For the average gamer, audience scores are part of the parcel when deciding to see or buy a movie or game. They Google something like ‘Callisto ProtocolMetacritic’, see the number is low, and decide to buy something else. Often, that score is a harmless aggregate of people wanting to try their hand at the critical process or giving their two cents, like telling your friends thatCocaine Bearwas pretty good. Unfortunately, these scores are often the subject of review bombing.
We see this onSteam, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and many more, and while it can sometimes be used to protest anti-consumer practices, it’s also a weapon used by bigots to attack anything they don’t like. Usually, they don’t like anything not catered towards straight white cis men, labelling everyone else a part of the so-called ‘woke agenda’.
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Horizon Forbidden West:Burning Shores is the latest victim in this long-running gamer tradition, with its Metacritic score dragged down to 3.9 out of ten, compared to the critic’s 82 out of 100. I don’t know why these scales are different either. The expansion lets Aloy flirt with, tease, and eventuallykiss another woman. The mere idea of queerness was enough to set people off, and you’ve no doubt heard the criticism levied against the DLC a million times before. ‘Stop shoving it down our throats!’ some reviews said. ‘What does this have to do with robot dinosaurs!?’ others reductively asked. ‘Are there any straights left?’. You know the drill.
Hosting these bigoted reviews, unscrutinised, on official websites alongside legitimate audience and critic scores tells them that their hatred is justified. They’ll go online to whatever sites they feel like spewing their outrage on, and flood replies and threads with their distaste, often to marginalised people directly. We saw this with The Last Jedi,The Last of Us Part 2, and so many other games and movies where the user score was upheld as tangible evidence that they were right.
Bigots can just as easily jump on the bandwagon if they haven’t played the game. I made a Metacritic account to see how the system works, and the only step to take before reviewing was email verification. I could then pick a score, write my thoughts, and hit submit. It’s far too easy to drag down the audience rating, and Metacritic’s attempt to combat this was lukewarm at best.
Three years ago, it enacted a 36-hour waiting period after a game’s launch, but all this means is that the bigots in the review bomb queue have to wait a bit longer to spam their zeroes. More recently, amidst Horizon’s backlash, itvowed to improve moderation, but we need to see it in practice, as previous attempts to curb abuse changed nothing.
The bare minimum in trying to combat this is active and thorough moderation, to weed out the clearly hateful reviews that simply exist to decry marginalised people’s existence. More than that, sites need to verify that people have actually played the games they’re reviewing. Both are things Steam already does, withValve’s goalbeing to ensure that all reviews are “accurate and trustworthy”, meaning that it removes off-topic ones that are “unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game”.
Metacritic, meanwhile, continues to host homophobic and sexist comments for old games. Take The Last of Us Part 2, three years on from launch and you can find plenty of comments angry that Ellie is a lesbian, or thatAbby is muscular. There’s been more than enough time to clean up the page, rather than leaving the score to the whims of bigots who don’t deserve a platform. Instead, these sites continue to allow them to have one, upheld alongside valid and legitimate player critique as if to say that they belong there with the fans who put forward genuine commentary.
Until something’s done to address this long-standing problem, sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes have completely lost their value when it comes to audience scores. They’re no longer representative of whether something is ‘good’, and they don’t offer fans the platform to voice their opinions, as they’ve devolved into review time bombs waiting to go off. The second a developer does anything under the vaguely defined woke umbrella, it’s quickly skewed to alienate marginalised people who are regularly told they don’t belong anyway.
