You might have heard about the recent controversy regarding Metacritic and their addition of info pages for individual developers. You might want to check out their official statement on the matter. Well like many other people in the industry, Adam has taken issue with these individual metacritic pages, and feels this may be a slippery slope towards unfair classification of people who work on video games. Do you agree with The Sess?
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FaerieFyre
You're not getting old. I'm turning 30, this year, and I couldn't agree with you more. This madness has to stop. Not only that, somebody needs to hack Metacritic and crash them... permanently.
MJimiD
First off, it's crappy to 'rate' people to begin with, but to also rate developers based on their games is a whole other level of effed up. As if their games actually say anything about their character. It's far too degrading and far too personal. Human beings are not consumer products and knowing the workings of a video game certainly does not give anybody even the tiniest of right to assume they know something about the quality of the persons responsible for making that game.
Skodmunk
It seems like an unnecessary feature, that cannot be used for anything worthwhile.
Potential employers already have the ability to find out what you have been working on before.
It is just another list, displaying people on the internet to be made fun of.
ArrenKae
Metacritics # assignments for individuals makes perfect sense. It's saying, "most of the works this guy was involved in were this good/bad".
It's not actually rating the individuals as human beings.
Doesn't everything have the potential to be mathematically expressed? That isn't to say it'd be feasible to arrive at a proper formula or that a # assignment would be accurate but it could be done, either crudely or nearly perfectly.
Adam mistakenly thinks that if a number-values assigned to someone it's fixed. The caste systems and feudalism are fundamentally different from assigning someone a score. Castes are escaped only by reincarnation. Nobility, royalty, or lack thereof is for life. An average score of a man's works changes with every new work the man makes. A score like metacritics change, unlike caste status.
Adam implied a solution in his rant. A problem he brings up I'd agree with is a bundled score being applied to an individual. A level designer may do well on his one section of the gameworld but the overall game may still stink. What'd be much better is more comprehensive data, sub-dividing the movies, games, albums, etc. into the constituent employees who worked on them and allowing each aspect associated with an employee to be rated separately. However, I don't see such data being easily collected nor enough people being interested in rating every aspect of a game as a separate unit for such a system to be weighty.
As for Adam's concern about hiring, it's misplaced. He's thinking of the score being like a grade. For an unknown person that could be the case but nepotism is everyone's agent. I expect any serious studio would take a closer look at who it was hiring, his portfolio and previous work (his specific contributions to projects). If a company did have an order from its' CEO for some minimum of experience and this were a foolish choice then it would suffer from it and the market would raise a fitter company.
Consider that game company's already have a cruder standard in place: experience on atleast 3 AAA titles. Consider if these scores did hold any weight at big companies, instead of raw seniority being valued up-in-comers who'd contributed to great works might be more valued. It could also create a power-shift where stars in the industry refused to be credited with games they knew to be poor, making them harder to market or forcing studios to put more into projects to please the talent.
Morgans_pet
I don't think you are getting old Adam. Im a 46 year old gamer and I agree with you.
allenaddens
Maybe I'm simply one of the mindless morons that visit G4tv.com, but I believe the winning formula for G4 as a whole is: Less Sess, More Shriner.
suryu
lol omg really adam thats so true but idk what can ppl do about that they don't seem to do that in the movie industry
C00James
Adam's right. A numerical score could be helpful to someone at a consumer or similar level, but even then it has it's flaws. I can think of the example of Dragon Age 2 which while having some issues is more confused than it is seriously flawed and a numerical score may not do justice to such complexities. When applying a numerical score to a person (which is something we do to every student) it is much more complex. Not every director will have a hit.. Furthermore. the team aspect of the game complicates things even more, the art for a given game might be amazing but the game play may be horrible. Thus is it fair to stick a low score to a person who's art may have been great while other aspects they had little responsibility are the real problem? No.
I hope that this trend doesn't continue since at that point we will be living in a world lacking a humanistic way of seeing professionals, creative and otherwise.
cs22
I disagree. Not on the basis that rating people is good, but on the fact that it is something people have always done. "Oh, that's a Miayamoto game?" And suddenly your interest increases. "Molyneaux is making it?" Oh, then it is going to be overhyped. "It's a Bungie/IW game?" Then it should be good. "Treyarch is making this year's CoD?" Well, then I will stick with last year's. To codify this subjective rating into hard numbers isn't really something we need - but to say that it is an actual rating of the person (as opposed to the expected quality of the games they make) is a little facetious.
BrockymanTM
Once again, Adam completely overreacts....
UltimaBlackMage
You guys HAVE to do that sketch. I was mucking around with a mate with that premise and we had a good laugh.
This_Dave
"I am not a number. I'm a free man!"
Number 6, The Prisoner
fluhtard
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." J. Krishnamurti
Adam... I agree with you.
People need to wake up and realize we are in a prison cell and doing things like scoring people is just going to make the cell smaller.
.gate
I'm in agreement as well. Any time a human being is "branded" with a number I think it is a cause for worry. It makes me think of such circumstances as the Holocaust where people would recieve a tattoo of a prisoner id. Clearly this is much less serious, however someone's worth cannot be designated with a number, and I am loathe to accept any number that would encompass who a person is.
FuzzofPekinopolis
Circumstances change minute by minute in the world of business, sometimes second by second. I know this may sound a little nostalgic, but why would any business use metacritic?
Regardless of your past failures, shouldn't the value be on what you can do for me now? Why are we trying so hard to get away from telling someone they are not right for the job in question. Have the rich men in suites lost there balls?
Some of you that disagree with Adam are helping open a can of worms that can never be closed. It starts there and goes where exactly? Hypothetically - Special report, special report, John Doe can't get a job at the McDonalds. Apparently metacritic says that John once took a leak in a bush behind a McDonalds and was ticketed for it.
Nobody actually knows that John had been in a car for 5hrs. and that the Janitor locked the door when he last cleaned the toilets by mistake. And that he did his best to hide what he was doing.
But it's on Metacritic so it must be true, right? SUITS NEED TO REGROW LOST BALLS
darksilo
totally agree; it would hold game dev's back and we wouldn't have awesome games.
miva2
it's not the score of an individual.
It's the average score of games he has worked on.
If that is made clear i don't see a problem with it.
But I agree that working on a game should not influence a score given to an individual (it's OK to count it with average of games worked on)
Tmidiman
Adam is only right to a degree. I know creating games is a team effort, but what if you saw the same names year after year on bad movie games and Wii shovelware? I've always wondered if the people who release bad games can be tracked the way we can track, say a good producer of games.
On the Myamoto front. This might make sense. Myamoto's games were great when he pulled from his creativity to make then, but these days it seems he is making easy to play games for his young daughter and wife. I have a Wii and like the fun games to a degree and I'm not a big shooter fan, but I can easily tell that Myamoto's games don't carry the same weight they you'd to. Maybe people need to stop telling him he is so great to that he can be challenged to make great games again.
Think about it.
Nerdi_Master
cliff bleszinski was talking about how Metacritic is getting out of hand when he noticed he was getting a higher score than Shigeru Miyamoto. He seems like a pretty humble guy despite his extroverted behavior, but I kind of have to agree with him. Cliff is amazing in his own right, but Miyamoto still deserves a higher score in my opinion, if it wasn't for him the video game industry would be dead.
Thogin
raise hand
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