 Great. Fantastic. Okay, review six. The week I reviews 100 point rating scale. So I realized this video probably needs some context. Last weekend I performed my review of John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed live in London and while most of it exists solely for the people who are in that room, something I'll be talking about more in-depth in a video coming up soon, I did record this one section review six about my review scale because it is something that a lot of people have asked me about and I figured if I was going to let any of the world see any part of this, this is the one that they would see. So enjoy, I guess. I'm sorry my hips moved so much I had been standing for several hours at this point. It sometimes feels like review has become a dirty word on the internet in general and on YouTube in particular, one that is synonymous with vapid bullshit done by people whose critical faculties shouldn't have gotten them through middle school and I can understand why but I still chose to put review in the name of my YouTube channel because I believe in the value of the word. Like not to be hella pretentious but I do think that many of the issues are a direct result of the democratization of criticism. In the olden days we had professional critics and newspapers and magazines and the like and you pretty much knew what to expect from them nowadays not so much and that is both fantastic and terrible. In text I think there are basically two types of reviews which I will oh so reductively describe as breakdown and criticism but once you go audio-visual there is at least a third which I will call the summary let's consider all three. The breakdown is what I did for the first several years of my critical existence separate a work into its component parts and focus on the individual at the expense of the whole maybe there'll be an overview of the plot it'll just be the entire sequence of events laid out in dry prose but in either case there is minimal attempt at understanding any of it what it is trying to do why it's trying to do it. A breakdown considers a work not as art but as product something to be physically rather than intellectually dissected. There are obvious reasons why this would be ideal for a writer the most significant being that it's fucking easy intentionally missing the forest for the trees makes your job super simple and there's a sort of logic when it's applied to game reviews specifically like I don't think you should individually consider each component of an experienced gameplay story graphics sound etc but I understand the impulse when I was a dumb baby writing about Resident Evil 4 I gave it a 10 and that was fine but that 10 was fundamentally different than a 10 pretty much anywhere else because it was sort of mathematically determined you see while GameSpot has switched to a more standard format in recent years back in the day a score was actually an average of individual scores given to its components as well as a nebulous tilt that was the only acknowledgement of any humanity behind us the rest was presented as cold calculation the illusion of objectivity and to that point most reviews that proudly proclaimed their objectivity would fall under the breakdown banner which is to say they are basic boring bullshit criticism acknowledges the components of a work naturally while understanding that it isn't necessarily the sum and certainly isn't the average of its parts they're less concerned with plot than theme when events are discussed it's because they exemplify some broader points the critic wants to make and not because a checklist requires their inclusion as my writing shifted away from games and towards the much more established critical world of film my own shortcomings there became very clear and ever since I've made it my mission to engage on a more than surface level to be a critic at a bare minimum I want my attempts at understanding a work to help you consider yours and if I can't do that I should just delete my channel and live my boring life offline but there is a problem the canon which I'm using here to mean the base set of experiences with the art form that someone must have to be good at their jobs professional critics have stupidly vast wells from which they can and do draw basically nothing is new which means everything can inspire comparison to the history of that or frankly any other medium because a good critic will know more than just their own done well this helps contextualize the work gives informed readers etc a dopamine hit when they understand the references and provides uninformed readers etc a place to start on their journeys towards informadness done poorly you run into the boss baby problem where someone who has only ever seen the oscar nominated film the boss baby turns around and gets serious boss baby vibes from citizen kane because it also centers on a man child in a suit trying to overcome his daddy issues and become the most important person in the world through mischief I assume I haven't seen citizen kane I haven't seen most things I probably should have it's why I tend to couch my comparisons in caveats I know a lot about modern Korean cinema for a white guy that was honestly more true in 2018 than it is in 2022 but you know when I started writing about Korean cinema in 2011 after only having seen a half dozen films most of which were directed by Park Jin-Wook I said some really dumb shit about the industry I needed to get educated so that I could be educational but at the same time I don't want to read a fucking bibliography to understand a review and I'm not trying to make reviews that need them either this is why I have so much difficulty getting through academic work in particular every few lines is a reference to another paper or book that I haven't read and I get why in the abstract but in practice it feels like they don't want plebs like me to engage and that sucks although it's not written academically I felt real heckin uneducated while reading the Anthropocene Reviewed some of this is a function of age John Green has been around longer and has had more time to ingest things and also that's more of his literal job than it is mine but I'm 30 now and I can't really hide behind youth anymore take for example Green quotes poems in nearly a quarter of the reviews included in this book and every single time I felt a twinge of frustration because I don't get poetry which it goes back to the whole metaphor thing I was talking about before the break I can put all of the internal rhymes I want into my rap songs but those punchlines that the art form excels at are beyond me I want to read more literature and poetry I want to understand academic texts and fill in the massive gaps in my knowledge of cinema and television and music and video games and everything else that I talk about on youtube and in my life but when it comes time to do that I don't tick tock taught me that executive dysfunction is a thing and it sure does sound like me I've always found serious attempts at self-education paralyzing because it's ultimately a zero sum game there is a finite amount of time that I have and I don't know how to spend it well every video essay I watch is a series of poems I didn't read every video game I play is a handful of movies I didn't see every tick tock binge is an online course I did not take to better myself or do any of the other things I just listed though it's the thing I'm most likely to end up doing while a voice in the back of my head calls me an imposter whose only expertise is in his own narcissism and is the voice wrong I talk about me all the time both because I like talking about myself and because I am the one subject that I know I'll get right or at least the one that no one can reasonably tell me I got wrong the focus on myself might be a part of why people sometimes call what I make video essays and certainly meaningful criticism on youtube is often presented in that format but it's not the only way to engage with the work meaningfully the difference between the two is largely a matter of framing a review focuses critically on a subject while an essay focuses critically on an idea you can make a review of the batman that talks about how the character's legacy resulted in this specific batman and you can make a video essay on batman in general that talks about how the batman fits into the character's legacy and the text of the two can be largely identical with the emphasis on different syllables and that's great a review can be every bit as critically rigorous as an essay it should be though by virtue of focusing on one subject it'll likely be shorter unless you're me and talk about inside for an hour or cj the x and do that for two and a half times as long but I get the desire to shun the word review because it has been so thoroughly bastardized on this platform specifically by the rise of the summary which is to say the thing but shorter and with some color commentary thrown in it's commentary in the youtube sense of the term channels breaking down movies and tv shows the exact same way they break down apology videos brief explanation lengthier demonstration ultra brief commentary now I wouldn't really call these homages to the nostalgia critic reviews but I'm also not willing to fight to the death over it even if I'd probably win interestingly scores are a relatively recent addition to media criticism while michelin stars have existed since the invention of the automobile ratings weren't applied to film until the 1950s and didn't become widespread until the internet age to john green at the five star scale doesn't really exist for humans it exists for data aggregators making conclusions about quality from a review is hard work for artificial intelligences whereas star ratings are ideal for them I disagree on a few points for example the tomato meter not an ai it's barely an algorithm in the massively complex way that we tend to think about them nowadays but also the idea that they're meant for computers grates up against the fact that they've existed since before computers but I understand what he's getting at a review score is a tldr of a tldr not so much distillation as punctuation when green started writing reviews for book list he had 175 words to work with which is paltry but still allows for near infinitely more nuance than a simple number ever could no matter how many decimal points it goes to he's also right that the sometimes controversial decision to use ratings and what ratings to use often comes down to aggregation whether star number thumb or letter you will want something easily ingestible into rotten tomatoes or metacritic or whatever because if you are not aggregated do you even exist by that metric my former critical home kind of didn't and kind of still doesn't flixes.com editor-in-chief Matthew Rezak was already a rotten tomatoes approved critic when he co-founded the site but as far as the aggregator is concerned it is a one-man operation and not itself tomato meter approved still when matt linked his early flixist reviews there he introduced likely the most rigorous scale to have ever been included in their ranking or possibly anyone else's one so ridiculously precise that when the site was founded in 2010 I wrote and subsequently did not send an email complaining about it I've never been so glad in my fucking life that I didn't do something what you might ask could have inspired such fury a 200 point scale zero to 10 base with the option for not just one but two decimal points adding a potential 0.05 for when you really just can't decide between a 7.2 and a 7.3 now the reason I was so irritated was actually because the first review guide implied a 1000 point scale but even 200 is fucking absurd which is why when I became the reviews editor at flixist in 2013 my first act was to have the number of options on the scale now I understand why that system would appeal to the man who created it someone who ranked every single movie he's ever seen against every other one like I wasn't a part of those discussions but I wouldn't be shocked if he literally wanted a 1000 point scale and they talked him off a ledge compromising with the 0.05 his concern that when too many films get a 7 or 7.5 or even 7.3 the number is robbed of meaning is not invalid and it fit with the ethos of the parent company modern method which owned destructoid flixist and two other outlets before they were all acquired by enthusiast media in 2017 review scales for its sites followed the fervent belief that an average project deserved an average score at the center of the scale i.e a 5 out of 10 problem is in the american grading system 50 percent is a failure 75 percent is average and so we've all got this sort of mental rejection of scores that should mean above average and that's a problem because why would you want more ways to say you didn't like something than to say that you did it's done but flixist implementation of this idea was particularly strict pushing ideas closer and closer to the center by sheer force of language according to the original review guide a 9.0 out of 10 was literally perfect if you wanted to change a single frame it was an 8.95 at best a 9 was perfect one of the best movies you'd ever see a 9.5 changed the way you viewed cinema and a 10 changed cinema itself which is to say it could really only be done in retrospect and i liked a lot of that i obviously removed the perfection requirement but i largely kept the rest in place at flixist and brought that over to the week air review making only two tweaks to 5.0 and 10 this is what a score on the week air review means zeros are insulting ones are repulsive twos are terrible threes are bad fours are subpar a 5.0 is something i love and hate in equal measure while the others are flavors of average sixes are decent low sevens are good high sevens are very good low eights are great high eights are exceptional and the nine's mean what i said before lows are among the best things i've ever experienced highs change the way i viewed their art forms and tens they're like porn i know them when i see them right and sadly i'll never see as much of one as the other sometimes i know exactly what a score will be when i go into the writing others it's just a vague idea i know that it's good so that means it's somewhere between a seven and a 7.4 but it may change maybe it's very good pushing it up slightly maybe it just misses the mark and drops down to the decent of 6.9 when i started the channel i was actually using multiple scales simultaneously my first score was not in fact the 8.5 that i gave creating a youtube channel it was 4.75 stars given to the app one second every day which i had stopped using about six months before i decided to make a youtube channel which is not a coincidence back then i thought that anytime i mentioned a subject that i had feelings about within the context of any other review i should score it and i did try that albeit inconsistently in my first five videos but aside from being more strict i had to keep track of it was doomed to fail when i decided that each other thing should be scored its own way because when i wanted to give the samsung galaxy s8 3.5 out of five wi-fi bars it was really hard to make it look good and and i i didn't i didn't make it look good and i'm i'm realizing now that i should have just used fucking cell cell phone bars fuck that would have been so much easier whatever point point is i'm not graphically minded this was a dumb joke and i was fucking over it right i thought about this thing that i tried to do when john green had added a little footnote to the enthropocene reviewed's copyright page wherein he gives the typeface four and a half stars and then again shortly after when the concept of a half title page receives two and a half stars but green like me gives up on this pretty quick as future footnotes serve functionally the same purpose as my sides or the text things that appear and then disappear ever so slightly faster than anyone would like still his implementation was better by virtue of these little blurbs using the same scoring system as every other review john green likes stars how they're applied to hotels and movies and public restrooms in his ocd medication in a bench in amsterdam upon which a scene of the movie adaptation of the fault in our stars was filmed anything and everything can be given a star rating and his book is evidence of that i immensely respect green's decision to rate things like humanities temporal range and whispering and plague it makes me feel like a coward for not giving being vaccinated a nine point something or separating art from artists to straight five what would i have scored turning 30 i literally never thought about it i should have worked harder to come up with scores for getting the bag and resurrection of little match girl but also there are times when feelings can't be reduced to numerics and definitely not ones as precise as my review skill i want these numbers to mean something and any number i assigned to the experience of the labyrinth of cinema would ruin the meaning of that number forever because it would be a lie if you chart the scores you see that na is tied with 8.5 as the most common followed closely by 9.0 8.4 and 7.9 and it is interesting that they're all kind of cusp scores the median is 8.2 and the average is slightly above 7.8 and perhaps that means those numbers are meaningless part of the modern method argument is that a proper score distribution would look like a bell curve with most of the subjects being placed right there in the center but the problem with that conception is that no one is or frankly should be reviewing every single thing that exists yeah with a large enough sample size you'll see more and more mediocre things fill out the center but we all have to make choices about what we're going to review january actually lowered all of the numbers i gave you because i saw more things that i was kind of on that i would have never reviewed otherwise as a rule i rarely review things i don't like because why would i it's not my job to see and do everything hell it's not my job to see or do anything so if i don't think i'm gonna like something i don't bother with it and when i do experience something that i don't like i rarely feel compelled to do more than dash off an annoyed tweet about it so my distribution is all on the high end because that's the stuff i want to tell you about and even if that meant every single score on my channel was an 8.5 it would still mean something each time that i said it and in any case it all gets put on the same leaderboard i may have given 13 8.5s and 12 9.0s but you can see how i felt about them compared to each other and even though i didn't give separating art from artists that 5.0 i did put it smack dab in the center of the four subjects that i have but while the scores never change the placement of subjects does every so often i will reorganize which is how an 8.3 like Anna and the apocalypse can end up ahead of an 8.7 like agretzko we wish you a metal christmas and i like that and i do think it's a little unfortunate that you lose the context with an n a rating but at the same time if you really want to know how it felt about something you can watch the review i give the week air reviews 100 point rating scale three and a half stars