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‘Uncharted 4’ Review Petition Requests Removal From Metacritic’s Scoring

By Cal Jeffrey
Published on: 07:22 PST, May 16, 2016

An Uncharted 4 review petition was started in an attempt to remove a review from the scoring on the website Metacritic. Michael Thomsen of the Washington Post published a review of the recently released Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End that was less than glowing.

The article is titled “Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End review: This four-part series should have ended after Part One” and it bashes not just Uncharted 4, but the whole series.

“The trouble with trilogies is that they almost never end at three. The same kind of thinking that assumes three parts will be necessary to tell a single story will inevitably need a fourth and fifth shot at getting things right. In that way, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End feels as inevitable as it does unnecessary. Each new entry has strained to add something new to its post-Imperialist pulp fantasies of treasure hunting in far-away lands. It’s a game in which a character reaching for a door knob might trigger the whole building to collapse, leaving them left dangling by three fingers over a subterranean chasm.”

The petition, posted by Dimitris Xorikos of Athens Greece, addresses the review’s author directly saying, “Your Washington post [sic] for Christ’s Sake, not a 12-year-old’s diary. Treat the game with professionalism and respect.”

Although the review does not offer a score, Metacritic assigned it a score of 40 on its website. Most of the game’s reviews are scored 90 and above. Fans are angry at the criticism and that the low score brings the game’s Metacritic score down one point, from a 94 to a 93 according to Stevivor.

The petition to remove the Uncharted 4 review seems trivial at first glance, but apparently this is serious business to fans of the game and the review site. The outrage is probably due to Metacritic being the video game industry’s leading review aggregator.

Gamasutra states, “The review aggregate has, for better or worse, become our standard measure of a game’s performance.”

Metacritic’s scores are very influential on video game consumers. This influence is probably the motivation behind the petition, which is being promoted on Twitter by the voice actor who portrays Sam Drake in the game, Troy Baker.

The Uncharted 4 review’s score of 93 will probably not detract much from Uncharted’s sales figures, so it is likely that there are other valid reasons for initiating the petition.

The first and most obvious reason for asking that the score be removed is that the original review did not provide a score. Therefore, the score of 40 is either subjective or arbitrary. It can only be based on the words in the column since there is no concrete number attached to it in any way.

If a human scored the Uncharted 4 review, then the score is subjective to that person’s opinion of the game and the review. In other words, if 10 people were put to the task of assigning a review score based on the Washington Post’s article, 10 different scores would be produced based solely on opinion. Additionally, if the review was scored by an algorithm that tallies the number of negative words to positive words and comes up with a ratio, then it is potentially arbitrary because the algorithm would presumably have no way to discern the context of the negative or positive words.

Another reason that the Uncharted 4 review petition seems valid is that the column in question is not really a review at all. The article written by Thomsen was published in the Comic Riffs section of the Washington Post’s website and does not talk specifically about any of the game’s mechanics or aspects.

According to SegmentNext, “many fail to understand that this review is a parody.”

Adding weight to this line of reasoning is the fact that the Washington Post published a more positive review in the entertainment section of its website. Oddly enough, this article was overlooked by Metacritic even though it was published a day before. It seems that there is some substantial justification for the correction to be made. Replacing the Comic Riffs review with the entertainment review sounds reasonable and logical.

Why a petition is necessary to remove the review is anyone’s guess, but the Uncharted 4 review has certainly stirred up a hornets nest among readers and gamers.

[Image via PlayStation]

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