work the way it generates better results for them. While I would be happier if Steam reviews were different, this is not, in any way, a "they should be doing this" kind of post. Well, they should be better at moderating bigots1, but that's not the point of this.
Disclaimer number two: these are my thoughts at this moment in time. I've been leaving reviews on Steam games for years and I don't know exactly why I started. I can say that I tried a lot of different things in the way I write them, and what I thought about them (and their impact) has clearly changed throughout the years. So if you go check out some of my old reviews and think "wow gee these texts are completely contradictory to the post" congrats, you've discovered the concept of change.
What is a review?
For Steam, a review is a single-digit metric: on a thumbs-up it's a good game, on a thumbs-down it's not. Effectively, all you get to say about the game is 0 or 1. Then, Steam gets to add all the numbers that people submitted and make some statistics - most importantly the Review Score, that is, the positive and negative ratio that sits at the top of the game page and drives (or hinders) the game's sales.
Some may say I'm being dishonest, since there's a little text box there, but it's... Clearly not the focus? While Steam has done changes in the past to ensure that there is some kind of value in the review text2, I find it quite easy to say that it is mostly an accessory, not only due to the fact that text is hard to compute and turn into a metric but also due to the evident focus on the Review Score. It's in the top of the game page, it's in the game's banner when you hover over it on the store, it's literally used to determine what kinds of reviews appear in the review section of the game page (which is the bottom, fyi).
Now then, for me, a review is the exact opposite. It's not a 0 or a 1, it's not a number of stars and it's not a list of gradual two word sentences from "overwhelmingly negative" to "overwhelmingly positive". The simplest way to put it is, it's a fucking review. It's a bundle of words that I write expecting someone to read it and extract their own conclusions from. It's a piece in which I say that I liked or disliked certain aspects of the game3, justify it, and then, if those aspects matter to you, you can decide if it's a recommendation or otherwise.
I believe that not everything can be measured and, as someone trained in the mathematical arts, I know that measurements are limited. That every comparison must be biased and that while there can be value in extracting a metric, I'd much rather extract meaning. So when I'm writing a review on Steam, it bothers me.
Why are you bothered?
Because I want to write my reviews on Steam!
I like seeing the little boxes of text next to each and every game that I played, I want people who read one of my reviews to be able to see what I think about other things, I want the developer of the neat little indie game to get good publicity, and fucking god I want to write. I fucking love writing.
Is it not insulting, that after I've written my miserable pile of words that I birthed, nurtured and fed, Steam has the audacity to say, "reduce them to a boolean"? "Stifle them"? "Make them digestible"? It pisses me off.
It pisses me off that, when I majorly dislike a game and spend a lot of time trying to understand why this game was not for me, I click the button and then the game becomes, effectively, not for anybody else. It pisses me off that, when a game fundamentally changes me as a person and I try so hard to distill that into something that can be understood while not being self-indulgent, it means exactly the same to Steam as if I played it for a couple minutes and said "it's cool".
It pisses me off that I'm not writing something to be read, I'm writing something to be aggregated. I think the review that becomes aggregated, the review that offers a rating, is the ultimate triumph of the product over the art4. Hell, if you don't think games are art, it's still the product taking over the game! It's what justifies shallow, disgusting reviews around the lines of "not worth my 10 moneys because for that I expect at least 5 hours of gameplay time" or that repetitive copypasta with the sloppy one-liners for graphics, difficulty and other "quantifiable aspects". If you're willing to indulge me and go beyond the reviews, it's what justifies games-as-a-service, profit-optimized game-design, dark patterns, yearly releases, and all the other bullshit that plagues games today.
The thing that pisses me off the most, though? I know I won't stop writing reviews on Steam.
So what's the point of all this?
I don't know. Like a Steam review, I wanted to write. If someone allows me the luxury, I would also love to be read.
I don't think there will ever be a time where the reviews on Steam become what I want them to be. As I disclaimed earlier, Steam is a storefront, and this works well for them - it might even work well for the majority of their customer base. That's ok, and I understand that I'm striving for some idealistic vision of games where everyone has time and resources to make games, buy games, play games, and discuss them freely, without the many obvious pressures of the world.
So I still spend some time writing something down when the Steam client asks me candidly if I would like to leave a review, be it whether I just finished a game or whether I found an un-reviewed one in my library and I just happen to be feeling bored.
While I know I shouldn't care as much as I once did, I still like to think about my little words, trying to fit them together nicely and all that. I've been trying to leave less negative reviews5, but I still feel coerced by the false idol of "helping customers make informed decisions" sometimes. I've been trying to make my reviews shorter and move content that I actually want to be read to my blog, but the procrastinating muscles still push me to write things only one time, in only one place.
So hey, who knows how long it will be before this opinion on Steam Reviews becomes obsolete as well? Maybe then I'll squash all this into a thumbs down... You know, for the customer's sake.
anb
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Like, if they really want to pretend that there is this free marketplace of ideas or some bullshit, they don't need to delete the bigots' comments from there, but discount them from the review score for fuck's sake. Their "off-topic" review exclusion thing kind of helps, but due to the nature of review bombs, reviews that are part of the review bomb get massively upvoted and awarded, plaguing the few reviews that show up at the game's page. I love how "not having paid for the game" counts as a definitive Review Score exclusion for Steam but being a racist doesn't.↩
I'm not going to go into detail here, anyone can go and check out the Steam user review info. It has the whole "helpfulness" thing which is neat, but is still exploitable and diametrically opposed to my view on reviews.↩
Some might say, review it, even. This is also why I think it's so annoying when reviews on other platforms have a whole bunch of text and then some form of summary ending card or a rating. If I wanted a rating, I would have searched for a rating, not a review. Well Steam also has that, but we already established that their logic implies that the focus is the rating, with the text being a mandatory-but-dismissable justification.↩
This also applies to other art - and other media - in general.↩
Since I tend not to buy slop and naively believe there is a person on the other side of the screen, whom the positive review helps. While I'm very much of the opinion that things should be criticized and games can be bad, I am not of the opinion that if I criticize a game, it should be swallowed by recommendation algorithms. You shouldn't need to be the next Team Cherry to be able to pay bills, or get some extra income to make games.↩