Ranting About Ratings

Well not really a rant, hopefully more of a considered discussion about ratings…

So I’m putting together a comprehensive set of notes on all the various items of culture and media that I have consumed over the last few years. I’m trying to avoid using the word “review” here as these are really intended for my own purposes and not necessarily to recommend or inform anyone else about these things.

I want to include a very brief synopsis of the content (just to remind myself what it was all about) and since it is for my own use I’m not too worried about dropping any spoilers (so you have been warned!) And I also want to give an indication of how much I enjoyed the work.

This needs to another issues then, should these notes include a rating? The first version of these notes did, using a 5 star scale but it raised some interesting issues that I think are worth discussing.

Firstly, what does the rating actually mean, in particular, what does a one star rating represent? I.e. what is the “range” of the rating scheme? It is fairly clear that 5 stars mean something that is really good, but does 1 star mean really bad?

Well, no, not in this case - I’m a free agent, not a paid reviewer here, I’m only going to make notes on works that I have (at least substantially) “finished”, and I’m not going to finish anything that I don’t like! So perhaps the star ratings then run from “quite liked” to “liked a lot”?

And then, are the ratings comparable across different media? Is it reasonable to compare (and reduce) a 10 episode TV series with a 1,000 page hardback with a iPad game polished off in a hour or so? What would it mean if they were all 3 stars?

Finally, and somewhat related, I was finding the allocation of the star ratings to be an agony of decision making! Given that big budget action movie ‘X’ had a rating of ‘n’, was it fair / reasonable / meaningful to assign the same rating to a short romantic fiction novel that I might have enjoyed just as much?

And at that point I start asking myself whether I need a richer set of ratings: half stars? percentages? more categories…? Aaagh! This is just making my life too hard, and for what reason!

Finally, I realised that for my purposes (recall, reminding myself of the content and what I felt about the work) I didn’t need ratings at all!

Simply the fact that I finished the work indicates that I enjoyed it - whether it was in some respects “better” or “worse” than some other work in a completely different medium and genre is neither relevant nor particularly meaningful.

The only sensible / reasonable direct comparison that I can really make is to other works by the same author, so for example it is meaningful to argue that a sequel might not quite be as good as the previous work. But even then, a narrative description of this is more nuanced and helpful than a “rating”.

So that’s it - I’m in the process of re-entering, updating and expanding all of my “culture consumed” notes - and none of them involve ratings! This has taken a great weight off my shoulders and I’m actually enjoying the process, not dreading it! I’m able to write about the things I read, watch and play however I see fit, and don’t need to constrain things to arbitrary categorisations of “good”, “bad” or whatever. I have, by virtue of finishing them and writing about, clearly enjoyed them and if you want to know what I actually thought about them then you’ll have to read the words and not rely on the crutch of a simple (meaningless) star rating!

Thank you.

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