I want to get more opinions and arguments for and against for a blog to grade shows using some kind of quantified grading system.
Basically, if someone were to review an episode of a series, by writing a review and ending it with a letter grade (or a 1-10 or 1-5 or 1-4 or whatever), how would you do it? Would you even do it at all?
The question is pretty hard to answer because I think the better one to ask is why are we using a grading system at all? Confession: the only grade I read is from Psgels’s, mainly for the sake of checking out his general impression on an episode without reading the actual review, to avoid being spoiled. And to me that’s the real strength in a grade system like Metacritic or RottenTomatoes–you get an idea of value without looking into it too much. Of course, it is not really a precise measurement on a personal level nor is it a particularly accurate one. Or I should say, it comes with a margin for error and often times reading one reviewer you trust thoroughly can often give a higher quality impression than seeing a score based on hundreds of thumbs up or down.
Actually, I’m more curious as to why you would give a grade? On the one hand, some people enjoy grades for reasons I mentioned above, and more. Some people only care about grades, actually. And sometimes it is another mean to express what you’ve failed to express in a TL;DR post. I mean I’ve read my fair share of episodic blogs and far majority of them don’t have anything to say that you can’t pick up from the screen caps they’ve also posted, so having a grade system actually adds to what these blogs offer.
On the other hand, for every show you note down this way you run the risk of making some kind of over- or underestimate. This is particularly the case in terms of how people judge shows by cover while ignoring that margin of error we all work with when doing so. This is particularly true when anime tend to be serial and each episode is merely building up some kind of bigger picture where the picture is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s kind of a meaningless thing to do. To that extent Psgels uses his impression-based measurement which makes a lot more sense to me, so maybe that objection can be avoided by using a smarter metric.
Some people take this seriously. I’m not sure I do, but I can see why you would want to. I don’t know, any good ideas? I am not really going to implement a grade system, but someone else might, and I want to get some ideas as to why it is a good idea, what is a good way about it, and how do you manage people’s expectations with them.
