Ranking systems have been used during every era of humanity. Their first recorded appearance being in Mariana Starke’s 1820 guidebook, which was used to indicate works of art with ‘special value’. Even starting with their first use, the system has always been flawed. It’s undeniable that many of us look at reviews before choosing a restaurant or destination. How else will we get a grasp of how the food is? Most, if not all times, it’s easy to skip over restaurants with 3.2s and go straight to the 4.8s. Some people really get into the nit and grit, reading what people are saying about their experience going in.
This is where things start getting murky. Everyone has lived a different life, and these lives result in certain expectations of things. Going into a sushi restaurant, one can expect that they won’t walk out with food poisoning. If they did, it would make sense to leave a bad review.
But some people are meticulous, criticizing due to unrealistic expectations of how things should be in their head. Salem Bill, working at Flora Café, told me about his run in with a customer the other day, who wrote a bad review about the restaurant after being denied entry when the location was at capacity.
At least with restaurants, these kinds of reviews are easy to spot. It’s obvious when someone’s a snob and is just review-bombing for the sake of it, and that is if people even read the review. When it comes to other topics, however, the medium takes a sharp nose-dive. Take music, for example. Everyone has such a wide spectrum of music taste that it’s almost impossible to have one song everyone likes. Because of this, good music reviews must take a more objective approach, discussing things like the use of instruments and lyrics. While all publicity is good publicity, each piece of music should be up to individual interpretation. Being told how to feel about a certain piece can impact your own outlook, thus influencing your own listening experience and change your listening experience. Alongside this, it can unfairly tarnish the actual music’s reputation.
Video game reviews serve as a great insight into a more professional review space. With large review companies dominating the sphere, these reviews have tanked in quality. One of the biggest names in the business right now is IGN, a platform that has run for years and covers almost every relatively large game that has come out. The problem lies in the fact that they get good writers to review these games, not good gamers. As previously stated, experience can sometimes bring undue criticism, but writing that states the facts of what is successful and unsuccessful in a game can more helpful. It allows the reader to choose if they’d like a game based off that description, not just from a rating on a 1-10 scale. Nowadays, the issue with these kinds of reviews is that too many people can write them, resulting in the process of reviewing becoming somewhat insincere and informal. Someone can just jot down a few of their thoughts on a game after playing only it for two hours, and at places like IGN, it will have the same platform as someone who’s been playing the same game for 200 hours. Reviews are detrimental because of their power to sway opinions before they are formed. They aren’t objective, and due to this anyone being able to write them can impart unnecessary, inflated standards into the webspace for others to see.
If there’s anything that you should take away from this article, it’s to go out and try new things without worrying about other people’s reviews. By finding things you like without worrying about others, you start to build a stronger understanding of the content and yourself. You learn about the world around you while simultaneously discovering your personal taste, instead of someone else’s.
Go out and try things; it builds character.
