Virtually everyone I’ve spoken to has either not understood or just outright hated these two decisions in my review scale. That’s fair: I assumed people wouldn’t like them outright, and, even worse, I think I did a poor job justifying them in my original article. That’s what I get for writing and posting while incredibly sleep deprived (seriously, every three minutes it seems another motorcycle, bus or truck goes by my window, rattling everything like an earthquake, and I still don’t have curtains so the streetlights light my room like a 3am crime scene). But, now that I’ve woken up and the Concerta’s kicked in and I’ve had some coffee to boot, I am going to take another crack at explaining why I think these two categories are relevant.

The thing you need to recognize is that the ultimate point of the scale is “should I play this game?” <--this becomes important!!!

Histrionics is defined as "Exaggerated, overemotional behaviour, especially when calculated to elicit a response; melodramatics" (thanks, wiktionary). As such, any gamer who intends to talk about games (and, in the end, these reviews are intended to be read by those two like to talk about games) might, from time to time, be a bit guilty of it. But that's just the name.

To write about games, you need to play games. And to write anything that people might read (a histrionic without an audience is perhaps the saddest of things) you need to play what other people might play. This is where the ultimate question comes in: should I play this game? A mediocre game that is nonethless lucky enough to be drenched in hype should be played more than a mediocre game that nobody's playing, simply because it allows the player to engage in the conversation occurring about the game's quality.

Imagine for a moment that there are two games of roughly equal quality to the gamer. In this example, I am going to talk about Clive Barker’s Jericho and Gears of War. Overall, I’d probably give the two of them about 10/15 total in the other three categories (OCD, ADD, escapism). While somewhat engaging (3ish ADD), and somewhat technically interesting, they left me cold emotionally. However, I maintain that Gears of War is infinitely more important for the average consumer of my review to read. Why? Because Jericho is just another shooter, while Gears is currently insanely important to the landscape of shooters (and games in general, really) out there (due to its massive fanbase, Cliff being insane, the ten shitloads of memes is spawns, “introduction” of cover mechanics to games (which I’d more chock up to Clancy games than GOW but I digress), etc). While I don’t think GoW is better, I think it’s more important to play.

Therefore, 15 points are “is it good?”, and 5 points are “…but does it matter?” This is the essence of the histrionics category.

Keep in mind, also, that a game can get a 5/5 without any hype whatsoever. It doesn’t need to be an indie darling or a September blockbuster. It can be virtually unheard of, really. But, if it is wildly new, or introduces a nugget of gameplay that needs to be remade and formed into something new (and therefore needs to be noticed by people) it would also score high. Imagine Assassin’s Creed, for the sake of argument, was virtually unknown. Even though it has zero hype, and isn’t the greatest game, really, I’d give it big points in this category because the free-running mechanics, while imperfect, are worth talking about.

My auxiliary point was that it “removes hype from the rest of the equation.” In my opinion, this is true: if you are consciously aware of the hype and are attaching it to one part of your review, you are far less likely to let it color the rest of the review. Look at Grand Theft Auto IV, for example: to say that its reviews (98 on metacritic? Really?) weren’t colored by hype would be ludicrous. But, if you played through the game, and recognized that it was excruciatingly important to play for those who wish to stay relevant, you could say that in the end and continue to mark the game on its other points. I mean, I’d give GTA IV a 5/5 in Hist, but in ADD only a 3 (good because it lets you destroy shit for a laugh, bad because every five minutes are punctuated by a phone call asking you to play a shitty minigame or ruin your in-game friendships), OCD a 2 (the engine is sloppy and irritating, the pigeons aren’t sufficiently entertaining to addict) and emotion is 3 (the radio stations are as always a high point of immersion, but the character is again impossible to feel empathy for). So, for ‘Is it Good?’ (the other three categories), that’s a 42% score.

Obviously, a 41% score would outrage people. I don’t care if people disagree with me, but they’d be right in one respect — the review only tells them part of the story. They also want to know if it’s worth playing, which, in my opinion, it is, because it’s a shared experience for so many. The 5/5 in histrionics would bump it up to a 56%, by my scale, which at least puts it in the direction of “play it.” Heck, I might even give the hist on GTAIV a 6/5, but that’s another argument for a later paragraph.

The other great thing about the histrionics score: it makes it really easy to separate. So, if it’s something you don’t want in your score, then instead of (a+b+c+d-4) / 0.16, you could just also have (a+b+c-3) / 0.12 to reach a “hype-free” percentage. But, if my above summation is any indicator, hist is almost a “tilt” category, not simply a “how many dollars advertising” category, so I’m not sure why it’d require removal.

As far as 6/5 goes, I’m not sure what to say. All I can really say is that sometimes, a single part of a game is so good, so transcendant, that it makes up for other faults in a game completely. 6/5 would never pop a game over 100%, because in my process it’d cap there, but it could make up for a less perfect reaction somewhere else. Really, I can think of maybe one game that would reach a 6/5 in each category in each generation, one game that was so pitch-perfect in that one category that it would be worth that extra marker of success. Actually, scratch that: I’d be hard pressed to figure out one for each. The only game I can think of that I’d give 6/5 OCD would perhaps be Football Manager 200X, because nothing else is so complex, so uncrackable, and simultaneously so optional (you can gloss over ANY part you don’t like, like, for example, I don’t much care for the finance-side of things, so it’s automated) that you can spend months attempting to crack its chaos engine and still never succeed.

Is it kind of like “this one goes to eleven?” I don’t think so. 4/5 doesn’t imply something’s wrong with it; it just means it’s in the second-to-top quintile. Similarly, a 5/5 means the top quintile. a 6/5 means top quintile, AND great enough to make other shortcomings less relevant.

In fact, with 6/5, I think it’d be fine if I’d said nothing. If I had just given out a 6/5 at some point, people might say “wow,” but codifying it just made it worse. So imagine I never said it. But I will probably do it one day. Just a warning.