Truth About Star Ratings

From xkcd. Seemed very apt to me.

Or, you know, this.

"I got lost and wandered into the world's creepiest cemetery, where the headstones just had names and star ratings. Freaked me out. When I got home I tried to leave the cemetery a bad review on Yelp, but as my hand hovered over the 'one star' button I felt this distant chill ..."

Love xkcd. Also in case no one clicks the link -- here's the tooltip of the image.

I got lost and wandered into the world's creepiest cemetery, where the headstones just had names and star ratings. Freaked me out. When I got home I tried to leave the cemetery a bad review on Yelp, but as my hand hovered over the 'one star' button I felt this distant chill ...

EDIT: Damn, Lord Andrew beat me to it =P

While we don't believe any game is perfect, we recommend this game without reservation.

Still very good and easy to recommend, though it doesn't quite live up to its full potential.

The halfway point. An inherent appreciation of this game's specific gameplay style, characters, subject matter, and so on may play as big a role in your enjoyment as the actual quality of the game.

This game's problems outweigh its good qualities.

This game will make you wish you had died in a fire moments before turning it on.

What is this half star bullcrap?

@GERALTITUDE said:

From xkcd. Seemed very apt to me.

That is, actually. Good find.

I don't think that reflects Giantbomb's reviews at all.

Besides, there are different levels of "crap". Transformers: War for Cybertron, according to Jeff, is not a bad game, but it's one that will be presumably forgotten in the future, whereas Daikatana is a "crap" game because it's a mess of horrible game design and really bad decisions.

5-star reviews are better broken down this way:

@jimmyfenix said:

While we don't believe any game is perfect, we recommend this game without reservation.

Still very good and easy to recommend, though it doesn't quite live up to its full potential.

The halfway point. An inherent appreciation of this game's specific gameplay style, characters, subject matter, and so on may play as big a role in your enjoyment as the actual quality of the game.

This game's problems outweigh its good qualities.

This game will make you wish you had died in a fire moments before turning it on.

@believer258 said:

interesting, care to kill this humorous perception with any more insight?

here is another one from xkcd, i don't get it, angels aren't real.

/s

Sadly this is how many people on the internet view star ratings.

. . . great

It's meant for user reviews that add up, like every online shop has. Come on guys...

"Has only one review" suggests to me that this is intended to refer to aggregate ratings, such as the App Store. Or Yelp, as mentioned in the tooltip.

Giant Bomb's review guide is therefore irrelevant.

Well seeing how some people get riled up when a AAA title gets anything lower than four stars, I'll have to agree.

Oh. I get it. Humor.

Also, I feel this probably falls under spam

Topics linking to websites, images, videos or other material without any original commentary from the topic creator.

You may want to change that. Or not, I'm not sure how much you care about this. Or how much there is to even add or to talk about.

@mnzy said:

It's meant for user reviews that add up, like every online shop has. Come on guys...

That XKCD comic is about aggregate reviews, for example Amazon customer reviews. In that situation, yeah, it does make some sense. It has zero relevance to Giant Bomb's editorial reviews.

It's also probably spam, since it's just an image/link with very little text to provide discussion value. So I'm locking it.